War rations During the war, children were given "orange" juice and hateful cod liver oil, paid for by the government. When the war was over, exotic foods like bananas made their appearance. One teatime at "The Birches", my cousin Ray, told to eat his bread and butter, cried when he found he didn't have room for his banana. During the war, my father was stationed at one time at an airfield in Sunderland, and got to know the Barkers, who lived nearby. After the war, a friend of the Barkers, who was first officer on the liner Queen Mary, showed my father and me over the huge ship, while it was in dry dock in Southampton. After the tour, we had a meal in the first-class dining room. My father had on his plate the biggest piece of meat I had ever seen (more than we got in a week's rations during the war). Tiggy At school, in the South of England, we played a number of games, including he (tag in most countries), relievio, conkers, marbles, jacks (or fivestones), each in its season. One day, when I was about nine, and visiting my grandparents in the Yorkshire West Riding mining town of Maltby, the boy next door asked me: "Dost tha play tiggy?". I was used to the North of England use of the old second person singular pronouns and verb forms, which had long disappeared in the South, and could understand his regional pronunciation of "play"; it was the word "tiggy" that I didn't understand ("Do you play tiggy?"). I quickly gathered that he was referring to the game "he". My cousin Anthony introduced me to the variant game of kingy, played with a tennis ball and dustbin lids as shields, in the back alleys of the Maltby Crags neighbourhood where he lived. Comics I was an avid consumer of British comics in my early teens (and late pre-teens). Since they were "too common", I wasn't allowed to buy The Beano (Pansy Potter) or The Dandy (Desperate Dan and Aunt Aggie), but read borrowed issues. I also read borrowed copies of Radio Fun (Jimmy Jewel and Ben Warriss) and Film Fun (George Formby). I was, however, allowed to receive at home The Eagle (Dan Dare and Digby) and Lion. Then onto story comic papers. There were four to choose from, as I remember: The Wizard, The Hotspur, The Rover, Adventure. The one I favoured was The Wizard. I read it surreptitiously in class, jamming it with my knee against the underside of my desk if the master came round (I managed to escape detection). I revelled in the adventures of Limp Along Leslie and the great Wilson (cf. "Trust and obey"). Finally I left the world of comics to pass into that of novels. The first I remember were The White House Boys and Quo Vadis. Trust and obey My Mum's brother Stan worked for the Colonial Service in Nigeria, overseeing the construction of wells. He was very good-looking, with mischievous blue eyes, a hearty chuckle, and a happy-go-lucky attitude to life. He referred to the local Nigerians as "the heathens". He married Dorothy, an unattractive complainer, and the daughter of Mr. Scott. Mr. Scott was a Methodist local preacher. He was a fierce-looking man, whose upper lip was adorned with a brush moustache which looked as if it was built to sweep all before it into hell. His sermons were of the fire-and-brimstone type, causing me to switch off and imagine I was either the great Wilson or Limp Along Leslie of Wizard fame, playing for England at cricket or football, scoring goals, taking wickets and hitting sixes. Mr. Scott's services inevitably included the poorly written and scored hymn "Trust and obey". Camping When I was nine, a wolf cub pack was started at St Peter's Hall at Maybush Corner. Then, and later, when I moved up to the boy scout troop, we went camping for a week or a weekend at the end of the spring and each summer: on the Isle of Wight, the banks of the River Test, or in the New Forest, and further afield to Weymouth and the Wye Valley in Wales. The weekly meetings in St Pater's Hall involved, among other things, dib-dib-dibbing Akela, learning knots and playing the uniform-destroying game of British bulldog. We also went on wide games in the woods at Rownhams. But it was the camping that we all looked forward to. We would load the camping gear and ourselves onto the back of an open lorry and off we went. Memories: catching wasps in jam-jars in the camp kitchen; earning a badge for making twist, i.e. toasting over a wood fire dough, made from flour and water, wrapped around a hazel stick (this was meant to be a survival skill, but where was one to find flour when lost in the wild?); cutting my thumb while peeling potatoes; singing songs around the camp fire; seeing a test match between England and Australia on a black-and-white television set in a shop window in Brecon (it was Coronation Year, 1953); regurgitating baked beans eaten straight from the tin; getting washed out by the incessant rain; swimming in the Test with May flies. An inevitable activity after "lights out": telling scary ghost stories in the patrol tent. One morning, Robert Smith was found outside the tent in his dew-drenched sleeping bag, having wriggled under the tent flaps. Most scouts were C of E. In the Wye Valley, one of the scout leaders was Methodist. On the Sunday, he was to lead the service at the local chapel. One of his hosts lent him a tractor on which he drove Methodist me and another scout to a farmhouse, where we sat around a huge table bearing the most scrumptious spread I had ever seen: bread-and-butter, jams, cakes of all sorts. I remember the tea, but not the following church service. Many years later, my eldest daughter went to a guide camp with her cousin's troop in a field on Pendle Hill (see above), of witchcraft fame. She hated the cold, the wet, and particularly the numerous cow pats. I accompanied my son's beaver colony on a weekend camping trip in Ontario. We all got very muddy from playing soccer in the camp field, but slept, not in tents, but in a luxurious (and dry) hut. I was very fortunate in that my turn to sleep in the same hut as the boys was the second night; the unfortunate men who spent the first night with the boys were kept awake by various pranks, stories and noises coming from the excited beavers. The boys were exhausted by the second night, and went to sleep straightaway! Sign language and texting When I was 13, Judy and I attended Senior Sunday School, Judy with the girls, I with the boys. Judy and I would talk to each other via sign language (Judy started it). Pointing at self = "I"; index fingers held apart = "long"; two fingers held up = "to"; counting letters on fingers - 2nd letter = "be"; hands clasped together = "with"; pointing at other = "you". This was a precursor of "LOL" texting. Hello I was shy of girls. I had no sister, although I was convinced that it was a girl that Mum was carrying when she had a miscarriage during the War. Young people's socials held at St Peter's Hall involved quicksteps, foxtrots and waltzes. Nothing would have induced me to attend. Then I discovered square dancing. At the Hedgend Methodist youth club I learned the rudiments of do-si-do and The Lancers. It felt "safe". St Peter's Hall announced the holding of a square dance evening. I felt emboldened enough to attend. On the fateful evening, it was announced that the caller was unwell, and that subsequently the evening would consist of... quicksteps, foxtrots and waltzes. I spent the evening miserably turning pages for Mr Smith at the piano. Afterwards I felt that the situation had become ridiculous. If Michael Moody and Roger Hannah could dance with girls, why couldn't I? And so, one morning, instead of catching the train to school, I walked up the Calvary-like hill from the railway station to Southampton High Street, and positioned myself in a strategic spot past which many people had to go on their way to work. Whenever a young girl went by me, I smiled and wished her a good morning. Some girls hurried past, but about half of them smiled and said hello. After about twenty minutes, I was exhausted. I descended the hill to the station and caught a train to school in Winchester, a smile on my face. I never attended another social evening at St Peter's Hall, but I did learn how to do the quickstep, the foxtrot and the waltz. I took a girl to the school sixth-form dance. Harry Harry Hawkins was a maths master at Peter Symonds School in Winchester. He was tall and gangling, probably in his forties or fifties. His main claim to fame amongst the boys was this: he could be hypnotised by a swinging light. The classrooms were lit by electric lights on long flexes hanging from the high ceiling. If Harry saw a swinging light, so the story went, his eyes glazed over, his grasping hands would shoot out, and he would walk straight through the intervening desks to the source of attraction, there to still it. His fame amongst the boys was enhanced one mid-morning break while he was supervising the installation in the assembly hall of the crates containing 1/3-pint bottles of milk (a practice later ended by Margaret Thatcher "milk snatcher" while serving as Minister of Education). Harry was bending over. Lewis, one of the school idiots and a born loser in life, mistaking him for a friend, put his hand between Harry's legs, and grabbed his balls. In the Middle Fifth year we had Harry as our maths master. Doubtless like our predecessors down the years, we one day put the legendary story to the test. Sure enough, Harry's eyes protruded from his head, his arms shot out with grasping hands, and desks were scattered left and right as he strode towards the swinging light bulb. Terry's older sister, Heather, attended Brockenhurst Grammar School, where she managed to get her hands on a copy of the teacher's edition of the maths textbook we were using. The teacher's edition had all the answers at the back, so all we had to do, on the train taking us to school, was work backwards from the answer to provide the reasoning. Harry was convinced he knew someone with the same surname as mine, someone who therefore must be related to me, someone he liked. I took advantage of this misconception to keep in Harry's good books. I was good at maths, but even so was surprised to get a term mark of 108%. The Valentine Card His name was Robin, but, because his last name was Barton, everyone at school called him Dick, in honour of the radio superhero who had kept us enthralled during our primary school years. He was shy of girls, but none of us boys would be seen dead in the same carriage as the girls travelling from Southampton to Winchester High. We spent the time in the train comparing, or completing, our maths or Latin homework assignments. Dick's main interest was music, his catholic tastes ranging from Brahms to the Everly Brothers. He had, however, mentioned having a soft spot for a girl called Susan, who, like him, lived in Bursledon. It was January. In the 1950s Saint Valentine had the same status as Cupid or Eros. Class valentines did not, could not, exist. A Valentine card had the potency of Cupid's bow. And so, unbeknownst to Dick, we hatched a plan. Dick was going to receive a Valentine card from Susan. Vic, who also lived in Bursledon, had a sister. She was going to be Susan, writing, in her girl's hand, an ambiguous message inside a Valentine card, the envelope of which would bear the postmark of Bursledon. Anonymity was a prerequisite for Valentine cards. The recipient of this potent symbol was meant to imagine, wonder and suffer - after all, Cupid's bow shot a wounding arrow. The card was duly sent and received. It gave us a great deal of fun and satisfaction, Dick appearing at the train in a flustered state on St Valentine's Day. Yet we never let on. We never learned whether Dick approached Susan. Boarding school Let me state at the outset that I never went to boarding school, thank goodness. My parents, like every adult I came into contact with when I was a boy, had neither the money nor the social pretensions to think of sending their offspring away for their education. My reason for writing about this subject comes, nevertheless, from my contact with boarders, and a growing horror coming particularly from the accounts of many sufferers, such as that of Rose Tremain in her autobiography Rosie. My contact came when I attended Peter Symonds grammar achool. About one quarter of the boys were boarders, their school house being called Symonds House, named after the founder of the school. The rest of the boys were assigned geographically to one of three other houses: Kirby (Winchester and nearby), Mackenzie (Eastleigh area) or Northbrook (Southampton region), each named for a benefactor of the school. The school was run along the lines of a public school. The classes were called forms; the slow boys destined to go no further than 'O' levels were put, in second year, into Remove. The teachers were called masters. The school week comprised full days on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and half days on Wednesday and Saturday. The school was in the Public School Yearbook, and the headmaster attended the Headmasters' Conference. The various internal sporting events were usually won by boarders or by Symonds House. I was particularly pleased, when playing on the top board for the school chess team, to beat my opponent when playing against Winchester College. School dinners In primary school, I went home at midday, so I ate the meal prepared for me by my mother. When I went to grammar school, I was travelling, by train, from Southampton to Winchester, so school dinners became a fact of life. Dinner money (for the week) was collected at the beginning of Monday lessons. I remember this particularly in my second year at grammar school, in Form 4B. (The "bright" boys were distributed alphabetically by surname between 4A and 4B; the not so bright were consigned to 4C, the "Remove" form.) Our form master, in whose classroom the roll was called and dinner money collected, was "Biffer" Smith, the junior maths master. Only masters and prefects were allowed to walk across the field to the cafeteria. We unwashed masses, the hoi polloi of the school, had to walk round by road, caps on, to join the queue, which was policed by prefects. Once inside and at the counter, the dinner ladies put on our trays a plate loaded with something savoury (meat, potatoes and some sort of vegetable - usually cabbage - cooked to within an inch of extinction) and a second plate containing something sweet (usually a dollop of suet pudding or spotted dick, when varied with raisins or currants). I discovered later that the latter pudding is called "dead baby" elsewhere (Kay knew it by that name). A discussion of Cambridgeshire school slang in Andrew Taylor's An Old School Tie: "'Dead baby,' he explained 'was boiled baby injected with red death. That's to say, steamed suet pudding to which a small quantity of raspberry-flavoured jam had been added [...]'". In a word, school dinners = stodge, at least in those days. Vive la différence A number of us went to Paris for the 10-day Sixth-Form Conference organised during the Easter holidays by the British and French governments. Our stay included attending a lecture in a Sorbonne amphitheatre, attending a reception at the Hôtel de Ville, going up the Tour Eiffel, and visiting Versailles.     The boys were housed at the Collège Stanislas, which Charles de Gaulle had attended. On the tables in the refectory were bottles of cider and baskets of baguette slices, neither of which were to be found in British schools.     It was during this stay, my first in France, that I discovered that wine, though made from grapes, did not taste like grape juice. Our French master, Fluebrush (he had a crew cut) Smith, was married to a Frenchwoman. One summer, Tony and I found ourselves working in the Marne region on a farm run by Fluebrush's sister-in-law and husband.     On the morning of 15th August, the farmer announced that it was a holiday, and we would be spending the day in the nearby village where his father had a farm.     C. of E. Tony and Methodist I were flummoxed. What was so special about the fifteenth day of August? We were none the wiser when we were told it was the feast day of the Assumption of the Virgin. We had only heard of the virgin birth from the Gospels, where there was no mention of Jesus's mother ascending to heaven.     We arrived in the father's village and went straight to church. I thought our farmer showed irreverence by spending a lot of time gazing at a mouse trap which had been laid on the church floor. At the end of the incomprehensible mass, the members of the congregation filed up to the front of the church to kiss a crucifix bearing a crucified Christ held by the priest. Tony and I thought this barbaric and left the church without kissing the crucifix.     My disarray was complete when we went from church to café where alcoholic apéritifs were consumed and the young people playing babyfoot were introduced as brothers, sisters and in-laws of our farmer.     After a Gargantuan three-hour meal, which included a delicious omelette, consumed by the large extended family seated around the huge kitchen table of the father's farm, Tony and I accompanied about four of our farmer's young relatives, male and female, to visit the champagne cellars in nearby Épernay.     When we stopped at a level crossing, our male driver got out of the car and urinated against a tree only a few feet away. I felt embarrassed, particularly as there were ladies present.     On our return, before another marathon meal consumed round the kitchen table, we were taken on a tour of the farm. In one barn, we came across our farmer's little daughter urinating in the straw. In another it was the father relieving himself.     On the way back, our heads, Tony's and mine, were reeling from the day's events. In the years that followed, I became a lot less Methodist, and a lot more appreciative of French culture, both rural and urban. We were in France, not only for the culture, but also, of course, for the language. We learned a lot from our farmer's two small children, a girl and a boy.     We also went to the cinema to learn. The two of us walked on two Saturdays from the farm to the nearby small town of Montmirail, where in a barn there took place once a week the projection of films to the delight of young and old seated - or not - on benches. We had been told to arrive well in advance of the announced time. It soon became obvious to us that this was above all a social occasion, an opportunity for what seemed to be a good part of the population to catch up on gossip. The feature film was just an excuse.     It was important to us, however. I didn't understand a thing about the first film, but, the second time we went, I was delighted to realise that I could follow what was going on in the hospital. The main aim of many students in the late 1950s and early 1960s was to get as far away as possible from their parents and learn to grow up. In my case this included pub crawls and collecting souvenirs. For example, to celebrate my 20th birthday Bill and I went from pub to pub and ended up pinching a triple-punned poster entitled "Here the belles peel" from outside the Hulme Hip.     Rag Week was, on the one hand, a week of collecting for charity, and, on the other, an excuse for university students to run wild. The highlights were the Rag Day parade and the Rag Ball. French Soc had the great honour of being able to include the Fresher Queen. Our float featured pretty Jenny seated on a throne dressed in top and tails. The rest of its occupants were boys with faces made up with mascara, rouge and scarlet lipstick and dressed in grass skirts. Its banner bore the proud boast "Vive la différence".     The parade took place in the centre of Manchester. The floats left from the Students' Union with the avowed intent of collecting for charity (we had collection tins), and the unofficial aim of collecting as many office girls as possible by our jumping off, seizing them and putting them (they were quite willing) on the float. French Soc's impressive haul of girls were then treated to coffee back at the Union. After my second year at university, instead of going into final year I spent a year in a French lycée as an English assistant. I wanted French to exist in my heart and my gut as well as in my head.     At the beginning of my final year at Peter Symonds the headmaster had told me that if I wanted to be a prefect I would have to shave off the beard which I had grown over the summer. At the Lycée Alain, several boys had beards.     I spent the year in Alençon drinking cognac, learning slang (argot) from Alfred, keeping the score when we played cards, watching rugby matches (as important to the French as soccer), playing French billiards (no pockets), doing French crossword puzzles, going to the cinema (Brigitte Bardot, Bourvil, Jean Gabin), and going out with French girls (pillow talk is appositely termed in French "apprendre sur l'oreiller").     I also learned a few things about Norman culture. Janine took me to visit a relative who was a farmer in the département of Calvados. Calvados has the privilege of having the highest percentage in France of mentally deficient inhabitants, owing to the abuse of the eponymous apple brandy. This farmer, like many of his peers, made his own (very strong) calvados, awoke his senses each morning through the expedient of dabbing calvados on his face, and kept quiet the many babies which he imposed on his wife by putting a drop of calvados in their bottles. The palate is cleansed between courses of a meal typically by the swallowing of a trou normand, a small glass of calvados. To the espresso coffee consumed at the end of a special meal are added a few drops of calvados; after a few sips, more calvados is added, until one is drinking calvados with a slight flavour of coffee.     At the beginning of the summer, Janine and I went on my scooter to St Malo to meet my parents, who came over from their holiday in nearby Jersey celebrating their silver wedding. We took them to dinner at the Faisan d'Or, where we managed to introduce them to wine.     Over the summer, I was taken on at the Monuments Historiques office in Caen as English guide at the Abbey of Mont-St-Michel. I quickly learned the patter and the necessity of building up to a climax ending with a flowery statement that my only monetary recompense was visitors' tips (true - guided tours of monuments in Britain did not include tipping).     The real test for me, however, was on 14th July (national holiday) and the famous 15th August, when the number of French visitors was in the thousands. Visits in English were abandoned as all the guides had to pitch in and take a couple of hundred French speakers through the abbey.     At the end of the year, I returned to England with the experience of dreaming in French, the ability to tell a joke in French, and that of spontaneously coming out with expletives like merde alors. Final year was a breeze. The final stage of my acculturation, the refinement of my palate, took place in Besançon, in the East of France, where I spent three years in between Manchester and emigration to Canada studying for a doctorate.     In Britain at the time, the aim of cooking food seemed to be the killing of harmful substances; the aim of French cooking was, and remains, to bring out flavours. To take the example of the pea (petit pois), many Britons profess a liking for mushy peas; the French distinguish between at least five sizes of pea: (petits pois) moyens, mi-fins, fins, très fins, extra-fins, which Americanised Canadian French reduces to two: pois, and petits pois!     My chief memory of French gastronomy in my first year is of the pre-Christmas meal offered me by my landlord and landlady at the railway station restaurant. It would be absurd, comical even, to imagine taking someone out for a meal at a British station buffet, but French railway restaurants are an entirely different matter. We ate a most delicious meal, the highlight of which for me was the morels accompanying the tender steak.     In Besançon I earned my living by teaching adults spoken English using the then famous méthode de Besançon in six-week intensive courses. Especially after I married (at the end of the summer after my first year in Besançon), but even before, our students (Kay taught as well) took us out with them to explore the regional gastronomy. I had eaten well in Alençon, at Mont-St-Michel and in Paris, but was taken to another level on these occasions.     Our students came from all walks of life: mainly French or French-speaking from France or Africa, there were politicians, doctors, dentists, launderers, hoteliers, air stewards, civil servants, office workers, even a daughter who spoke French and German and wanted to know what her parents were saying to each other in English.     Without fail they took us out at the weekend. I discovered, and learned to appreciate and differentiate, the wines of the local regions of the Doubs, Jura and Côte d'Or, and further afield, as well as the dishes of these areas.     One of Kay's students in the summer of 1965 was the national minister of agriculture. Jacques Duhamel was also the mayor of the nearby town of Dôle. On 14 July he invited Kay, me and my parents. to spend the day with him in Dôle. At his apartment, wishing to offer us an apéritif, he asked me whether he should serve whisky or champagne. I thought the latter would be more acceptable. My father, inspired by the occasion, broke into song and gave a very acceptable rendering of La Marseillaise. Then I emigrated to Canada. When I started my teaching career at the University of Toronto, the model for French was European (French) French. The switch to Canadian French was gradual, but well before I retired the norm was Quebec French. My first students were better at written French than at the spoken variety; by the time I finished, the reverse was true. I encountered three basic types of French: European French, Canadian (or Quebec) French, and immersion French. The majority of my students had learned the last, which contained anglicisms such as "Il/Elle est comme..." ("He's/She's like...") to introduce reported speech. They were incapable of using vous in addressing a single person, with the absurd, topsy-turvy result that I, a European, addressed them individually as vous, while they addressed me as tu! The purse Back in Manchester after my year in Alençon, Barrie and I had the good fortune of renting the flat in Moss Side that Bill and I had occupied in the last term of my first year. One evening, after a session of beer drinking, I noticed on a table, when we returned to the flat, a change purse which I didn't recognise. Greater still was my surprise to find Janine, come all the way from Alençon, asleep in my bed. She spent a few days in Manchester, including startling our French philosopy lecturer, Professor Sutcliffe, with her fluent reading of an extract from Pascal's Pensées. I could only reward her persistent initiative by getting engaged to her. We had an engagement party at Christmas at her parents' in Liesle, in the Jura. Later on, my father and I picked up a crate containing her trousseau (or bottom drawer) at Hurn Airport in Hampshire. But then, as the date of the wedding approached, I got cold feet... Fiançailles The English language has fiancé and fiancée (or, indiscriminately, fiancee), so why not fiançailles, so much more expressive than the military-sounding engagement? I got engaged twice, first of all to Janine (see "The purse"). The wedding, when it took place, would be "sous les cloches" (literally "under the bells"), in other words, not in the main part of the church, but in the porch under the belfry. Since I was not a Catholic, there would be no nuptial mass. We didn't get married anyway. Looking back at it, it was not just my lack of readiness for the married state, it was also the threatening nature of the "bottom drawer", a relic of the days of the dowry. Kay and I were to be married, without music or mass, in St Teresa's church in Wilmslow. Beforehand, I had to receive instruction from the priest, Father Mooney. Kay's mother treated Father Mooney with great deference. I should hasten to add that he was not the only person to receive her consideration; it was always easy to get into her good books with a box of chocolates - or a block of ice cream. The summer when I was Mr Softy (see "Holiday jobs"), I called in at the house in Wilmslow with a block of ice cream for her. The van had a motor to keep the ice cream refrigerated, so a neighbour knocked at the door to complain about the noise. Said Florence to her: "He's not an ordinary ice cream man, he's a graduate of Manchester University"! The religious (Catholic) instruction (or indoctrination) was to be given in three one-hour sessions. At the first, Father Mooney and I, with our hands behind our backs, in the sacerdotal pose (not to be confused with "the missionary position"), walked up and down in the garden of the presbytery. I was off to work as a guide at Mont-Saint-Michel (see "Holiday jobs"), so Father Mooney gave me a letter asking the curé there to give me the other two hours of instructiion. The curé at Mont-St-Michel was more interested in learning about Methodism, practically unknown in France, than in instructing me in the ways of the Catholic church, so we spent our time, to the accompaniment off a glass of calva, talking about John and Charles Wesley, and their view of the world. Switzerland, the Alps and winter sports The first time I went to Switzerland was with school-friend John Prior, in the summer of 1958. We hitched our way to Neuchâtel, the capital of the eponymous canton, where we stayed with a family whose son had stayed with John's family the previous summer. One day, John and I caught a train to Vue-des-Alpes in the Jura mountains, and climbed to the top to get our first glimpse of the Alps. I was later to return to Neuchâtel, in 1965, when I went there with wife Kay, her sister Carole and the latter's three-year-old Canadian-born daughter Kirsten. I remember Kirsten "seeing" her Poppy on top of several buildings in the town. The second time I went to Switzerland was in 1960, after my second-year-summer-term-abroad in Montpellier. I celebrated my 21st birthday, at the time the age of majority, on the beach at Palavas-des-Flots (see "Early memories"), and went to Geneva to buy an Omega watch with the birthday money given me by my parents. Kay and I, usually accompanied by my parents or, especially, hers, went from Besançon into Switzerland several times, staying in hotels in Geneva, Bern, Interlaken, Lucerne or elsewhere mainly in the western part of the country. The road was often precipitous, and on one memorable occasion Kay's mother Florence, a champion back-seat driver, said urgently to her driver-husband: "Jim, you'll kill us all!" I have a vivid memory of a village high up in the mountains, where we bought a loaf of pumpernickel bread for our picnic lunch and where the only sounds were the humming of bees and the splashing of a mountain stream. Kay and I went particularly for the chocolate and made sure to fill the car with gasoline, then cheaper than in France. We went once to Sion, where we saw a spectacular son et lumière. On our way to and back from Sicily (see "Sicily"), Kay and I drove through the Mont Blanc tunnel. Kay and I were taken once by two of our students, in a floating Citroën DS, to a ski resort somewhere in the French Alps. Neither of us could stay on our feet skiing downhill. The only thing I mastered, more or less, was fish-boning up the (beginners') slope. One of my students, in my first year in Besançon, was a hotelier in the ski resort of Courchevel. I have seen the French Alps many times on television, as the Tour de France always includes several Alpine stages. During our time in Besançon, Kay and I bought a cowbell, typical of the mountainous country of the Doubs, the Jura and the Alps. We used it at home in Toronto to summon the children to the supper table. I heard cowbells often during my time in the East of France, but the most memorable occasion was in the summer of 2002, when my eldest daughter and I climbed the Col des Aravis, in the French Alps, where we had a wonderful open view and could hear, in the still air, the bells of cows grazing in the far distance (see left). When I emigrated to Canada, I, an Englishman, didn't know how to skate. During the first few winters, I tried, with the help of Canadian friends, but then gave up. After my experience in the French Alps, I didn't fancy downhill skiing, but I did get much enjoyment from two winter sports: tobogganing and cross-country skiing. My children and I got a thrill from tobogganing down the slope at Sherwood Park (see left and right), tumbling off when we go to the bottom, and several times skied at the Rosedale golf course. We skied once at the Metro Zoo, and were impressed when, topping a rise, we were confronted with a Siberian tiger. Sicily Two others of Kay's students in the summer of 1965 (see "Vive la différence") were Francesca Vitale, the wife of a member of the Sicilian parliament, and her daughter. Francesca invited us to spend a holiday in Sicily. So, in September, we set off from Besançon in our little Renault 4, camping our way down through Italy to Reggio di Calabria and following the sun to save money, then crossing by ferry to Messina, thence driving to Palermo, our destination. After dinner at the Vitales', an experience to be repeated several times, we went to the apartment of Mme Vitale's mother, who spent the summer months at her second home in Enna. This was to be our home during our stay in Palermo. We knew that Sicily was renowned for its Greek temples and Byzantine mosaics, so on our way down we visited the basilica of San Marco in Venice and the town of Ravenna (mosaics in both), and also the wonderful Greek temples at Paestum (see photograph). We gazed at the magnificent mosaics in the Sicilian parliament church in Palermo and in the cathedral of Monreale. Typical of Byzantine Christianity are the representations of the Christ Pantocrator, a beautiful example of which we saw in the cathedral of Cefalù. We also attended a perfomance at the Teatro dei Pupi in Palermo, visited the ruins of the Greek temples at Agrigento and the Roman mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale at Piazza Armerina, and went up to the top of Mount Etna, but, for me, the highlight of our stay in Sicily was our visit, on a clear, sunny day, to the Greek temple and theatre at Segesta. Kay and I were the only visitors, and the loudest sound was that of bees collecting pollen. It was magical and timeless. By contrast, when I returned to Sicily thirty years later for a conference of the Société de linguistique romane, the car park at Segesta was filled with coaches and cars. There was plenty of noise, the modern one of tourism. Paris Paris, Paname, Lutèce. Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, while keeping most of the old neighbourhoods, had the money to give the city its Vitruvian perspectives and Palladian beauty, sadly not available, after the 1666 Great Fire of London, to Charles II and Christopher Wren, who only managed to rebuild St Paul's. Paris is equally divided between the right-wing Rive droite and the left-wing Rive gauche, with the Ìle de la Cité playing referee in the middle. The right bank has the rich Rue de Rivoli, the swish 16e arrondissement, the old Halles and Bibliothèque nationale, the Centre Pompidou, the grands magasins such as les Nouvelles galeries (Galeries Lafayette) and Printemps (it used to have Marks & Spencer and la Samaritaine, among others), les Tuileries and the garden of the Palais royal, la Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe; the left bank has the Sorbonne, the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the publishing houses, the Eiffel Tower, le Bouvelard Saint-Germain, l'Assemblée nationale, le Jardin du Luxembourg; l'Île de la Cité has the Sainte chapelle and Notre-Dame. London, on the other hand has its power concentrated on the North Bank, with the City, Whitehall and Westminster (plus the Tower in times past); the South Bank, despite the panoramic views of the Greenwich of today and the magnificence of the Tudor past of Greenwich Palace, still retains the "forbidden" atmosphere of the bear pits and brothels of yore; there is nothing in the middle. My first arrivals in Paris were at the Gare Saint-Lazare, the last at Charles de Gaulle Airport. I arrived by ferry, lorry (from the quayside to the railway station in Le Havre) and train from England; by scooter from Alençon; by coach (and ferry) from the West of England; by plane and train from England; by train from Besançon; by car from Nancy; by plane from Nice; by plane from Canada. Early experiences included: Ionesco's La Leçon and Les Chaises performed at le Théâtre de la Huchette, Claude Luter at le Caveau, rue de la Huchette; "French" onion soup at les Halles. Later: gazing each year nostalgically at the sculpture "le départ des Halles" in the church of Saint-Eustache. Amongst my favourite places and activities: the food section of le Bon marché; the Sunday street market in Rue Montorgueil; the local neighbourhood atmosphere of the Rue Mouffetard; the banks (quays) of the Seine, with their bouquinistes; the churches of Saint-Louis-en-l'Île, Saint-Séverin, la Sainte chapelle for concerts; the Arènes de Lutèce and the Jardin du Luxembourg for reading; Gibert on the Boul'Mich for books; the cinéma l'Épée de bois for films from all over the world; le Square (public garden) Théodore Monod to eat a tarte aux framboises bought at a nearby pâtisserie; cheap restaurants such as le Bouillon Chartier, le Tournbride, Chez Léon or le Polidor (used by Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris, one of my favourite films); any café to sit on the terrasse and watch the world go by as I sip a cup of café crème. I celebrated my successful thesis defence by taking Kay, my parents and Jean-Michel to dinner at la Godasse, no longer there hélas!, in Rue Monsieur le Prince, now filled with sushi restaurants. Besançon I spent three years in Besançon after Manchester and before emigrating to Canada, studying structural linguistics and teaching English in six-week intensive courses (see "Vive..." and "Early memories"). The town itself is situated mainly in a loop of the river Doubs. The defence of the town was completed by the Citadelle, which closed off the town on the only side not bordered by water. It was said that the bullet holes in the outer walls of the citadel were the marks left by the shooting of collaborators after the Second World War. The town was once part of the Spanish empire; a feature of its architecture is the Spanish balconies (often called Juliet balconies in English-speaking countries) to be seen on a number of its houses. A speciality of Besançon is the griotte, a type of cherry. Griottes are steeped in kirsch and cherry juice, and sometimes coated with chocolate. One evening when I had badly cut my hand, Kay took me down to our landlady's flat. Madame Masson bound up my injured hand and made me partake of some of her griottes. She ran a haberdashery on the ground floor. Life was fairly cheap. A packet of Gauloises and a coffee (espresso coffee in Engish), usually enjoyed on a café terrasse on the Place Granvelle, could be purchased for about two francs, more than we paid to eat a full meal, midday and evening, at the government-sponsored resto-U (university restaurant). University life in France was cheap; tuition fees were practically non-existent; the crunch for undergraduates came at the end of the preparatory year (propédeutique), when, at most, only half would go on to do a licence, the other half having failed the exams. Kay and I attended mass (said in Latin) at the cathédrale Saint-Jean, a cavernous place with no redeeming aesthetic qualities. The music in most French churches is very poor. The hymns are feeble - France never had a Charles Wesley. There are nevertheless some very good choirs, but to hear great choral sacred music sung in its proper setting, one must cross the Channel to Anglicized England, to its cathedrals, Oxbridge college chapels, or the (Catholic) Brompton Oratory in London. I returned to Besançon in June 1968, shortly after les événements de mai. The all-powerful secretary of the Faculté des lettres (faculty of arts) went by the name of Rouquérolles. Daubed on the walls of the Faculté was the slogan "couilles molles, Rouquérolles", a good rhyme expressing a very rude sentiment. Nancy Nancy has two dominant faces: that of the eighteenth century, when it was the capital of the Duchy of Lorraine, not yet part of the kingdom of France, ruled by the Polish Stanislav (or Stanislas); and that of the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, when architecture and home decoration were dominated by the style of Art Nouveau, led by Émile Gallé, Louis Majorelle and the Daum family in the grouping known as the École de Nancy. Duke Stanislas marked the centre of the city with two spaces. I attended the celebrations of the Feast of Saint Nicholas (6 December, whence Santa Claus) in the Place Stanislas, the main square of Nancy, and sang in a choral performance of Berlioz' Requiem mass in the neighbouring Place de la Carrière. I was doing research at the Institut national de la langue française and singing in the Chorale des Cordeliers. One year, I stayed in the flat of someone who had a friend who was a specialist of Art Nouveau glassware. From him I bought two small vases made and signed by Émile Gallé (see left). To get the official version of Jeanne d'Arc, one goes south to the village of Domrémy (her birthplace) and the nearby town of Vaucouleurs, where she went to seek permission to go to the court of Charles VII. To get the unofficial version, one goes north to the village of Jaulny, where Joan, another young woman supposedly having been burnt in her place in Rouen, is alleged to have married Robert des Armoises, borne his children and lived for a number of years in his castle. Limoges I was invited, in 1996 and 1997, by a French colleague to teach summer computer courses to Humanities students at the university of Limoges. The World Wide Web was in its infancy but already had many important sources for the study of human society and culture. In spite of the crude (by today's standards) state of the technology, I was able to screen for my students pertinent Web pages, prepared from my preparatory explorations. Of course, Google did not exist then, but there were several search engines to choose from. An added difficulty, particular to France, was the existence at that time of the country's own online network, Minitel. I was lodged in a pleasant flat to the south of the city in a building of flats on the banks of the river Briance. The banks of the Briance were an attractive place to have a picnic in the summer, and I invited Philippe, his wife and their two small children for drinks and games. The building was managed by the Benedicine abbey in the nearby town of Solignac, which was where I dropped off the keys. The abbey was founded in the seventh century, with most of its buildings constructed in the Romanesque style of the early Middle Ages. The hamlet where I was lodged was called Pont Rompu, although the present-day bridge crossing the river was intact. My explorations of the region revealed that this was Richard Coeur de Lion (in English: Richard the Lionheart) country, the Limousin being under English rule in the twelfth century. At the end of each day, I would stop off at a favourite pâtisserie to buy a tartelette aux fruits, often raspberries, which I would consume, along with a glass of chilled white wine, on the banks of the Briance. Italy I married Kay, who did a double honours B.A. in French and Italian at Manchester University. With her, and later, I went several times to Italy, to the point that I could gesture and speak quite fluently in Italian. With two of the children we went several times from Nice to Sanremo (see left). With two or three of the children we went: to Pisa (daughter and I climbing the famous tower); to Florence, where we went to the Uffizi to see the Botticellis and other paintings, admired, in the Piazza della Signora, the statues of David by Michelangelo and Perseus by Cellini, and gazed at the beautiful doors of the Duomo baptistery; to Siena and its immense Piazza del Campo; to the towers of San Gimignano; to the watery city of Venice (see "Curiosity"). I went several times to Venice, including, as a student, a visit to one of the islands of Murano, where I bought a typical vase, which I still have. Early in our marriage, Kay and I went to Sicily (see "Sicily"), stopping on the way back in Rome (we drove past the Colosseum, and went on foot to visit St Peter's - it was the time of Vatican II, and we saw the cardinals descending the steps as they left the huge church) to see the subject of Kay's M.A. and Ph.D. theses, the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. He took us, and his Czech translator, to dinner in a Tuscan restaurant, where I had the most delicious steak I have ever eaten. While he talked about himself in the third person, he, a man in his late seventies, ogled the young waitresses. On the way down to Sicily, after visiting Venice and Ravenna, we spent one night at the campsite of Fiesole, above Florence, which we visited the following day. Since we had little money and were thus rising and setting with the sun, it was still almost dark when we went to early mass in Fiesole. I was struck by two things, typical of a Mediterranean country: apart from the priest, I was the only man present; Kay and I were the only two not in black (the congregation comprised about six elderly women, plus Kay and me). Further south we visited the wonderful Greek temples of Paestum, finishing our visit with a refreshing citron pressé. In Calabria, at the toe of Italy, we entered a village shop in search of lemons; the conversation within immediately stopped, although we wouldn't have been able to understand a word of the local dialect. On another visit to Italy, this time with the children, we stayed with Kay's former Manchester prof, Kate Speight, in her converted watchtower high up in the hills of Tuscany. Once with Kay and once with two of the children as well, we went to Lago di Como and Lago di Garda, two beautiful lakes. Ireland I have been to Ireland three times. The first was in the company of my parents and my brother, when I was recovering from the breaking-off of my engagement (see "The purse"). We went to Ulster, where we stayed with an extremist Protestant family (no piano-playing of Mozart on Sunday, only hymns!). Driving to Derry and Donegal, we came upon a living Irish joke (an Irish joke in England is the equivalent of a Newfie joke in Canada, or an histoire belge in France; an Irish joke told by an Irishman or woman is about Irish people). We could see, in the distance and coming towards us, a car straddling the painted centre line, presumably taking it for a guide. Fortunately, the driver had the sense to move to the left before passing us. The second visit was our honeymoon, which Kay and I spent in a cottage in Connemara (see left). One day, we decided to go to the nearest town, Clifden, nine miles away. We didn't have a car, but we were told we would be picked up by the first car going our way. We had walked eight miles before the first car came along... The third time I went to Ireland was when Kay and I decided to celebrate 50 years of marriage and divorce by renting a cottage in Dunmore East, near Waterford. The lady who ran the bakery told us wearily that a Canadian had come up to her in California and said "Thank goodness there's someone else here from a Commonwealth country". We, equally Canadian, certainly didn't make the same mistake. The driver of the bus driving us from the car rental office to the airport terminal told us an Irish saying: "Take your time, but hurry up". Wild Wales My brother moved from England to West Wales, first of all living in a caravan, then in a cottage called "Pen Rhiw" (literally "top of the hill"). When he lived in a caravan he washed himself and his clothes summer and winter in the cold, pure water of the nearby stream. The water supply to his cottage came off the hill and was tested purer than the mains supply in the village. We went to a pub one evening and participated in the Welsh tradition of the lock-in, leaving the pub by the front door at closing time, and going back in by the back door to continue our drinking. Another evening, we went to a pub called "The Last Dog on Earth", where we encountered a complete mix of ages (incuding children), classes and races. It was the most democratic pub I have ever been to. A typical evening at the cottage involved smoking up in front of the coal fire, drinking home brew and listening to Tangerine Dream or Mike Oldfield while watching the images of the television set with the sound off, trying to give sound + image some semblance of meaning. The world conjured up by the grass-affected mind can be quite wonderful. Nigel grew his cannabis in his own garden. Wales has no motorways (except in the Anglicised south), with the result that life tends to go on unhindered by authority. The water at the cottage was heated by an Aga cooker; the food was cooked on an electric cooker, which had a grill for toast and mackerel - the fish van came to the village on Wednesdays. I was often there in late summer, and picked mushrooms in the fields and blackberries in the hedgerows for my breakfast. Life was somewhat like Cider With Rosie, but in late 20th-century Wales, not early 20th-century Gloucestershire. Nearby are the ruins of the abbey of Strata Florida, those of a Roman settlement on the banks of the River Brefi, the dramatic cliffs near Cwm Tydu (see left), a path along what was the embankment of a railway line from Lampeter to Aberystwyth, and, in Lampeter, St. David's College, the first university in Wales and only two years younger than the University of London. Many English students who come to St. David's stay on in Celtic Wales, which they find saner than Anglo-Saxon England. One of the activities which Nigel and I shared was attending festivals: Dance Camp in Pembrokeshire, a Harvest Festival in Fishguard, the Glastonbury Festival (three times), an Earth-Mind-Body Festival in Sussex. Nigel was usually involved in selling (one of his friends, 'Cosmic' Pete, made candles, incense and essential oils), so at Glastonbury we were away from the mud in the Healing Field. I wasn't particularly attracted to the airy-fairyness of New Age, but I did enjoy the near-anarchy and sheer inventiveness to be found at most festivals. One of Nigel's friends said to me one day that I was what sounded like "a Middle Age dippy"; I realised he was calling me a "middle-aged hippie". The beginning of my favourite way back from Nigel's was via twisty, narrow lanes, with the car brushing up against the hedge on either side, a hedgehog crossing, a Roman road, Merlin's Seat (amongst the earliest accounts of the Arthurian legends are the stories contained in the Welsh-language The Mabinogion) and a ford, coming out on the A482 near Ffarmers and Pumsaint. Holiday jobs I had a number of jobs during the Christmas and Summer holidays between the ages of about 12 and 25. This besides being a paperboy during term-time. The first was accompanying Uncle Cale in a little van when he delivered groceries from the International Stores in Hythe to customers living in Beaulieu, Blackfield or Dibden Purlieu. Then I helped him in a larger van on his greengrocer's round in Marchwood and Dibden. I learned to "see" and "feel" a pound of potatoes of apples. In the subsequent summers I weeded 1000 Christmas trees for Uncle Freddie at a farthing a tree, and helped his nephew feed and clean out the pigs. That was on the Furzewood Estate at Butts Ash. That was the last job obtained through nepotism. When I was 17, I worked at the UnaStar Laundry up Winchester Road. There were the regular women and several of us schoolboys. We entertained one other. The women taught us dirty songs, and we thought up "Luddite" ways to amuse them. Of the former, I remember the "Caviar comes from the virgin sturgeon" song. One instance of the latter: sending a jelly baby between two sheets through the ironing press; when the sheets came out at the other end, they had the shape of a giant jelly baby imprinted on them. My last summer job in Southampton was at the smelly Calor Gas factory at Millbrook. The job consisted of filling canisters with gas and loading them onto delivery lorries. A number of the lads amused themselves by spraying each other with gas by chasing one another holding a canister and opening the nozzle. A pre-Christmas job I had for a number of years was working at the post office, delivering letters, delivering parcels, sorting letters or sorting parcels. I did them all. One year, I worked at the foreign parcels office at Redbridge. On Christmas Eve we had one delivery to sort at 6 p.m. then the last one at 10. In between, we all went to the pub, where I had several rum-and-blackcurrants. Feeling completely sober, I rode home on my bike, thinking it wise to chew a bit of spearmint gum before reaching home. My mother was not deceived however, and so I did not enjoy the subsequent Christmas Day. After Christmas, I worked several times in the January sales at the department store Edwin Jones. The first time, I was in the rubbish department; one day, I slipped on wet ash in the yard, fell, cut my hand and had an anti-tetanus shot. That was when I discovered I was allergic to penicillin, suffering painful after-effects. The other two years I worked as a shop assistant inside. In my student years I found casual jobs in Manchester. After working as an insurance collector during term-time in Moss Side, I worked for a week the first summer as a vacuum cleaner salesman. During that week, the company changed addresses, and the one sale I managed to make using a very misleading patter and demonstration earned me a bonus, my team leader a bonus, and the head salesman a bonus. Something was very wrong, so I left. I then worked very peacefully for a soft drinks company, Jewsbury and Brown, spending most of my time checking invoices at the office, and selling soft drinks at a cricket test match at Old Trafford. Since the invoice-checking didn't take me long to complete, I spent a lot of time typing out poems addressed to my girlfriend Gwen. In subsequent summers in Manchester, I worked once at the Colgate factory in Trafford Park, and once as Mister Softy, driving a van and selling ice cream. Working the night shift at the Colgate factory, the normal job for the three of us casual students was to clean the factory floor. It took us about two hours of concentrated work to do this, so we spent the rest of the time sleeping or reading (I managed to read all of Proust while there). On our last week (last because we left), however, we were put on the assembly line. The sheer monotony of this led to several results, some inevitable, some unexpected, including: for diversion (cf. UnaStar), putting a dead mouse in a container of Colgate cleaner; passing everything as correct (mainly weight of filled cartons); Pete, a medical student who worked as an intern during the day, thought the date stamp was: a) his girlfriend's change purse, b) a bar of chocolate. The three of us decided it was time to move on. My two best summer jobs, however, were neither in Southampton, nor in Manchester. After my second year at university, I stayed with the family of flat-mate Barrie and worked, like him, as a conductor on the Southdown buses based in Bognor Regis. Those were the days of double-deckers (single deckers were rare and known as "one-man bandits"). Standing on the open platform at the back of the bus, the conductor could look up the skirts of young girls going up the stairs; while collecting fares, he could look down their blouses! I got my comeuppance, however (see "The fall"). Since many regular conductors took their holidays during the summer, I was often asked to do two shifts a day, thus earning a lot of money. I liked the challenge of a full bus, the sleep-time of an empty bus, but not the boredom of a half-full/half-empty bus. I repeated the experience in the September before my final year. After my year in Alençon (see "Vive...") and again before I got married, I worked as a guide at the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel (ditto and see pics), earning a lot of money through the keeping of two thirds of the tips I received (the other third went to the regular guides). I liked to have an interested (thus interesting) group of visitors. If they were uninteresting, I tended to switch to automatic pilot, inevitably wondering at some point what I had already told them, an unnerving experience. One visitor made the priceless remark that the monks must have had a hard time keeping the sand in the bay flat; another wondered how Tombelaine (a large rock out in the bay) stayed in place when the tide came in. The fall I had a fall one day, when I was a student. It was in Bognor Regis, on the Sussex coast, where I was working as a bus conductor during the summer holidays. I was standing on the open platform at the back of the bus in the conductor pose, left hand in my pocket, right hand nonchalantly holding onto the bar, watching the world go by. The bus was going slowly through the centre of town. Suddenly I saw a girl I knew standing on the pavement. She smiled at me and waved to me. I smiled at her and gave her a wave with my right hand. Just then the bus accelerated, and I found myself on my bum in the roadway with coins spilling out of my bag all around me. Too embarrassed to look at the girl, I started to pick up the money, helped by a Good Samaritan who came to my aid. A few minutes later the bus driver came running up, his face as white as a sheet. By the time the story of what had happened had passed from mouth to mouth from the back of the bus to the front, he had visions of my needing a stretcher to the mortuary. One of the other bus drivers had a reputation as a story-teller. And so several days later, when I was at the bus depot in nearby Chichester, an inspector came up to me to ask if I was the conductor who had seen his girlfriend with another man and jumped off the bus to go after him... A cappella Maddy Prior sings a song called "Acapella Stella" written by her husband Rick Kemp, both of Steeleye Span fame, but this is about Renaissance polyphony. A member of St. Michael's Cathedral all-male choir, I long thought that, as in the sixteenth century, the soprano line was always sung by boy trebles, the contralto notes by boy altos. This in the modern world, according to my way of thinking, was due to the inevitable vibrato of women's voices. This misconception, based on the enduring influence of nineteenth-century opera singing, was shattered at a concert of polyphonic motets sung by the Bevan Family at Downside Abbey, five young sisters and five young brothers, all in their twenties or thirties, their voices trained by their mother and conducted by their father. The singing was superb, with not a trace of vibrato. I have since had the privilege of talking to Maurice Bevan, one of the ten, after a concert given by the Deller Consort, of which he was a member, and of seeing Emma Kirkby sing at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. One of the best recordings of Allegri's Miserere is that by the choir of Clare College, with its high C sung by a young woman. Grass rubbing On sabbatical in East Anglia, in the days when one could get at the originals, I explored the region by way of the rubbing of monumental brasses. Using my detailed Ordnance Survey maps, I would choose an area, determine from my collection of books on the subject which churches held which brasses, then, with itinerary and list, set off in my car to find out who to get the church key from and who to pay. Inside the church I would examine the brass and take its measurements. On a second trip I would make the rubbing. The supplies - paper and wax crayons - I would buy in an art supplies shop in Cambridge. I ended up doing rubbings in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshre, Kent and Surrey. In this way, I discovered little villages well off the beaten track. I particularly remember the village of Westley Waterless, in Cambridgeshire. When I arrived, in the morning of a mild winter day, there was no sound, nobody in sight. The village pond was surrounded by daffodils and had ducks swimming on it. Another memory is of the carpet of snowdrops in the graveyard of the church in Felbrigg, Norfolk. The rubbings were hung, sometimes several on top of one another, on the walls of the rented house in Stratford St. Mary, and, at the end of the year, as part of a fête, in the cloisters of the Franciscan Friary in West Bergholt. (It was at the friary that I learned one of the popular etymologies of the English fish and chip shop, set up, in the Middle Ages, by a chip monk and a fish friar.) I am the proud possessor of over fifty rubbings, including those of famed brasses such as those of Henry Bures at Acton, Sir John de Creke and wife Alyne Clopton at Westley Waterless, Margaret Peyton at Isleham, and Sir John and Lady Ellen de Wautone at Wimbish. On many of these outings I took my two-year-old son. We were going "grass rubbing", a great adventure. While I started on a rubbing - carefully cleaning the brass and covering it with masking-taped brass-rubbing paper before starting in with the crayon - little son, armed with paper and drawing crayon, would start on his "grass rubbing" (before then, while I was writing my doctoral thesis, he would sit on my study floor with paper and crayon, writing his "feesis"). Before finishing my rubbing, we would have our picnic lunch, either on the grass or in the car, after which I settled him down for his nap on the back seat. Edible fungus For my second sabbatical, I decided that my centre of interest for explorng the region around Bath would be mycology. One of the interesting things about this subject is that there is no universally accepted terminology for the different species and genera of mushrooms, the classification and nomenclature of fungi differing from book to book, and language to language. Latin and vernacular names vary from one to another. I had always been interested in mushrooms. When I was quite small, my mother would send me out in the early autumn morning to scour the nearby fields for field mushrooms and horse mushrooms, which she would then fry as part of our breakfast. I learned early on the thrill of seeing white caps peeking above the green of the surrounding grass. Among my experiences during the year in Bath and since: finding edible boleti in the woods near my brother's house in Ceredigion; finding, with my brother, "magic mushrooms", which we then consumed in magic mushroom tea, causing me to see brilliant stained-glass windows when I went to bed; finding, and eating fried or in soups, giant puffballs in Hampshire and Killbear Provincial Park; finding delicious chanterelles in the woods of Killbear Park. At dance camp near Milford Haven, in Pembrokeshire, I attended a workshop on rooting. The workshop leader asked the participants for suggestions for the mantra which we would chant while stamping around getting rooted. My suggestion - "edible fungus" - was adopted by the group. Tintin My third sabbatical was spent in Nice. My younger daughter was put in the final year, class CM2, of the local primary school. During the first term, her teacher kindly did not assign marks to her work while she learned (European) French. By the time the second term started, she was completely fluent, so her teacher treated her like everybody else. In the French school system many schools are closed on Wednesdays, with classes on Saturday morning. So Wednesdays were Sarah's and my special day for exploring. Our travels, sometimes including Sarah's Canadian friend, included taking us to: le Mont Chauve, with its World War 2 barracks; the abandoned hill town of Neuchâtel; Roquebrune-Cap-Martin; le Trophée des Alpes. My daughter shared my passion for books. It was during this year that I gave up reading to her at bedtime, halfway through David Copperfield. But we shared another book project. We spent several Wednesdays building up a complete collection of second-hand Tintin albums, scouring the bookshops of Nice. When our collection was complete we were very proud of our achievement. Woman's Hour In the early 1980s, I had the task of proofreading the 672 double-column folio pages of the keyboarded early French dictionary Thresor de la langue françoyse of Jean Nicot, better known for the introduction, while king's ambassador to Portugal, of the tobacco plant into France and the words nicotine and nicotiana (known at the time as l'herbe à Nicot). During his retirement in le Bois-Robert, he took an existing French-Latin dictionary and added commentaries, in French, on many of the French entries. The text had been captured, partly by a keyboardist at the Institut de la langue française in Nancy and partly by a research assistant at the University of Toronto. The two, technically quite different, were merged by a programmer at the Computer Service (only one at the time) at the University, and I did my proofreading from a printout. For two summers we exchanged houses with an English academic from the Universiity of Exeter. While my forbearing wife took our children canoeing in Exmouth or bathing at Sandy Bay (I occasionally went with them), I tackled the immensely boring job of reading the capture of Nicot's Thresor, comparing it to a facsimile reprint edition of the original. The biggest obstacle was the tendency to "make sense" of the forms in front of my eyes, to confuse one word with another (think of discrete and discreet in English). Fortunately for my sanity and for the accuracy of my reading, I hit upon the idea of occupying my thinking mind with something else. I had a radio, and so spent many an hour listening to the fascinating reports, interviews, debates - on health, education, cultural and political topics - and dramatisations of the programme Woman's Hour, while my eyes did the proofreading. The odd combination worked well. Devon So enamoured were we with Devon that the following summer we rented, for a week each, a house in Zeal Monachorum, a cottage in Moretonhampstead and a caravan in Sandy Bay. Kay's sister, brother-in-law and their four children also spent a week each summer in their caravan at Sandy Bay. We did things together with them, including exploring, along with my widowed mother, the beauty of Dartmoor (we had been to Exmoor, in North Devon, during a previous summer spent in Ditcheat, in Somerset). Bluebells I have various memories of bluebells (in Canada, the equivalent are called scilla). The first was when I was a little boy on a visit to see Auntie Blake and Dorothy. The woods at Ashley were full of bluebells covering the ground amongst the trees. Then, when on sabbatical in Stratford St. Mary, I remember going for a walk in the nearby woods in the Stour valley and coming upon the dreamlike scene of a carpet of bluebells, with, standing in their midst, a white peacock (escaped from a nearby stately garden). The scene had the mystical quality of the unicorn garden in the New York Cloisters' tapestry, but in three dimensions and true colour. The third memory is of a stop at the beginning of the Cambrian Pass on our way to visit my brother in Llanddewi Brefi. We stopped because my mother suffered from migraines. I took several photographs of the moss-covered tree branches and the bluebells growing among the trees (see left). Bluebell carpets are both magical and the harbinger of warm weather. The train In 1974, my parents, Kay, our two children and I spent two and a half days in a CP train, travelling from Toronto to Vancouver via Calgary and Banff. We experienced none of the high jinks of Some Like It Hot or Laurel & Hardy's Berth Marks, nor the drama of Murder on the Orient Express or Le train, but we did enjoy seeing the vastness of Southern Canada and took pleasure in the food served on a crisp white linen table cloth with silver cutlery and linen napkins. We left in the late afternoon of Day 1, and spent the whole of Day 2 going along the North shore of Lake Superior. After lengthy stops at Winnipeg in the evening of Day 2 and Medicine Hat and Banff on Day 3 (there were others), we entered the Rockies, where we were told to go to the observation car, either at the front or the back, to see the other end of the train higher up or lower down entering or leaving the mountainside. On Day 4, we descended the Fraser Valley and arrived at our destination. I got up early each morning so that I wouldn't miss anything, and particularly enjoyed the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets. St Petersburg For several years I had wanted to go to Leningrad, to visit The Hermitage and see the magnificent churches dating from the time when Catherine the Great invited Voltaire and Diderot to her country. Then, when Leningrad had become St Petersburg again, I received an invitation to give a paper at a conference in Tampere, in Finland. Aha! We drove from Molshem, in Alsace, through Germany, Denmark and Sweden, leaving the car in the parking lot of a hotel in Porvoo, in Finland. From there, we travelled by train to St Petersburg. At the Finland Station, we were accosted, in English, by a young man, who became an imporant part of our stay in Russia. He said it would be cheaper to get to the hotel if we caught a taxi a hundred yards away rather than in the station forecourt. That proved to be the case (the same applied to taking a taxi from the hotel). In exchange for supplying him and his girl-friend with hot dogs and beer at the hotel bar, he found for me a source of American dollars and supplied me with other money-saving tips. We found that shops and cafés accepted either dollars or roubles, never both. Our stomachs would have to wait until we got back to Finland, but nevertheless I enjoyed the coffee with Bailey's Irish Cream in place of milk served at the hotel bar (paid for in dollars), and we both appreciated the caviar consumed in a café on the Nevsky Prospekt (roubles). The feast for eyes and ears included: a visit to the collections of The Hermitage; the skyline of St Petersburg; a visit to the Summer Palace, where we found a Mozartian chamber quintet in period costume playing in the gardens; an evening of wonderful dancing, ballet, choral singing and instrumental music given by a St Petersburg company in the magnificent concert hall of the hotel; walking around the city and seeing people playing chess everywhere. On the ferry returning from Helsinki to Stockholm we passed by little islands which beat anything I had seen in the Saint Laurent. Denmark I had a cousin, daughter of my mother's sister, who had married a Dane and lived near Copenhagen, in Brøndby, I think. In 1968, Kay and I rented a Peugeot 404 station wagon in Besançon, and drove, with our baby daughter in the back, to pick up my parents, who had flown over from England, at the Porte d'Italie, in the southern outskirts of Paris. On the way, we spent a night in Liège. Then, in Amsterdam, we took a canal boat ride, where our daughter had her first taste of Fanta (see left). We spent the night in Groningen, where Louis, a friend from my Besançon days, lived with his family. His father was a butcher, so we tasted his sausage at dinner. Then on to Lübeck, where we caught the ferry to Denmark. Wendy and Per, their two boys and two girls, plus Per's widowed father, made the five of us welcome. I remember the trips: to the beach (somewhere north of Copenhagen), with its glorious cliff-top dog roses and invigorating sea; to the Viking museum in Roskilde; an evening at Tivoli; a shopping trip to Copenhagen. There were bicycles everywhere. We left impressed by a beautiful, civilised country (one of my favourite novels is Rose Tremain's Music and Silence). We never made it to Jutland, the land of my New Forest forebears and the setting of one of my favourite films, Babettes Gæstebud. On the way back, we stopped in Groningen to pick up Louis and his sister, who accompanied us to Amsterdam (they travelled in a separate car). We got the address of a hotel from the chamber of commerce, and I bravely followed Louis (who had my father in his car) over bridges and alongside canals, all the time fearing I would never see my father again, as Louis was the only one of us who had the address of the hotel. And so back to France. After a restaurant meal of game hens and wild strawberries, my parents caught a plane back to England from Le Bourget airport. Kay, our daughter and I continued on back to Besançon. Spanish culture In 1958, John Prior and I visited the Brussels World's Fair. Turning a corner in the Spanish pavilion, we were almost bowled over by Salvador Dali's painting Cristo de San Juan de la Cruz (Christ of Saint John of the Cross). In 1989, Yvette and I went to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella, the destination of the Camino de Santiago. I had read Cuelho's Pilgrimage, which prepared me for our stay in Santiago. On our way back to France, we spent several days in Gaudí's Barcelona, visiting the Basílica de la Sagrada Família, the Parc Güell and the Casa Milá. We also went to the impressive Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, walked up and down Las Ramblas, and ate a lot of tapas (we had also eaten some delicious tapas in Vic, on a previous visit to Catalunya). In 1995, I was invited to participate in a Romance language conference organised by the Real Academia Española and held in a hotel situated in the birthplace of the Castilian language, San Millán de la Cogolla, in the heart of the Rioja region. We visited several rioja cellars, each visit terminating with a glass of rioja (my favourite wine), accompanied by a slice of delicious chorizo; each person was also given a bottle of rioja! At the end of our stay in Spain, the members of the French delegation, before boarding our plane at Madrid airport, visited the wonderful Prado (El Prado is, in my opinion, the best art museum in Europe) and regaled ourselves on tapas served on a restaurant patio in the impressive Plaza Mayor. Nightmarish city centres Not necessarily nightmares at the time, but in hindsight... 1959, Zagreb, in the days of Tito's Yugoslavia. Turned into a street which had streetcar tracks from one kerb to the other. Brief vision of a nightmare not dissimilar to that of Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, imagining a phalanx of streetcars advancng inexorably on me. 1961, Paris. With Barrie riding pillion, rode my scooter round Place de la Concorde. Lived to tell the tale. 1965, Rome. Drove past the Colosseum, closing the windows to shut out the cacophony of car horns. 1965, Palermo. Shut the car windows to avoid getting stung (or worse) by the self-defensive whips of the caleche drivers. 1970s, Toronto. And to finish, a magical dream, the opposite of a nightmare. Driving with my parents on the 401 to or from the airport, we were treated to a magnificent, beautiful rainbow, which seemed to fill the sky. Doudou and Bush dodgers A language is a living thing, constantly changing, with new words and expressions appearing daily (e.g. social distancing in March 2020), while others become obsolete (e.g. Y2K, common at the end of the 1990s and obsolete in the year 2000). At any given moment, children and teenagers are familiar with terms that are obscure to adults and old people, while the latter use words that the young think old-fashioned or simply do not understand. One-volume printed dictionaries of general usage contain a necessarily subjective description of language X or Y that is obsolete as soon as it is published, in which generally the descriptions of words beginning with the letter a are more obsolete than those of words starting with t, since the usual practice is to go though the alphabet from A to Z. This fact is often exacerbated by the fact that in modern times many lexicographical bodies tend to think of themselves as the "guardians" of the language, a preposterous claim. (No names!) Academics have a hard time accepting the idea that a better image of language X is given by the World Wide Web (McLuhan's global village) than by a print dictionary (the artefact of an elite). Three examples, two French, one in English. In 2003, my two daughters and I explored the side roads in the Auge region of Normandy. We came upon a roadside sign saying "La route des douets". What was a "douet"? In the village of Saint-Hymer, where we sought refreshment, our waitress told us that a douet was a stream. The most generally used one-volume dictionary of French, the Petit Robert, does not contain the word, which suggested to me that it was a regional term. Short of consulting a glossary of Norman dialect words, I looked instead at the Web, where I found all the information I could wish for, including photographs. The word douet is an Augeron word for "stream". The Quebec singer Richard Desjardins tells "Caroline": "Prends ta robe et ton bijou, / dis bye bye à ta doudou". What is a doudou? The Petit Robert tells us simply that in the Caribbean it is a beloved young woman. Hard to believe in the context of Desjardins' song. The WWW reveals all. It is used by parents and small children and means any type of security blanket or teddy. The word doudou is feminine in Canadian French and masculine in Europe. In Canada many American draft dodgers came up during the Vietnam War. When George Bush Jr. was reelected to the presidency, there were a number of Bush dodgers who did likewise. The WWW was full of references to the phenomenon. In an article entitled "BUSH DODGERS" and dated 2 November 2004, the Toronto Sun columnist Gary Dunford wrote: ""Let us in!" beg two guys at the Canadian border in a rusty Civic. "If Bush wins tonight, all is lost! Give us political asylum! New hope, a new life! Canadian dudeship!"" Home What is "home"? Is it the place where one lives, where one eats, sleeps, where one spends the most time, the place that one shares with parents, siblings, children or spouse? Probably, it is. But it is more complex than that. It is also, in part, the place where one has one's domestic possessions, one's domestic identity. In that sense, my secondary home when I was a university student was the digs or flat I was in in Manchester. When I lived in Canada and shared a house with wife and children, my secondary home was the house my parents lived in in the South of England. When my mother died, my secondary home was the cottage where my brother resided in West Wales. Then he died, and I no longer had a secondary dwelling place. Home is also the geographical region where one feels the most comfortable, the most oneself. This is the cultural definition of "home". The South of England when I was growing up, the North after I had visited my grandparents a few times, and later when I was at university. France, when I was living there as an assistant, and then as a post-graduate student and teacher. Canada, where I emigrated, raised a family, spent my teaching career and retirement. I also chose, with my wife, the three places that we spent a sabbatical year in: East Anglia, Bath and Nice. We felt at home in each. Parents In novels the protagonist's parents are often depicted negatively, models to be avoided. The protagonist as parent is often doting, even transformed by parenthood. My own I simply loved. To me my mother was lovely, and even into adulthood I regarded her as a paragon. One evening, when my younger brother Nigel had just got married, he, I and our two wives went out for a drink in a pub in Nursling. Nigel and I sat with our jaws hanging open as Elaine and Kay proceeded to criticise our mother. Like anyone else, of course, she was imperfect, but she was my Mum, the maker of scrumptious rice puddings, of roast beef dinners with Yorkshire puddings, and so on. Nigel suffered from being compared to me: "Why don't you do X/Y/Z like Russon?" Dad was a Methodist local preacher and, in his way, a saint. He gained a reputation for his sweet voice as a radio announcer on the HMS Brandaris on Merseyside during the Second World War, and later as a telephone voice when he worked as stores manager at Prince's service station at Millbrook. The weather was usually fine when he took his annual holiday, to the extent that when it was sunny people he knew called it "Sam's weather". The nearest he ever got to swearing was once when a church notice board announced that the service on the next Sunday would be taken by "S.J. Woodridge"; Dad said jokingly "they've knocked the L out of me". The most expressive Mum ever got was to exclaim "Oh, dear!" Thesis defences in France are public; the ones held in Paris are announced in Le Monde. My parents attended my thesis defence, held at the university of Paris-III, la Sorbonne nouvelle. To prepare himself, my father took French night classes for two years beforehand. He told me afterwards that he was able to understand quite a lot. My parents were devoted Methodists, but tolerant and adaptable. They got used to their elder son getting engaged, then married to a Roman Catholic, and visited us several times in France and Canada. They learned to drink wine in Saint-Malo (see "Vive la différence"), at Mont-St-Michel, and in Paris and Besançon. Al fresco meals When I was a boy, we had picnics in the New Forest or on a Channel beach (Calshot, Lepe, Milford on Sea, Barton on Sea, Highcliffe, Mudeford, Sandbanks). Mum made cucumber and Marmite sandwiches, cheese and tomato sandwiches and a flask of tea. Later on, picnics in France, particularly those where Kay, the children and I sat in an alpine meadow (in the Jura or the Alps), left fond memories. We would buy a baguette at the boulangerie, comté cheese at the fromagerie, pâté at the traiteur, and tomatoes and a bottle of water at the épicerie, then stop the car at a suitable spot. In the summers of 1972 and 1973, we did a tour de France de bibliothèques; we would drive in the morning, have a picnic lunch, and then, while Kay took the children touring or swimming on the beach, I undertook research in the municipal library (we dined and spent the night in a hotel). When we went to Vancouver (see "The train"), we had several picnic lunches in the Rockies - one in an alpine meadow overlooking Peyto Lake and several on a picnic table outside the cabin we rented near Jasper. Two years later we camped our way through New England and picnicked in many places, including various campsites in Maine. At one of these, we participated in a clambake, I being the only member of the family to eat lobster. The most epicurean picnics I have participated in - replete with caviar, vodka and wine, drawn, along with other delicious foodstuffs, from a hamper - were organised by Snejina, one at the Metro Zoo in Toronto, one at the Beaches, also in Toronto, and one in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Of properly catered meals eaten outside at a table, I remember only those that took place in France. One of these, a lunch partaken of by Kay and me when we were living in Besançon, took place at a river-side restaurant in the Jura. At the other two I remember (both summer-evening dinners), the invitees were my eldest daughter and I, who were spending two weeks in the Centre of France. The first took place in Glandieu, to the east of Lyon, in the garden of the mother of a Toronto colleague; present were Dominique (my colleague), her mother, her uncle, my daughter and I. The second, in a village in Auvergne, was in the courtyard of the home of the father of our host Jacques-Philippe. Both meals were excellent. Although I do not remember what we ate and drank, I was particularly struck by the presence, in a cornfield outside the village of Jacques-Philippe's father, of both blue cornflowers and red poppies. There are two types of al fresco meal I shall mention: breakfast and afternoon tea. My mother's family came of several generations of Mew Forest woodmen (see photograph). A family tradition was to have breakfast on the forest (as well as trees, the New Forest has huge expanses of heather and lawns created by grazing ponies, so one walks on the forest). So, the night before, we would pack into the car fire-making equipment and wood, plates, mugs, cutlery, a kettle full of water, a frying pan, and put together in the fridge eggs, bacon, pork sausages, bread, butter and orange juice. Then we would all get up early - parents (who lived on the edge of the forest), wife, children and I - and set off to Ipley Bridge, there to make a hugely enjoyable early-morning meal. My mother was born on 13 June, and according to another family tradition it was celebrated by the consumption of strawberries. One year, when my parents came from England to see us, Kay made a strawberry cake which we ate in Sunnybrook Park (see photograph). The New Forest This royal hunting forest, taken and developed by England's first Norman king and scene of the demise of his son (marked by the Rufus Stone), has - before it became a regimented national park - played an important part in my life. Family picnics (see "Al fresco..." and left), camping with the cubs and scouts (see "Camping"), walks with Mr Dovey and his wife, family games of cricket (see left), drives by car and bus (the Sunday School outing was usually to Sandbanks, on the other side of the Forest), trips to the seaside, visits to Minstead church and gardens, to Lyndhurst ("capital" of the New Forest, location of the Court of Verderers, with its two romantic cricket pitches, its venison butchers and the grave of Alice Liddell), to Brockenhurst and the Rhinefield Ornamental Drive, to the pony sales at Beaulieu Road Station, driving through the "piggy village" of Bramshaw (owners of New Forest free-roaming pigs have the right of pannage - see left), taking cousin Heather and her daughter out for a meal at the Bell Inn in Brook, going to dances and the motor museum in Beaulieu, rowing across the Beaulieu River to Bucklers Hard, cycling on my Rotrax bicycle with cousin Graham, cycling to Butts Ash via Applemore Hill (then a sandy track until it was replaced by the Hythe bypass) and Roman Road (outside Dibden Purlieu), walking on the Forest during World War II and seeing a hare, going to Lymington with Heather, daughter and grandson, taking the ferry from Lymington across the Solent to Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight with nephew, daughter and grandson, taking Mum to Sowley Pond, driving through the Forest via Beaulieu Road Station, Lyndhurst, Cadnam and Bramshaw on the way back from Butts Ash to Bath during a sabbatical year. I learned to drive at Stoney Cross aerodrome (disused after World War II). Mr Dovey was an interesting man. An auditor by profession, he came for a week each summer to do the books at Prince's Garage, where my father worked. He stayed with us, made a lampshade for my mother, and taught me cribbage, which he played during tea breaks with his work colleagues at his home base in London. At one meal, he saw a rasher of bacon on the side of my brother's plate (my brother was saving it for last), and said "Nigel, aren't you going to eat this?", whereupon he speared it with his fork and popped it into his mouth. That incident was subsequently enshrined in my family in the expression "doing a Mr Dovey". One year, after he had finished his audit, his wife came down to join him, and they spent a week taking marked walks in the New Forest, I accompanying them on two occasions. Kay loved the New Forest. After our divorce, she taught for several years at the Université canadienne en France in Villefranche. She often took two or three of her students with her touring by car. One year she went with two students to London, where the weather was hot and stifling. She told them they would cool down when they reached the New Forest. And so they did when they had a picnic there. Seafood I developed a taste for seafood during my year in Alençon and the following summer at Mont-Saint-Michel (see "Vive..."). On two occasions, I attended the celebration of something or other at the Salle des Fêtes in Alençon. At each, the refreshments included champagne and oysters, to both of which I took an immediate liking. But it was at Mont-St-Michel, on the Channel coast, that my real education in seafood took place. I took part in the communal event of manual seine fishing, and took along to the restaurant for cooking my share of the catch. At the Mouton blanc, where I ate as a demi-pensionnaire, I had fish, freshly caught, agneau des prés salés (salt-meadow lamb) and the local speciality of a fluffy omelette (best known as omelette de la Mère Poulard), but the meals - at about a half the price or less than the ordinary customer would pay - were dominated by shellfish (fruits de mer in French): oysters, mussels, crab, lobster, clams, scallops, and others. My favourite dish was moules marinière, then and now. In folklore, there is a common belief, both in Britain and France, that the consumption of shellfish should be restricted to months the names of which contain an 'r', i.e. from September through to April (the exact same thing applies to the names of months in French, i.e. from septembre to avril). French chefs (and my own experience) regard this as pure nonsense. My appreciation of oysters, eaten raw with a dash of lemon or Muscadet wine, preferably Muscadet sur lie, produced at the Atlantic end of the Loire valley, accompanied by thin slices of brown bread slathered with Breton butter, was refined later, in Saint-Malo and nearby Cancale, reputably the oyster capital of Brittany. A favourite dish of mine is plateau de fruits de mer, an assortment of shellfish on a bed of seaweed and ice, consumed in Paris, on the Atlantic coast of France near La Rochelle, and at Grandcamp-Maisy in Normandy. I have eaten lobster at Mont-St-Michel, in nearby Pontorson, also in North America, notably in Maine and Halifax. Lobster, and seafood in general, should, in my experience, be eaten as near to the sea as possible. We bought a crab at West Bay in Dorset; Kay made a delicious mayonnaise sauce to accompany it when we got home to Ditcheat. On the Mediterranean coast, the primary seafood dish is fish soup (soupe de poissons or the famous bouillabaisse of Marseille). At the end of the year in Nice (see "Tintin"), I having purchased the various Mediterranean fish at the market in the Avenue Jean-Médecin, local Charlie made for the three of us (him, Kay and me) a delicious soupe de poissons. The literate burglar There is the famous story of the first volume of Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution being put on the fire by John Stuart Mill's maid, and the Blackadder episode of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary meeting the same fate; then the story of baby Octavia chewing up the first several chapters of Lydia's novel in Margaret Drabble's The Millstone. Before the days of the personal computer, the chief nightmare of thesis-writers was of one's manuscript being burned by fire or destroyed by flood. It was thus with some trepidation that I asked John Fowles, at a book-signing, if his short story Poor Koko - in which an unusual burglar ties up the eponymous writer-protagonist and then burns, before his eyes, all his index cards - was based on personal experience. I was told that it was based on that of a friend of the writer. Language Language is also, in part, a medium in which one feels at home. At the primary school I attended, we all started off our recitation of John Masefield's poem "Oi must go down to the sea again", much to the teacher's chagrin; she told us to say "I must...". In the North of England, I had to get used to the old pronouns thou, thee, thy and thine, and second-person singular verb forms, as well as other unfamiliar words (see "Tiggy"). In Southampton, I lived next door to a less well-educated family. Overheard conversation between the two brothers: younger David: "'ey ni'er, did ya know Russon's doing La'ern?"; older Ron: "It's not La'ern, you clo', it's La'in". (Speech including dropped aspiration, and the use of glottal stops in place of occlusive consonants - nipper, clot, Latin.) The Hampshire Hog gardener observing my mother working in the kitchen garden of an estate: "Auntie Rose, you look like a gert emmet." Gert emmet is Hampshire dialect for great ant. Returning from Besançon to England for Christmas, on the ferry bearing us from Le Havre to Southampton, Ontarian Merirose informed incredulous me that she couldn't understand a word spoken by the members of the crew, all from Southampton. When I emigrated to Canada, I felt at home at first since the language was the same as I had grown up with - English. Then I had a period of feeling at sea, since I was not sure what was British English and what was Canadian English. My wife had a good story to tell. Before we got married, she spent a year studying for an MA in Italian at the University of Toronto. The evening before she did an all-nighter, writing an essay, she asked one of her male house-mates: "Will you please knock me up in the morning?" In British English, this means quite simply "Will you please knock on my door in the morning to make sure I'm awake", whereas in Canadian English, the expression has a quite different (sexual) meaning. French is no different. In European French gosse means "child, kid", whereas in Canadian French it means "testicle". So to the Parisian asking his Dorval cab driver "Combien de gosses avez-vous?", the latter replies "Ben, deux, comme tout le monde". Language is, above all, a means of communication which feels familiar. Thus, regional differences. Just as Ken Loach's film Riff-Raff, about the English working class, was subtitled for North American distribution, the films of Quebec film-makers Claude Jutra and Gilles Carle were subtitled in France. Satchmo A bad performer can be a person who is not good at what he or she is attempting to do. It can also be someone who thinks he or she is the bee's knees and doesn't care about the audience. It can apply particlularly to a singer or a teacher. The good performer is a person who is aware of a need, a desire in at least one member, often several or all, of the audience or class, and is able to respond to it. That is my own experience, as a person who spent his career as a teacher. To me, the epitome of the good performer was demonstrated at a concert given by Louis Armstrong at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. I discovered his Hot Five and Hot Seven in my teens, and spent all my pocket money on records of these bands, unobtainable in Britain, the first time I went to Paris. I also attended, at the Free Trade Hall, concerts given by Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, and Kid Ory, as well as the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. I was also a regular attender of the New Orleans jazz sessions given by local bands in the city's pubs. But back to Louis Armstrong. A relatively poor student, I was sitting in a cheap seat up in the gallery, with a number of empty seats in front of me. As soon as he came on stage, Satchmo said: "Come a little closer, I can't see you". He wanted to recreate the intimacy of a jazz club, and within seconds everyone was as close as they could get. I was now right at the front. It was a magical moment. Curiosity A word with more than one meaning. In Dickens' time it meant a thing, a kind of knick-knack, whence his novel about Little Nell and her grandfather. Charles Dodgson wrote later on, and used the word in a more modern sense when he has Alice say "Curioser and curioser". The chair of my department, in the speech she made at my retirement, described me as being independent - I took that as a compliment. (This didn't stop me from making collaboration the main theme of my own.) I have always been independent, doing my own thing. This got me into trouble once with my brother-in-law when I wandered off from Fairhaven Lake, leaving him with my young children, as well as his own. Trouble also with my mother-in-law, when I went for a walk rather than watching for the nth time my father-in-law's slides. Independent curiosity is essentially the constant need to learn about new things. In Suffolk, this included finding out-of-the-way places through the study of detailed Ordnance Survey maps and subsequent explorations by car. I thus found myself once driving along a narrow, grassy lane, surrounded by fields; another time, I actually ended up in a field. I enjoyed reading early Lovejoy and the Barbara Vine novels set in Suffolk. In Venice, one wet February, I explored an area off the beaten track, that of Cannaregio and the old Ghetto. After an early morning espresso coffee and grappa in a quayside café, I went to the little church of the Madonna dell'Orto, where I gazed at an exquisite Madonna and Child painted by Giovanni Bellini. I had this wonderful painting to myself, far from the madding crowds at the Accademia and the Palazzo Ducale. Of books, breaks and sealing wax This story is about books and breaks. The sealing wax of the title is there purely for hooking and scanning purposes, although, when I was a boy, sticks of red wax were still used to seal the knots of the string fastening parcels (gone were the days of personal seals). I used to think that "ceiling wax" stopped the ceiling from coming down (this was many years before Goscinny and Uderzo created the character of the Gallic chieftain and afraid-that-the sky-would-fall-on-his-head Abraracourcix - Vitalstatistix in English - in the Astérix albums). The title, as it stands, obviously owes much to Carroll, who continues with "cabbages and kings". When I was doing research for my thesis, I frequented many libraries. In Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale, l'Arsenal, Sainte-Geneviève, Mazarine, Sorbonne. In other parts of France, the municipal libraries of Lyon, Bordeaux, Bourg-en-Bresse, Toulouse, Quimper, Nancy, Troyes, Besançon and others. In other countries: the beautiful Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, the British Museum in London, the Bodleian in Oxford, the university libraries of Cambridge, Manchester (Rylands), Southampton and Toronto.     Bookshops are for browsing, rather than research. Amongst the best browsing bookshops I have frequented: a second-hand bookshop near the quay in Broadstairs; Autour du Monde in Lille; the defunct Volume Two in Toronto; Barnes and Noble in New York; Blackwells in Oxford and London; two second-hand bookshops on Dundas St at the Junction in Toronto, one highly organised, its next-door neighbour chaotic. Also, the online Abebooks. Coffee breaks, tea breaks, elevenses, in French "la pause pipi". In my undergraduate days, a gang of us spent our second-year summer-term-abroad in Montpellier, starting the day with a breakfast of delicious beignets and café au lait and finishing it, in another café, playing pontoon, after spending the day either on the beach at Palavas-les-Flots or cycling to Aigues-Mortes, Nîmes, Arles, Sète or Béziers. Breaks, often very long, in Alençon were spent at the café La Renaissance (which we called "La Re") (see "Vive...").     In my last two years in Manchester - B.A. final year and Grad Cert Ed (Graduate Certificate in Education) - we gathered, for our mid-morning break, in the cafeteria of the students' union. During finals year, one of us announced a pause in our studying in the French Reading Room by bouncing a table-tennis ball on the floor. That year, we combined forces to solving the Manchester Guardian crossword puzzle while drinking our coffee. The following year, a different gang of us decided, at one point, to play crazy eights (known in France as le huit américain), with the added twist of the addition of a new rule each day. It didn't pay to miss a day. Inevitably, like all pyramid scams, it collapsed. On climbing trees and listening to nature When I was a boy, I lived in a house on the edge of the country in an untarmacked cul-de-sac that had only fields and minnow streams between it and the River Test. Primary school holidays were timeless; we left our homes after breakfast, returned for dinner at 1 p.m., went out again, and returned a second time for tea about 5:30 p.m. In between meals (our stomachs told us when it was dinner-time or tea-time), we played in the fields, built dens, caught minnows in jam jars, collected frog spawn in jam jars, went scrumping, explored the gravel pit, made peashooters out of stalks of cow parsley (the 'peas' were hawthorn berries), got stung on nettles and soothed the stings with nearby dock leaves, ate bread-and-cheese (spring hawthorn leaves), sucked the sweetness out of shoots of grass, blew raspberries with a blade of grass stretched between our thumbs, climbed trees, did a million different things. The Ordnance Survey offices on Romsey Road and down Green Lane were protected behind a screen of trees. At the top of the allotments, there was a copse of wonderful climbing trees, from which we were occasionally chased by an OS employee (see "Early memories"). The first cigarette I smoked was when I was up a tree at Butts Ash with my twin cousin Ray (we were born on the same day) and his friend Bunker Bowman. Much later, as an adult in Toronto, I remember climbing trees when I was 33 - "l'âge du Christ", as my colleague Daniel called it at the time (for several years Daniel made me a rhubarb tart for my birthday). Daniel and Anne lived in a house on Chaplin Crescent, with a back garden containing several trees. It was my job to climb up and prune back the branches. Auntie Freda gave my parents a copy of The Observer's Book of British Birds, which I perused many times when I was young, to the extent that I could name almost all of the birds that were listed, although I had never seen many of them, such as the golden eagle, the grouse or the capercaillie. The same went for some of the eight species of warbler. Great was my astonishment to learn that there were many more species of warbler in North America; in one morning, armed with my book of Ontario birds and a pair of binoculars, I was able to identify over 30 species of migrating warblers in our garden. Yet observation can be undertaken with other senses than that of sight. Although sight is essential to the reader and the lover of paintings, sculpture and architecture, other senses come into play when one is listening to music, or cooking. There is the French expression déjà vu for something previously seen, yet for the evocative sense of smell one doesn't say déjà senti, nor for something heard before does one say déjà entendu. I have always listened: to the soughing of the wind through elm trees when I was a boy, or rustling through avocado leaves in Mexico a few years ago. As a boy, I loved lying down in a field, closing my eyes, and listening to the twittering birds, and the breeze ruffling through the grass. I was enchanted by the humming of bees in Segesta (see "Sicily"), repeated in the Swiss Alps, this time accompanied by the chatter of a mountain stream (see "Switzerland..."); by the gentle bass of cowbells at Le Col-des-Aravis (ditto). Cowbells, like tractors, are not natural, yet both are an integral part of the countryside. I remember, as a little boy on the long walk from King's Somborne to visit Auntie Blake and Dorothy in Ashley, hearing in the distance the comforting sounds of a tractor ploughing and of cawing rooks. Memories of listening walks include: when I was a boy, going with a friend to look for fallen chestnuts in enchanted Nightingale Wood, near Nursling; strolling along the lanes with Tony near the farm in L'Échelle, picking wild flowers which were later pressed between the pages of a book (see "Vive..."); coming, early one morning, upon chanterelles with my youngest daughter in the woods at Inverlochy; listening for, and hearing, woodpeckers in Sherwood Park; walking through the heather from Ipley Bridge to The Noads, in the New Forest. Listening non-walks include being soothed by the lapping of waves breaking on the stony shore of Lake Ontario in Cobourg. And then there is silence: experienced on a windless day on a moumtainside in the Swiss or French Alps or in the Rockies. One of my favourite books is Rose Tremain's Music and Silence. Choral singing As a soloist I was entered in Methodist contests and won prizes with my treble voice. As an adult I sang with various choirs, first of all as a tenor in the Wimpson Methodist church choir, then later on as a bass in the St Michael's Cathedral (Catholic) senior choir in Toronto. Also with the choir of the Church of the Holy Redeemer (Anglican), both in Toronto. While on sabbatical leave, I found joining a choir to be a good way to get to know people. And so I sang at the Franciscan friary in East Bergholt in a choir conducted by Brother Frank. Then, in Bath, I was a member of a church choir led by Rupert Bevan, of Bevan family choir fame (see "A cappella"). During that same year I spent about half my time at the Institut de la langue française in Nancy, joining the Chorale des Cordeliers, conducted by Gilbert; in practice we sang madrigals by Janequin, and gave concerts of requiem masses written by Berlioz and Verdi. In Nice, I joined a local choir conducted by Christiane. We sang Mozart's Requiem at various locations on the Côte d'Azur and in Piedmont. The highlight of the year was when we joined forces with other choirs of the region to sing, under the baton of the peerless Pierre-Philippe, Haydn's Creation at the church of Sainte-Réparate in the old town, le Vieux Nice. During the following summer, I joined Christiane's choir again to sing in a choral competition held in Vic, in the Catalan region of Spain. I have fond memories of the long coach trip, and of eating tapas in a Vic restaurant with Yvette, Christiane and her husband Michel. Wild strawberries This is not about the Sweden of Ingmar Bergman, but about the marks that two world wars left in France. In 1979, we spent two months in a gíte in the village of Sampigny (see "Sampigny"), in the Meuse north-west of Nancy. One weekend, we went to a sidewalk sale in the nearby town of Saint-Mihiel. Our son bought a gas mask, dug up by a local farmer and dating from the First World War - objects from World War I still surfaced in the fields of the region. We also visited the Montsec American Monument, commemorating the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, in the Parc Naturel Régional de Lorraine. Our most important excursion, however, was to the region to the north-east of Verdun. We took side-roads, and passed through wooded areas where we came upon signs saying that there had been a village on that spot. We visited the Ossuary of Douaumont, commemorating the Battle of Verdun. An image I will always treasure is that of finding wild strawberries growing at the edge of the preserved trenches. In 2003, my two daughters and I were in Normandy, based in Honfleur. On one trip, we went to the D-Day landing beaches and D-Day museums north and north-west of Caen, and also the gun emplacements and bomb craters of the German battery at Longues-sur-Mer. Sampigny In Sampigny (see "Wild..."), the children went to the village school; the youngest, four years old, went for a few days until she saw that the "toilet" was a big, dark hole in the ground; the eldest, eleven years old, was top in French, since she could write better than the other children in her class; our son made a name for himself at soccer, since he was bigger and fitter than the other boys. Our (Canadian) children's teeth were white, whereas most of the (poor) local children had black teeth. The gîte was managed by the local curé, to whom we gave the rental money, and who gave us the key. He had a strong sense of humour. He told us a French joke about the British royal family, specifically about Philip, the Prince Consort: "Le prince consort est le prince qu'on sort quand il le faut". On the subject of the fascination that the French - at least those who miss their own monarchy or who simply like pageantry - hold for the British royal family, one of Kay's students in Besançon (see "Vive..."), the chief editor of France Dimache (the French equivalent of the British News of the World), told us some of the tricks of the trade. Amongst these was that of putting as the headline of an issue (in French) "Is Philip having an affair with Anne? - see p. 26"; on page 26 was the simple answer "No". The scandal implicit in the headline was enough to ensure a huge readership of the edition The curé also took care of a group of local delinquent boys. They could be found weeding our garden or that of someone else. The inventory of the gîte he left with us included the staircase! The children's amusement took different forms: watching Mio Mao on the rented television; collecting snails, much to the consternation of our neighbours, who were looking forward to eating them; using J-cloths to fashion clothes and dressing up various of their stuffed animals to stage a wedding. We undertook various excursions. To nearby Commercy (of Proust fame) on VE Day to see the costume dancing (see picture). To Nancy (see "Nancy"), the capital of the département, where we ate at the self-service restaurant Flunch. To the Parc naturel régional de Lorraine. And elsewhere. During the week, Kay drove me to Commercy to catch the early-morning commuter train to Nancy, where I was doing research at the Institut national de la langue française. The late-afternoon return included a bus ride between two villages on the route. Bradford-on-Avon and Bath After Sampigny (see "Sampigny"), we rented a farmhouse outside of Bradford-on-Avon (see left), in Wiltshire, for a week to enable us to look for a house to rent for our upcoming sabbatical year in the nearby city of Bath (then in the new county of Avon, which disappeared soon afterwards to become once again a part of the county of Somerset). We found what we were looking for: a narrow, four-storey house, in a typical Bath terrace, in the village of Weston, by then a western part of the city. Our eldest daughter spent the year at a girls' grammar school, our son attended a local primary school, and the youngest spent the first half of the year at a play group in Weston, the second half at a Catholic primary school. We made good friends with an Australian couple (the Wheatons) and their two children (about the age of our youngest daughter), who were also on sabbatical, and with a local couple (the Woodwards) and their three children (each about the same age as each of our three), all living close by in Weston. During the year, we went on a number of excursions: in Bath, we haunted Victoria Park, and walked past the Royal Crescent to go into the centre of Bath, where we frequented, among other places, a pastry shop (delicious patties), Pulteney Bridge and its floral Magic Roundabout in the garden below, the famous Roman baths (see left). We went once to the beautiful campus of the university. We spent many hours in the garden of the Crown at the end of our terrace drinking real ale. We saw the packhorse bridge at Bruton, went with the Woodwards to bathe at Woolacombe, ate a delicious meal at the old mill in Freshford, saw a host of daffodils in Dyrham Park. At one point, Kay went with Barbara Wheaton and Irene Woodward to see the sights of Florence, leaving the husbands to look after the kids. Kay and I sang in a church choir led by Rupert Bevan (see "Choral singing"), who gave lessons to our two unwilling eldest on our second-hand piano. We had a black-and-white television set (colour television sets were rare in those days). I liked to watch two-dimensional (like curling) snooker. I remember the commentator saying: "He's going for the brown. For those of you who are watching in black and white, the brown is the ball behind the green." !! Girlfriends What I remember, from puppy love to adult relationships. Judy (met at Wimpson Methodist Sunday school, when we were both all of 13), Janice (Wimpson Methodist revivalist rally), Teresa, Brenda and Anne (St. James St. Methodist youth club), Annette (Wimpson Methodist), Christine (friend of Methodist friend). Then in my Manchester years: hairdresser Shirley (also waitress at Saturday neighbourhood café), teacher-in-training Gwen (friend of flatmate's girlfriend), co-student Ann, London nurse Diane (met at Wimpson Methodist), co-student Anna, Jackie (met in a Chichester jazz club), Wendy (daughter of Bognor Regis bus depot manager - see "Holiday jobs"), co-students Gina (Rag Ball), Kay, Marie. During the Alençon year (see "Vive..."): co-assistant Gloria, surveillante Janine, pupil at Lycée Alain (I forget her name), nurse (ditto). In Besançon, faithful to Kay (co-student in Manchester, MA at U. of Toronto while I was in France), I asked her to marry me. We bought the engagement ring in London at the beginning of the summer and were married in the September. We spent two years in Besançon before emigrating to Canada. Midlife crisis: colleague Nicole, friend-of-a-friend teacher Leonora (both in Toronto), co-chorist and gambist Geneviève (Nancy). After divorce: co-chorist and accountant Yvette (Nice), school administrator Janine again (Alsace), academic Isabelle (Lyon), dating-find Wilma (Toronto), computer technician Lucie (Ottawa). Imaginary girfriends: I remember particularly Maggie Taylor (student at Manchester) and Marie-France (guide at Mont-St-Michel). From a few days or weeks to several years. I remember some with vague fondness. Linguistic schizophrenia While a prisoner of war, the linguist André Martinet devised and administered a test to help him better understand regional variants of French. This included the pronumciation of the word gâteau ("cake"), in which the circumflex accent is purely etymological, marking the dropping of the letter s before the t (the word used to be written gasteau, even a long time after the sibilant ceased to be pronounced. We were given the test to administer in our phonetics class in Besançon. My landlady, who unthinkingly pronounced the word, like all other French-speakers in France, with a front a, told me the word was pronouned [ga:teau], i.e. with a long back a, "à cause de l'accent circonflexe"! In my experience, people in Quebec can show similar behaviour. Some speakers of Canadian French can also protest that they speak standard French (i.e. the French of France). This duality can express itself in different ways. A shop assistant in Montreal once switched from French to English when I addressed her in European French. Another time, a Quebec French-speaking friend of mine, a resident of Montreal, gave me a tour of the city, turning back at one point, saying "Ici commencent les Anglos"! Another reaction I have found in Quebec and in august institutions in Paris is that only individuals who are accredited members of their society have the right to study the language, a sort of linguistic appropriation (cf. "Doudou"). Thus a former director of the Trésor de la langue française au Québec once refused to make the dictionary's drawers of index cards available to researchers from outside the province. Another time a well-known Quebec phonetician made known his disapproval of the study of his language by an anglophone. L'entente cordiale Some may see the 1904 agreement between the old enemies (enemies since the Norman but French-speaking William conquered England in the eleventh century) as somewhat ironically expressed by the term "cordiale". Traditionally, the French and the English have hurled insults at each other (cf. the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Swearing in respectable company was often accompanied by the plea "Excuse my French". Another English expression has it that "the Wogs start at Calais", this despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Calais was English from 1346 to 1558. The English call to take French leave what the French express as filer à l'anglaise. Similarly, a French letter is termed in French une capote anglaise. Misunderstandings Both English and French lend themselves to misunderstandings. One of the classics is to be found in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Avonlea, where Davy is sure that God makes jam, because in the catechism one is told: "He makes preserves, and redeems us". Similarly, there is the little girl who calls her defectively-sighted teddy bear Gladly. When asked by the vicar why she has given it that name, she replies that it is because of the line in the hymn which says "Gladly, my cross-eyed bear". Two examples from French. The Canadian national anthem, which appears to say "Et ta valeur, deux fois trompée". And, again with foi, the expression crise de foi. England had the Tudors, notably Henry VIII, Edward and Mary, to clear up matters of doctrinal doubt. Spain had the Inquisition. But France, apart from the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre? It was only after a while that I understood that French people had a tendency to call a bad bout of indigestion une crise de foie (literally "a liver attack"). Mistaken identity A happy family picture (see left) was taken in the back garden of Joy and Eric's flat in Southampton. Several years later my head was extracted by clever editing and put on the envelopes used in the annual campaign to collect money for the National Children's Homes. It should be explained that the NCH are the Methodist version of the better-known Dr Barnardo's Homes. In other words, I, a happy boy with two healthy parents, was being passed off as an orphan! What were my parents thinking?! Studying and learning At school I studied a number of subjects, including mathematics, art, science and languages. My calculation abilities have been put into practice throughout my life. I have always found it easier and quicker to do multiplication and division in my head than with the help of a calculator. My drawing abilities have not improved, but I have done quite a lot of artistic photography, not a subject on the school curriculum. My interest in science has grown continuously, and I have learned a lot from reading; I would therefore say that I know a lot more now than I did at school. At school I studied French, Latin and (classical) Greek. I remember the Greek alphabet, and the fact that the structure of Greek includes such exotica as the aorist tense, the optative mood and the dual number. Since my move to the town where I live now, I have become acquainted with a native Greek speaker and her Greek-speaking daughter born in Canada. The alphabet remains the same, but rough breathings have disappeared (I was able to explain to them the origin of the puzzling word Hellas). I needed Latin for my doctoral studies, as Latin was an important language in the sixteenth century, and many theses published in France at the end of the nineteenth century were in Latin. However, when I am asked where I learned French, I reply that I studied it at school, and learned it in France (see "Vive..."). The difference between, on the one hand, Latin and Ancient Greek, and, on the other, French, is, of course, that the former are dead and the latter living. It is interesting to note that whereas in Britain French is classified as a "foreign" language, in Canada it is termed a "second" language. In Canada, all languages, except a speaker's first language, are second languages. Thus "ESL", "English as a second language". Every speaker has at least one first language (sometimes two if each parent speaks and uses a different language from his or her spouse). In English Canada, the dominant language is English, regardless of the language spoken in the home. Specialisation and generalisation When I started my university teaching career, education was regarded as a panacea for all of society's ills. That vision soon changed, and the money thrown at universities started to dry up. At the time, a "proper" undergraduate education still ended with the earning of an Honours degree. The end of the 1960s saw a switch to a quantitative system: the old Honours/General distinction was replaced by one based on the number of credits accumulated. At the same time, specialisation started losing ground to generalisation, uni-disciplinary studies began having to compete with multi-disciplinarity. At the time I started my career, ten or so medievalists (i.e. specialists in Old French language and literature) were taken on in the French Department(s) alone (at the time, French was a "college" subject, so there were four departments in the various colleges making up the University of Toronto). Practically none of the ten taught Old French during their careers. In the 1960s students of French had to take a course in Old French, as well as fulfilling the Latin and Religious Studies requirements. In the present day, Old French, Latin and Religious Studies are scarcely populated areas of study. The same can be said for Classics and German. Amongst my colleagues were specialists in Middle French literature, Provençal poetry, eighteenth-century theatre, and so on... I had the good luck not to have a first-class undergraduate degree and to teach in a country in which the two official languages are English and French, my own two languages. My grammar school wanted me to do Classics in the sixth form, but I insisted on keeping French; I had a good French teacher ("Oink" Griffin) and wanted to go to France (see "Vive..."). If I had got a first-class BA Honours degree, I would probably have received a British university appointment, and subsequently have lived a "church mouse" existence. This impression was reinforced when my wife and I had dinner in Tony's dirty, draughty Didsbury house. Tony had been our contemporary in our undergraduate days at Manchester University. He was known to us hitherto by the back of his head (all students striving to earn first-class degrees sat in the front row). He had married a French girl, obtained a teaching appointment in the department where he had studied... and lived in quasi-poverty. When I started my career, the best students of French were specialising in the subject. When I finished, the best students of French were specialising in other subjects. They were taking French because it pays in Canada to be fluent in its two official languages. In the last year of my advanced French-English translation course, the best two students were specialising, one in mathematics, the other in psychology. Towards the end of my career, I was depressed in the oral exam given to intending specialists to be told by three different students that their ambition was to use their French by working at Toronto airport. Independence In the novel Nobody's Fool, Sully goes his own way, regardless of what his boss, Carl, wants or thinks, finds a kindred spirit in his landlady, Miss Beryl, and despises her son, spineless Clive. I have known a number of groupies, from the fellow student who lapped up the colourful abuse she received from Dave since she had managed to catch the attention of a male, to the colleague who put herself up for promotion but had not produced a single piece of original research; her claim to fame was managing to become accepted as one of the toadies who sucked up to a successful male colleague. At the reception held in honour of retirees (I was one of the last to be retired, instead of choosing to retire, as afterwards became the norm), my chair - one's chair always digs up nice things to say about retiring colleagues - used, in talking about me, one particular epithet which I have treasured ever since: she said I was independent. Inflation and home buying Reading Margaret Drabble's novel The Ice Age, about the havoc caused by inflation in 1970s' Britain, I was reminded of Brian and Pauline, who bought a new, heavily-mortgaged bouse on the Hythe estate, and subsequently moved to a caravan, where they were living the last time I saw them, a number of years later. The first house Kay and I bought, in Toronto in 1969, cost us $35,000. There were six offers at the asking price, but, despite the financial precarity of our situation, ours was accepted, as one of the co-owners, Alice Parsons, took a shine to us. We took out a private first mortgage with an interest rate of 9½% (far less than was the norm in the 1970s in Britain), and a second mortgage guaranteed by the University. The minimum acceptable down payment was $1,000, all we had. We lived on tenterhooks for the first few years, but sold it, eight years later, for $123,000. When we bought it, it was advertised as an urban cottage, and so it proved. Originally the lot had been bought by a gardening enthusiast, who had a house built in the corner, and planted the rest with flowering shrubs and trees, such as a nicotiana, a japonica (flowering quince) and an apple tree (which attracted over thirty different species of migrating warblers, according to one spring count). It had been part of an orchard (it was at the bottom of a cul-de-sac), was surrounded by other gardens, and attracted a lot of wildlife, including a pheasant, a rabbit, a Baltimore oriole, and a number of ruby-throated hummingbirds. A family of skunks lived under the shed. It was an idyllic environment for our three small children to grow up in. Tourist attractions The attractions I wish to describe are monumental in size, man-made, artistic in intention or reception, and typical of the time of their construction. This would exclude monuments (commemorative in intention and reception), such attractions as Disneyland (artistic neither in intention nor in reception) and natural attractions like the Giant's Causeway in County Antrim. On the other hand, they include objects sacred in intention but artistic in reception. According to these criteria, I have visited and been impressed by the following. Ecclesiastical. In Britain: Winchester Cathedral (grammar school Founder's Day celebrated there), Salisbury Cathedral, York Minster, Canterbury Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral, Norwich Cathedral, Exeter Cathedral, Ely Cathedral, King's College Chapel, the ruins of Roche Abbey (Yorkshire), Tintern Abbey (Monmouthshire), the abbey of Strata Florida (Ceredigion) and Glastonbury Abbey (Somerset). In Ireland: Tintern Abbey (Co. Wexford), Jerpoint Abbey (Co. Kilkenny), the Rock of Cashel (Co. Tipperary). In France: Chartres Cathedral, l'Abbaye du Mont-St-Michel, Notre-Dame-de-Paris, St-Eustache (Paris), Reims Catheral, St-Guilhem-le-Désert (Hérault), le Monastère royal de Brou (Bresse), la Basilique Sainte-Thérèse (Lisieux), Notre-Dame-la-Grande (Poitiers), Bourges Cathedral with its wonderful thirteeth-century stained glass, several enclos paroissiaux in Brittany. In Spain: the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia (Barcelona), Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella. In Italy: the Basilica San Marco (Venice), St Peter's (Rome), the Battistero Neoniano and Basilica of San Vitale (Ravenna), the cathedral and adjacent tower in Pisa (see left), The Duomo, Baptistry and Campanile in Florence, the cathedral of Monreale in Sicily. In Germany: Aachen Cathedral. In Mexico: thr churches of Santa Maria Tonantzintla and San Francisco Acatepec. Non-ecclesiastical: Stonehenge (Wiltshire, in the days when one could touch the stones - see left), the standing stone circles in Avebury (Wiltshire), Hadrian's Wall (Cumbria), the Eiffel Tower (Paris, including two ascents to the top), the Pont du Gard (Gard), the Roman theatre in Orange, several châteaux de la Loire. In Italy: the Colosseum in Rome, the Greek temples in Paestum, Segesta and Agrigento. In Tunisia: Carthage and the Zaghouan aqueduct. In North America, I have been to the top of the Empire State Building in New York (once) and the CN Tower in Toronto (several times). In Mexico, the ancient cities of Teotihuacán and El Tajén. The ecclesiastical monuments, mostly glories of the Middle Ages, and focus of artistic expression of the time, will likely not be around in a thousand years time, whereas the prehistoric stone circle of Stonehenge could well last another few thousand years. The opposition "ecclesiastical/non-ecclesiastical" is very limiting (limited to the Christian church and the secular aspects of Western society). The opposition sacred/profane is also reductive, supposing a separation between what in ancient times were simply two (inseparable) aspects of human existence. All ancient cultures have creation stories and gods (and goddesses). Enigmatic Stonehenge is both sacred and profane. The life of the inhabitants of Teotihuacán and El Tajén was determined both by their society and their gods. Monumental proportions Two old buildings on the St George campus of the University of Toronto give two quite different imressions. To me, University College (see left) feels comfortable, its proportions friendly to human beings; like Azay-le-Rideau and Chenonceaux, it was built for Renaissance man. On the other hand, neo-Gothic Victoria College strikes me as being too big for people, draughty, inimicable. I had the same feeling when visiting the Basilique de Sainte Thérèse in Lisieux and the Oratoire St-Joseph in Montreal: these buildings seem intended to make human beings feel small and insignificant. Gastronomic add-ons My stomach was formed in England (my mother was a good cook and baker), my palate in France, so there were few "add-ons", the climate of both countries being more of less mild. A dining table in England has a cruet containing just salt and pepper; in France, a third item is also present: a pot containing Dijon mustard (moutarde de Dijon). Surprisingly, English mustard (Colman's or Keen's) is quite strong, as also is horseradish sauce. This is perhaps due to the days when meat was more or less the preserve of the rich - the poor had to make do, if they were lucky, with a rabbit in the pot -, who didn't consume game (deer, grouse, partridge, pheasant) until it had hung for several days, and needed disguising. Bright yellow North American mustard is sweet, but a surprisingly good accompaniment to a hot-dog. Canadian gherkins are sweet, whereas French gherkins are savoury. The strong spices to be found in hot climates were thus not part of my upbringing. In North America, typical British meals such as roast beef, roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, shepherd's pie, fish and chips, or bangers and mash are called, somewhat disparagingly, "comfort food". Other types of cooking are called French cuisine, Italian cuisine, Chinese cuisine, Indian cuisine, Thai cuisine, and so on. I tend to avoid strong spices. I have never had chicken vindaloo, but have watched a table companion sweat his way through this dish, once in Notting Hill (London) and another time in Montreal. I was once almost killed by a very strong white pepper contained in a sandwich given me by a Hungarian colleague (one of my favourite dishes is Hungarian goulash). Hanging on Three heart-stopping incidents spring to mind. In 1974, my parents and I took off in our rented car for the Rockies from Edmonton where we had left my wife and two small children with Kay's sister and family. My map showed a road leading from Red Deer to the Columbia Icefields Parkway, coming out midway between Banff and Jasper. The "road" became a track as we reached the Rockies, and we hung on, particularly when the track turned into two planks bridging a stream. Eventually the road ended when we reached a high bank of gravel (see left), which, we were to learn, had been laid in preparation of a new road replacing the old. We managed to climb the bank, and immediately got stuck. Fortunately, a Good Samaritan in a 4WD truck pulled us out. When we eventually reached a motel, the three of us, adrenaline pumping through our bodies, laughed like idiots as we hosed off the car. In about 1980 we went, for the first and last time, to an amusement park, predecessor to Disneyland Paris. There were Kay, the three children and I. Unwittingly, I took our five-year-old daughter on one of the gravity-defying roundabouts. I hung on for dear life - mine and especially hers - holding my daughter as tightly as I could, as we were whirled around practically horizontally. We didn't get thrown out, but we all left as soon as we could to breathe back life into ourselves in some tranquil spot away from the noise and insanity of the "amusement" park. In 1984, we were on holiday, with Kay's sister and family, at Sandy Bay near Exeter. I found myself in charge of either the youngest daughter or her son, the child being on a cheap-and-nasty "English-seaside-bucket-and-spade-shop" flimsy plastic blow-up dinghy in the sea. The tide was going out and it took all my strength to hang on to the inflatable to prevent it and child being pulled out to sea. Needless to say, as soon as we managed to struggle to shore, I destroyed the ridiculous, dangerous inflatable. Then and now At grammar school, one of the perks of being in a school cricket team was, at home games, eating Mrs Renton's Rice Krispie and Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup cakes during the tea interval. Mrs Renton was the wife of "Randy" Renton, boarding-school housemaster and art master. In my retirement, I have tried to replicate those cakes, but they don't taste the same! Nothing nice from the past is ever the same as one remembers it. My flat-mate at university, Barrie, and I ate our way through several dozen packets of Special K in order to send six cereal-box tops and a postal order to Kellogg's, in exchange for which I received a set of stainless-steel cutlery comprising a dinner knife and fork, a dessert knife and fork, a dessert spoon, a soup spoon and a teaspoon. At the end of our cereal marathon, I had six sets of cutlery for my approaching marriage to Kay and our setting up house together. Although the marriage ended in 1988, I still have 5 large and 6 small of the knives, 5 large and 5 small forks, 6 dessert and 6 soup spoons, but only one of the teaspoons. The last named have obviously been used, and lost, the most. When I was growing up, a typical English house did not have central heating, the rooms downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs all having a coal-burning fireplace, and all the windows were single glazed. Double-glazing salesmen, like encyclopedia salesmen and mothers-in-law, were fodder for stand-up comedians. It was only when I came to Canada that I saw how sensible the norms of central heating and double-glazing were. In fact, the term "double glazing" is more British (with pejorative connotation) than North-American, the thing referred to being taken for granted in the "New World". The first car my father bought, in 1959, was a pre-war Wolseley Hornet 6 (see left). It had leather upholstery, two indicators which came out of the exterior pillar between the front and back doors on either side to indicate that the car was going to turn left or right, and a choke. It also had a starting handle as well as an interior button. The transmission was, of course, manual, necessitating double-declutching. I learned to drive at the disused Stoney Cross aerodrome in the New Forest. I took the driving test twice in the Wolseley, failing each time because one was supposed to turn corners in second gear, whereas the lowest gear one could turn in the Wolseley without stalling was third. The Highway code part of the test was, of course, administered orally by the examiner (as it was when I took my driving test in France). I passed, finally, in a modern driving school car. My mother passed third time in the Wolseley, then my younger brother put us both to shame by passing first time in the ancient Wolseley. When I took my driving test in Ontario, I found that the rules of the road were tested by a multiple-choice questionnaire, seemingly devised for idiots, since two of the four possible answers for each question were patently absurd. Thus, with a tiny bit of intelligence and no knowledge of the province's roads and driving regulations, one was guaranteed to get at least 50% on the test. I now have a chokeless, leatherless, automatic-transmission car with lights front and back to indicate turns, a far cry from my father's first car. Navigational hazards I remember, as a boy, travelling overnight with my father and his brother, Uncle Cale, in a little Austin 7 from Southampton to Maltby, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where their parents, Grandma and Granddad, lived. In those days, long before the appearance of motorways, driving was still an adventure, the North of England having, for a Southerner, a similar reputation to that of the North of France for Philippe in the film Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis. At the time, my father had a reputation for finding himself unwittingly in railway station forecourts, when attempting to get through a town. These days, one is either a map-reader (usually those over a certain age) or a devotee of automated GPS systems (or satnavs, as they are called in Britain). Both invite disasters. The two map-reading adventures I remember, were one in East Anglia and one in the foothills of the Rockies. In the former, my reading of an Ordnance Survey map led me, and the car I was driving, unexpectedly into a field. The second incident is related in the story "Hanging on". You're a kipper I learned the expression "seeing a man about a dog" from a friend of my teen years, Michael Simmons. It was when Michael and I went for a walk to smoke Turf cigarettes (the cheap cigarettes I smoked at university were Woodbines, made famous by the World War I chaplain and poet Woodbine Willie) and swim in the river (probably the Itchen). He told me his father had "gone to see a man about a dog", meaning he had gone to the pub. This was significant in that the Simmons family were members of Hedge End Methodist Church, so that going to the pub for a Methodist was similar to a Catholic eating meat on a Friday. Sub-story/joke. Priest visits the Bloggs, sniffs, goes into the kitchen in time to hear Mr Bloggs say, while scooping over fat with fish slice, "You're not a steak, you're a kipper. You're not a steak, you're a kipper. You're not a steak, you're a kipper." Cf. parody in traffic accident scene in Jacques Tati's film Trafic (on Youtube). Misreadings, mistranslations and mispronunciations When I was young and living in England, I would see notices in shop windows saying "Shopfitters required", and inevitably read "Shoplifters required". This puzzled me no end. I had a colleague at Glendon College, who gave a prize each year to the student who found the most hilarious mistranslation (commercial products in Canada are required by law to give descriptions in both official languages). The prize one year was for the French for "soft cycle" in the user's manual for a washing machine made in the Far East: "douce bicyclette". Rather poetic... Then there are names, place names and surnames (toponyms and anthroponyms). For a Brit, Gloucester and Worcester pose no problem of pronunciation. For others, there is always the nursery rhyme "Doctor Foster went to Gloucester..." and P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster to help. The local pronunciation of Cirencester, identical to that of sister, has, alas, more or less died out. The greater the influence of incomers, the more likely the disappearance of local pronunciations. Thus, Romsey (Hampshire) has its name pronounced more and more "Rom-", replacing "Rum-". The "l" of Wilmslow (Cheshire) is now pronounced more and more by its inhabitants. The names of the Yorkshire town of Scarborough and the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, though spelled the same have different pronunciations (last syllable). The name of the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, like the names of the American city of Tucson and state of Arkansas, will often be mispronounced by Brits. In the New Forest, the villages of Beaulieu and Dibden Purlieu have kept the French spelling of their names, which, however, have anglicised pronunciations, the first being pronounced as "Bewley", the second as "Dibden Perloo". In Toronto there are two adjacent streets named after Oxford colleges, Merton and Balliol. The first presents no problems, but the majority of Torontonians mispronounce the name of the second. The surname Singeon exists, but is far less common than St John. On the other hand, Sinclair is far commoner that St Clair. The aristocratic names Cholomondley and Featherstonehaugh are each pronounced in two syllables (one also encounters Chumley and Fanshawe). Meals When I was a boy, my mother, a very good cook, prepared the meals. There were three meals in the day: breakfast, dinner (around 1 p.m.) and tea (5 p.m.). At grammar school, I suffered through school dinners (see "School dinners"). For Saturday tea, we had the special treat of dripping on toast. It was my job to make the toast, toasting slices of bread on a toasting fork over the coal fire. The dripping came from the roast beef we ate, fresh and hot on Sunday, cold and sliced during the week. Sunday dinner, then, saw roast beef, roast potatoes, a vegetable (usually Brussels sprouts) and Yorkshire pudding. That was the first course. The dessert - or pudding, as it was called - usually consisted of a plum pie (the plums grew on two trees in the garden) and custard. I always asked for, and was often given, the skin off the custard. Tea was bread and butter, jam, cakes and tea. It was my job to lay the table for tea, and help with the washing-up afterwards. At university, meals were inevitably a lot less organised. I remember going, a number of times, to an Indian restaurant to eat chicken curry. In my last year in Manchester, Barrie and I had a room at Mrs Pierce's; she invited us to share Sunday dinner (roast beef, etc., of course) with the family. The best roast beef I have had was: 1) that cooked by my mother, 2) that cooked by Mrs Pierce, and 3) that presented at Ed's Warehouse in Toronto. In France, things were a bit different. In my first year in Besançon, I lodged with the Scherlers. M. Scherler was a retired cheesemaker, so every morning I had a piece of Comté cheese to go with my baguette and café au lait. As a result, my very favourite cheese ever since has been Comté. In French, the three meals of the day are called le petit déjeuner, le déjeuner and le dîner. The latter two meals, I, and after I got married, Kay and I ate at the restaurant universitaire, or restau-U, as it is called by students. At the restau-U, it was customary to shout "Chapeau!" and throw pieces of bread at anyone daring to enter wearing a hat. In Alençon, I had eaten all my meals in the Lycée refectory, learning such slang words as bidoche (meat), fayots (beans) or patates (spuds). English customs and pursuits were all the rage in France in the nineteenth century, so one encounters words such as redingote (riding-coat) or lad (stable lad). I was amused, in the Jura, by the sign announcing "le five-o'clock à toute heure" (a bit like the pub "happy hour" lasting a lot longer than sixty minutes). In Canada, I got used to calling the second meal "lunch" and the third "supper", unless eaten in a restaurant, where it is called "dinner". It must be said that in Britain now the middle-of-the-day meal is now also called lunch, and the evening meal dinner. I now live on my own, and have learned to cook and bake. So, all my meals, except for the occasional outing to a restaurant, are prepared at home. I have yet to dare cooking a beef roast! Power cuts My mother grew up in a cottage with oil lamps for light, wood fires for heat and cooking, and a well for water. There was no such thing as a power cut. When she was 21, she married and moved to a new house which had artificial light at the flip of a switch, an electric cooker for cooking and an electric boiler for washing clothes. The water was heated by two electric geysers, one in the kitchen, the other in the bathroom. Heat was still provided by fires; there were two fireplaces downstairs, one in the dining-room and one in the front room, and two more upstairs in two of the bedrooms. Food was still kept more or less cool in the larder, and the washing was still hung out to dry. However, for the first time in her life, there was the possibility of a power cut. Her dependency on electricity increased when she moved and had a refrigerator in place of a larder, and a television set added to the radio, or wireless as it was called. I myself now live in a condominium and am entirely dependent on electricity: for heat, air-conditioning, light, cooking, hot water, clothes washing and drying, and refrigeration and freezing of food. Colour blindness I found out I was (partially) colour-blind at about the age of 10. I was given a test in which coloured spots formed (for non colour-blind viewers) numbers. To me they were just arbitrary, though pretty, patterns. The type of colour blindness from which I "suffer" is, I believe, in the red-green spectrum. I say this because I am unable to see holly berries at a distance, can not see fuschia flowers at a distance in natural light (in the light of the headlamps I could see quite vividly the fuschia growing in the hedges of my Irish honeymoon), and the meeting of red and green in the carpets of the Robarts Library pained my eyes. I once read a computer review in which the properties of A and B were marked either by a red or a green square. I came to the initial conclusion that A and B were identical, since the intensity of each colour was the same! I would have been able to discern a distinction between light red and dark green (or dark red and light green). The London Underground map, based on colour differentiation, is completely useless to me, whereas I can decipher quite happily that of the Paris Métro, based on numbered lines. I have heard that colour-blind people, initially excluded from military service in World War II, were later found extrememly useful, as they could see through camouflage. (Whether this is true or apocryphal, I don't know.) I have learned to live quite happily with this "handicap". It means that I am not bothered by what others call "colour coordination". My favourite colour is blue, for the simple reason that I was put in St Andrew's house at primary school (Andrew was blue, George red, David yellow, Patrick green). So my shirts are either blue, black or in between, such as charcoal. It means that colour is not one of my sign systems. If I am looking for a house and am told it is the one with a green roof, I ask my helper to tell me if it is the fifth or sixth one, etc. A magical moment After I had officially retired, I was asked to teach a third-fourth year undergraduate course on the comparison of the French and English languages. I had thirty-odd students including several who were very interesting, gifted individuals. It was the first time for many to hear an account of the history of English, which is a mixture of germanic (Anglo-Saxon) and romance (French) languages (e.g. the beef, mutton and pork consumed by the masters from the cows, sheep and swine raised by the serfs). The class was held in the late afternoon. One day, in March or April, we were studying a passage from Michel Tournier's novel Les Météores, in which the protagonist is travelling east in a train leaving from Vancouver. Our classroom was in Carr Hall, on the St Michael's campus of the University of Toronto. It was near the end of class, and no-one had switched on the light. The setting sun was streaming through the windows. We had just read "une vitre transparente qui laisse entrer la sapinière drue, dense et noire à travers laquelle fusent parfois mystérieusement les rayons du couchant" ("a transparent window which admits the crowding, dense forest of dark firs through which at times the setting sun mysteriously shoots forth its rays"). There was a hush and it seemed we were all travelling through this occasionally sunlit forest. I don't know if anyone else shared my sense of wonder, but the magical stillness continued as I became slowly aware of the setting sun's rays piercing the classroom windows. La vie en rose This is not about the song of Édith Piaf, but Paris in July 1981, when France had its first socialist president and government of the Fifth Republic. My wife and I went to Paris with our eldest daughter, our son and niece. For the last-named, it was her first visit to France. We were at a café. Niece needed to go to the toilet. Daughter, an habituée of French culture, went with her. Niece screamed when she found herself in the dark, so daughter told her to switch on the light. Niece screamed again when she saw that the "toilet" was, in fact, no more than a hole in the ground (toilet holes have since become rare, at least in the city). Jacques Chirac, an opponent of François Mitterrand, was at the time mayor of Paris, so the 14 July firework display was particularly magnificent. It was held on the forecourt of the Palais Chaillot, and we found a good spot underneath the Eiffel Tower. Afterwards, we went to the Place de la République, where we were rather put off by the explosion of bangers which revellers threw amongst the crowds. The same thing occurred in the Métro as we made our way back to our hotel. After a week in Paris, we were glad of the calm of Chantilly, where we spent a week in the apartment of friends. Sacred music and pleas to the Maker Every culture has a creation story. The idea of a being superior to one's species has always appealed to the spiritual side of man. For many cultures, the Sun is in that category. The winter solstice is still today seen as a celebration of the rebirth of our planetary system's star, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, and the painter J.M.W. Turner is reputed to have said "The Sun is God" on his deathbed. In the Christian religion in which I was brought up, it is, or was, customary to say grace before meals and to pray on one's knees on going to bed. In my family, the spoken grace was a staid "For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful", whereas at "The Birches" one gave a lusty sung rendering of "For health and strength and daily food we praise thy name, o Lord, amen". The prayer I learned as a little boy was: "Jesus tender shepherd hear me / Bless thy little lamb tonight / Through the darkness be thou near me / Keep me safe till morning light. / God bless Mummy...". I am not surprised that Christopher Robin Milne changed his name when he grew up. In the Western Middle Ages and Renaissance, the church was the focus of artistic expression. In music, the greats included Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria and Byrd. They were joined later on by such composers as Purcell and Mozart. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hymns became important components of a church celebration. Peerless in this domain are the hymns of Charles Wesley (admirably recorded by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band). When my children were little, I used to sing to them "All in the April evening", not for the words, but for the lovely melody. A moving version of this beautiful song can be heard in Terence Davies' film Sunset Song; Davies also includes the haunting Harold Darke version of "In the Bleak Midwinter" in his film Distant Voices, Still Lives. Closed minds I was brought up by Methodist parents who, thankfully, were not proselytizers. I had an uncle who built a church next to his house in Lordswood and called it the "Church of Christ". He was shocked when he learned that I was going to marry a Catholic. I enjoyed Kay's retelling of an incident in which, in the cold depths of winter, her flatmate Ron stayed inside in the warmth and kept two freezing Jehovah's witnesses in conversation on the doorstep until they could stand it no more. When, attracted by Renaissance polyphony, I sang in the St Michael's Cathedral choir, I went to men's practice on Wednesday evenings. Supper was offered beforehand at the Choir School, and I often took advantage of this kind service. Priests were often my table companions. I was shocked one evening when one of them referred to "the one true religion". At the University of Toronto, I had colleagues who felt offended if asked to teach a language course, who taught modern literature according to the flavour of the month - Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, Cixous - and attracted graduate groupies. Generative grammarians could be just as bad. The colleagues were, of course, male, and the groupies female. For one of these colleagues, Friday evening was sacred, as it was reserved for the tasting of vintage Bordeaux wines (he had a summer apartment in Bordeaux) and the eating of a gourmet meal, prepared by his long-suffering wife slaving away in the kitchen. As his retirement loomed, he even repeated the famous words ascribed to Louis XIV, the Sun King: "après moi le déluge". In the town where I live now, I had the misfortune one day to mention my love of French cooking to an opiniated acquaintance, who has never been to Europe, let alone France. He, of course, pooh-poohed the notion (it wasn't Canadian!). Similarly, when Kay taught at the Université canadienne en France in Villefranche, she liked to take her students to Cap 3000, a hypermarché to the west of Nice, to see the magnificent display of French cheeses and other dairy products. One of her students said it wasn't "real cheese", i.e. it wasn't the processed cheese he was used to back home in Canada. A nice cuppa I was struck by a reference to the Lyons Corner Houses in Gilbert Adair's A Mysterious Affair of Style. It brought memories of the one in Above Bar near the Bargate in Southampton. I have many memories of the enamel teapots which served tea at church functions or at scout camp; of dainty bone china cups and saucers, as well as of enamel mugs; of tea cosies, tea caddies and tea strainers, before the days of tea bags. In the South of England tea is brewed; in the North, it is mashed. In Canada, it is steeped. English tea is traditionally that grown in India, and is always drunk with the addition of milk. Green (Chinese) tea, drunk without the addition of milk, was an innovation of the tea houses that appeared in the 1960s. Tea is not often drunk in France; its weakness and lack of milk is off-putting for many British visitors. The corner caff was known for its lipstick-stained cups and mugs; known for its strong, spoon-standing tea, as well as for its horrible excuse for coffee. The word itself (caff) comes from the French for a liquid concoction and for the place where it is served, but there the comparison ends. Most English caffs serve instant coffee (it used to be Camp, a mix of coffee and chicory), whereas the express and café crème (or simply crème) of French cafés are made from real coffee beans. (Café au lait is only served, in bowls, for breakfast.) An Italian will say that the only real coffee is that served in Italy, and that proper coffee can only be made with the type of coffee machine made in Italy and to be found now in most coffee shops, whether in Europe or North America. Caffè latte is called latte in Canada (I always imagine a glass of frothy milk); many coffee houses which attempt to give it its proper name end up with a mixture of French and Italian: "café latte" (sic). In France, un café means un café express. If one wants what in Canada is called an americano, one asks for un café allongé. If a milky coffee is required, one asks for un (café) crème. A French custom, which I picked up, is the canard: one puts a sugar cube in a spoon, dips it into one's coffee, and then eats the coffee-soaked sugar. Peculiarities of French, or at least Parisian, waiters. Whereas in Canada, the waiter will wish you "Bon appétit" or, more likely, "Enjoy!", when bringing your dish, the French waiter will say nothing, but will ask you "Ça a été?", meaning "C'était bon?", when taking away the empty plate. At the end of a meal, the waiter will ask you "Un petit café?"; if you reply "Oui, un café", the waiter will shout to the colleague behind the counter "Un express". Strasbourg is now in France, but it, like Alsace in general, remains Germanic in many ways. My search for a café where I could have a quick express standing at the counter proved fruitless. All I could find were salons de thé. I might just as well have been in Bern or Düsseldorf. House, and car, buying This story is about buying new and buying second-hand. My parents had a new house built for them, i.e. to their specifications, in 1936. Maybush Road was a cul-de-sac on the edge of town and the beginning of the countryside. All the houses were therefore new, and the road was even outside the boundaries of the town, so that it was not on the main sewer system. Toilet waste ran into a cesspit, which was emptied periodically by "Lavender Jim", a lorry with a big tank that sucked out the contents of cesspits by means of motorised flexible pipes, a smelly operation. The car I have at present was bought new from a dealer, after much research using such tools as the World Wide Web and the sought advice of many friends and acquaintances. Most homes are purchased second-hand. The normal procedure is to use the services of an estate agent (or realtor), whose job it is to show a variety of potential homes to the prospective buyer. Looking over possible homes is, for the buyer, a learning process. The buyer, or buyers - man, woman, sometimes plus offspring - normally look at a number of possibilities, before the Eureka moment of knowing that X is what they are looking for. That is Kay's and my experience of buying our first and second homes (in Elvina Gardens and Keewatin Avenue). It is my experience in buying a house on Davisville Avenue and a condominium on High Park Avenue. It was the experience of many of my colleagues, when they bought houses in the 1960s and 1970s. The same goes for second-hand cars, except that one does not use the services of a realtor. The prospective buyer usually looks at, and tries out, several cars. I shall mention one case in point, that of my younger daughter and her husband. (I shall add, in parentheses, some detail of the house on Keewatin Avenue. Mrs Morris, who lived with her five sons in Lawrence Park, showed us a number of houses, mostly in what was then North Toronto. We finally found one that gave us the space we were looking for (we had by then three children). It was listed at the then high (to us) price of $167,000. It was owned by three single men, two brothers and a friend, definitely not a single unit with one mind, and needed a lot of work done to it. We made, in May 1977, an offer of $123,000, and promptly left to spend the summer in England (including a month in a rented house in Broadstairs). When we got back, at the end of August, Mrs Morris informed us that the three co-owners had brought the asking price way down to $127,000, which is what we paid for it.) There are no guarantees against buying a lemon. As the saying goes: caveat emptor. Parties Birthday parties and Christmas parties. The former for children, the latter for the whole family. Party hats were worn at both. When I was a little boy, birthday parties included a tea and games. At the tea, there was much consumption of jelly, blancmange and lenonade. The games included Oranges and lemons, Musical chairs, Pass the parcel, In and out the windows, and the daring Postman's knock. Several families got together to hold parties at Christmas time. Uncles, aunts and cousins would get together round the dining table on chairs and improvised seats to consume jelly, sandwiches, mince pies, Christmas cake and drink lemonade and tea. Dad would do magic tricks for the children, Uncle Cale would do his frustrating version of the imitation game (known, in a different form, as the scissors game) for children and adults, and Auntie Jessie would organise everyone for English charades (involving creating a script, dressing up and, in my opinion, a lot more inventive than Canadian charades). From England to Canada, and from one generation to the next, a number of changes occurred. Birthday parties involved similar hatted teas, with jello replacing jelly, but no blancmange. The games of my childhood were replaced by the screening of Laurel and Hardy films, very well received by the children. I would set up the 16 mm. projector in the basement, the children would troop down and settle themselves on the various daybeds and cushions, and Kay would prepare the popcorn. One of the most notable parties, held to celebrate the birthday of our younger daughter, involved each girl bringing with her a cabbage-patch kid, or several (see photograph 1). Christmas parties still involved the consumption of mince pies and Christmas cake, as well as wine and pop. Besides Canadian charades, the most popular game was the noisy Pit, which excited Wooldridges, Clandfields and Gersons (see photo 2). At one point Kay taught in the Continuing Studies programme at the University of Toronto. One of her students invited us to a theme party at her house. My party piece was a rendition of the Master Singers' 'Church of England' version of "The Shipping Forecast", which I sang in a sort of falsetto counter-tenor voice. Demonyms A demonym is a word applied to a resident of a place. The word demonym is extremely technical, far less used and known than its French equivalent gentilé, mainly because the thing it refers to is much more common in the French-speaking world than in what my thesis director called le monde anglo-saxophone. In fact, every community (city, town, village, hamlet) in France has a demonym: an inhabitant of Besançon is called un(e) Bisontin(e); someone who lives in Lisieux is un(e) Lexovien(ne); an inhabitant of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert is, apparently, according to Wikipédia, un(e) Sauta Ròcs; an inhabitant of Le Havre is un(e) Havrais(e); of Angers or l'Anjou is un(e) Angevin(e); a person living in Reims is un(e) Rémois(e). Things typical of places are bisontin, lexovien, havrais, angevin, etc. English makes do with a scatter-gun approach. Rome had its Roman Empire, and Audrey Hepburn went on a Roman holiday. The standard language spoken in France is what North-Americans call Parisian French. Paris also has its Parisian chic. An inhabitant of Southampton is a Sotonian, of Manchester is a Mancunian, of Liverpool a Liverpudlian or Scouse or Scouser, of Yorkshire a Tyke, of Hampshire a Hog, of London a Londoner. But do towns and villages like Worcester, Bath or Nether Wallop have demonyms applied to their inhabitants and characteristics? Learning in class and online The internet was born out of research undertaken mainly in the USA, starting in the 1950s. This virtual network linking computers was put to use by Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working in Switzerland, who, at the beginning of the 1990s, created the World Wide Web (WWW), thus giving the internet content and creating the global village that Marshall McLuhan had imagined in the early 1960s. Starting at the end of the 1990s, I created web sites for each of the courses I taught at the University of Toronto, particularly those concerned with translation and learning/teaching French with new technology (essentially the WWW). The course sites included a transcript of lecture notes from preceding classes, a breakdown of the components of the course with their value, dates of assignments and tests, guidelines for these, practical information on the use of electronic mail, on sending a document to the teacher, on the inclusion of diacritics in HTML documents, an interactive page on online resources, and an "entertainment" page - "pour vous distraire" - containing links to French-language songs and poems, a French radio station, photographs taken in the various French-speaking parts of the world I had visited, scans of old (French) postcards; the "entertainments" page was protected, of course, by a password. Translation course sites also included texts to be translated, plus model translations, incorporating approved student input, of already translated texts. The combination of social and distance learning worked well. All students came to class if they could, but, when they or someone in the family was sick or the weather was bad, they could work online. Although they didn't have my telephone number, they could contact me at any time through electronic mail. One particular advantage of "new technology" was that students no longer had to make the trek to the campus to hand in an assignment (term or course project) - they could send it to me by electronic mail up until midnight on the designated date (or before); my comments and mark were transmitted in the same way, if they hadn't already got back the marked piece of work in class. The coffeehouse I discovered the coffeehouse in France. Not the English caff, with its thick, chipped, unwashed cups and saucers, its strong tea, its beans-on-toast, its excuse for coffee. In France, the café is a civilised place where one can take one's time drinking an express or a café crème or a verre de rouge, reading that day's Le Monde or a Fred Vargas mystery novel or an anthropological discourse by Claude Lévi-Strauss, or chatting to a friend, or doing the crossword, or watching the world go by, or simply thinking. The same atmosphere is to be found in Venice, Rome or Florence; in Geneva, Basel or Bern; in Wolfenbüttel, Heidelberg or Erlangen; in Amsterdam or The Hague; in Brussels or Antwerp; in Madrid, Barcelona or Santiago de Compostella. The name for this type of establishment in Canada is no longer the café, but the coffee house, as it used to be in England. Feast days In England feast days were and, for those that remain, are ordained either by local custom or by the Christian church. Oliver Goldsmith mentions some of these in chapter 4 of his 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield: "They kept up the Christmas carol, sent true love-knots on Valentine morning, ate pancakes on Shrove-tide, shewed their wit on the first of April, and religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas eve." Carol singers, also featured in Wind in the Willows, were a feature of my childhood. Groups of singers would go from house to house, singing a selection of carols, before, in good cases, being invited inside to be warmed by a hot drink, traditionally wassail. I remember, at the age of eight, hearing Peter Frost's pure treble voice singing carols in house porches in Maybush Road. Wassail became replaced by money, the singing deteriorated, and now can only be appreciated in churches or on recordings. A mangled version can be heard in recordings played in shops or over urban street loudspeakers, with the implicit message to "Buy, buy, buy". Twelfth night was celebrated in an idiosyncratic way by William Shakespeare and in my boyhood in England was the time when Christmas decorations were taken down. In the Western Christian church it is celebrated under the name of Epiphany. As a popular festival, however, it is celebrated in continental Europe as the Feast of the Three Kings, the three Wise Men who followed the star and arrived at the Bethlehem stable, supposedly twelve days after the birth of Christ. In France, it is called La Fête des Rois, and is celebrated with the consumption of a galette des Rois, the lucky person being the one to find the fève (bean, nowadays plastic) in his or her slice, and thus wear the (paper) crown. I have memories of celebrating Twelfth Night with a galette at the Durets in St Cyr, in the Jura. When I was young, love-knots had disappeared, but Valentine cards were a serious business (see "The Valentine card"), not like today when Valentine cards are given indiscriminately to friends and class-mates. In my youth, pancake Tuesday was looked forward to by one and all, whether one observed Lent or not - the expressions "Shrove Tuesday" and "Ash Wednesday" were meaningless (I only learned the significance of the latter after I had married a Catholic). On April Fool's Day one could play tricks on someone else until midday, after which time any tricks played were turned back on the perpetrator. Michaelmas Day (29 September), like the academic Michaelmas Term, have mostly lost their general significance. Nuts are only cracked at Christmas, and, in my experience, less now than in my childhood. Amongst the festivals not mentioned by Goldsmith, Easter is still celebrated as the most important time of the year in Christian churches. Elsewhere, traditional Easter egg hunts still take place in back gardens, but Easter eggs in general and Easter bunnies have, like Christmas carols, been commercialised and have lost any meaning except that of being made of edible chocolate. Similarly, the Eve of All Hallows has been reduced, in the self-indulgent West, to the heavily commercialised festival of Hallow'een. One must go to countries like Mexico, to experience the true feeling of El Día de los Muertos and La Noche de los Muertos. I was fortunate to go, a few years ago, with my younger daughter, to a house and two cemeteries on the occasion of the Noche de los Muertos. The hotel where we were staying in Morelia was used as the changing room for the girls and women taking part in the nearby cathedral square parade of the catrinas, females with their faces painted like skulls and dressed in gorgeous dresses, to represent the coexistence of life and death, a recurring theme of El Día and La Noche de los Muertos (see left). The boy stood in the dining-room At university, Kay knew a student called Bob Gregory, whose party piece was a parody which went something like this:     The boy stood in the dining-room,       Whence all but he had fled.     It was his hundredth cup of tea,       Five hundredth slice of bread.     "Just one more crust, before I bust,"       He cried in accents wild.     "Just one more cup, before I bust,"       He was a greedy child.     There came a flash, a sudden roar,       The boy, oh where was he?     Ask of the maid who mopped him up       Amidst the bread and tea. The "butterfly" concerto In 1972 I taught a University of Toronto course in the summer programme held at the Faculté des lettres in Nice. We - my wife Kay, our two small children and I - lived, for the six weeks of the course, in a chalet we rented from an English couple who taught at the Faculté. The chalet was situated in the charming village of Colomars, up in the hills above Nice. We could look down at the Var valley, and were surrounded by vineyards. The garden was full of butterflies, lizards and the occasional scorpion. The Millers had left us their record player and collection of LPs. Amongst these was one which became a favourite: a recording of Vivaldi's Concerto per flautino, RV 443, which we thought of as the "butterfly" concerto - it expressed so well our beautiful surroundings. Many years later, I am still enchanted by this piece of music, particularly as it is played by the Dutch phenomenon Lucie Horsch, accompanied by the Amsterdam Vivaldi Players. Summer teaching I taught several summer courses besides the one in 1972 (see above). In 1964, I taught a class of students in the Besançon intensive English programme. At the time, I was engaged to Kay and one of my students, Alain Cholet, was the brother of one of Kay's friends, Marie-Christine Duret. Another of my summer students lived in the Vosges town of Baccarat, so the inevitable end-of-course class present was a set of 12 crystal tumblers, plus carafe and ice-bowl. My elder daughter has the nine surviving tumblers and carafe. After our marriage, during the following summer I taught a class of French teenagers sent by their parents to brush up their English before going back to school. I still have the San-Antonio novel they gave me, Le Standinge selon Bérurier, inscribed "À notre vénéré maître T.R. Wooldridge un souvenir amical d'une classe qui manquait de standinge" and signed by them. In Canada, I taught a first-year six-week language course in 1970. The course had two sections, the other being taught by my good friend David Clandfield. We designed the course together. One of the texts was a Tintin album, Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, featuring the French (or, rather, Belgian) version of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Dupont and Dupondt. The classes were held in the morning, five days a week, so the results were similarly impressive, if somewhat less spectacular, to those obtained in Besançon. After class, David and I played tennis at the Graduate Union. In 1978, Kay taught in the Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon summer programme created by a colleague in the U. of Toronto French Department who was a native of Saint-Pierre. I had a neighbourhood girl come in to look after the three young children while I taught a third-year language course on the UoT campus. After the course was over I took the three children to St-Pierre, by way of Sidney, where we spent a night at a hotel and the next morning in the hotel outdoor swimming pool, before catching the propellor plane (what the French call "un coucou") to St-Pierre. We all slept in the basement of the house where Kay lodged, and ate breakfast and the evening meal there. St-Pierre had four summer populations: the local Saint-Pierrais, the French civil servants (les fonctionnaires), the trawler men (of all nations, particularly Russian) and the summer students from all over Canada. The official currency was the French franc, but unofficially there were two currencies, the French franc and the Canadian dollar (four francs to the dollar). The streets were unsigned, the houses unnumbered. At noon the fish factory sounded its siren, and all the St Pierre dogs howled. Fresh fruit and vegetables existed perhaps elsewhere, and the main entertainment was provided by nightclubs of which there were many. The vegetation was stunted, the tallest trees no higher than a normal adult (see photo). St-Pierre-et-Miquelon comprises three islands: St-Pierre, Miquelon et L'Île aux Chiens. The mayor, who had received le Général de Gaulle, before the latter made his infamous speech on the balcony of l'Hôtel de ville in Montreal, took us one day to visit the recently abandoned school and houses of the last-named. A UoT colleague, who was teaching in the summer programme, organised an excursion to Langlade, in the southern part of the isle of Miquelon. Langlade occupies a narrow strip of land, sandy and calm on the East side, ideal for swimming and the finding of sand dollars, pebbly and rough on the West side, a graveyard of shipwrecks and beached whales. My two eldest children walked through a whale skeleton. In the summer of 1988, Kay taught a course in St-Georges, in Quebec. We were splitting up, so not only was I looking after the three children, but I also had to organise two moves: one of Kay's stuff to her new house, the other of my stuff to my new house. It was July, and Toronto, with its continental climate, was hot and stuffy. The move completed and Kay back in Toronto, I flew to England and its ocean climate. When the plane landed, it was raining and I could breathe again. Weeds and pests Dandelions (French dent-de-lion "lion's tooth") are often called weeds, whereas pansies (French pensée "thought") are called flowers; in fact, both are flowers. The term weed is a human invention, and dandelions are thought of as weeds in an anthropocentric world. Dandelions are considered weeds as they often grow amongst grass. Cultivated grass is what many human dwellings are surrounded by and is called lawns. To the human eye, dandelions are often considered detrimental to the greenness of the lawn. In places like England, Vancouver and Victoria, with their temperate ocean climate and copious rainfall, green lawns thrive; dandelions are not a major menace. Unfortunately, many Anglo-Saxons moved to various parts of the world and wanted to recreate, in their new environment, some of what they had left behind, regardless of suitability. The cult of the lawn in North America is one result of this. Hence, dandelions thrive, while the grass wilts, in a hot or continental climate. Hence, grass-cutting is expensive and time-consuming; artificial watering, with sprinklers, is expensive and often banned because of the subsequent depletion of the water table. To the amusement of some observers, many householders wage a losing battle in attempting to rid their lawns of pretty dandelions. Another flower that has weed in its name is the milkweed. It is often thought of as a weed because it can, like the dandelion, be "invasive". Other languages don't have the idea of "weed" in its name. In French, for example, it is called asclépiade or laiteron, where there is no built-in idea of a mauvaise herbe (weed). An anthropocentric view or the world has also resulted in the use of the word pest, sometimes used as a synonym of weed, but more often applied to animal beings such as birds or mammals judged harmful to such human activities as agriculture, unique to the human world and replacing the natural survival activity, common to all living beings, of hunting and gathering. One example: beavers. Beavers, almost hunted to extinction in North America and all the way to extinction in Great Britain before being reintroduced, can damage crops and gardens, often causing flooding harmful to human settlement. An anthropocentric view of the natural world is one of the themes dealt with in the nature-oriented BBC series "Springwatch" and "Autumnwatch", in which there is condemnatory mention of the naughty "C-word" (cute). Reading The word reading is a homograph. I have changed trains often in Reading, and once spent two nights in a Reading hotel. This story, however, is about the activity of reading (different pronunciation). When I was little, one of the first books I read was an adventure of Just William. The boys next door gave me The Friendly House - I still have it. In Class 7 at primary school the teacher, Miss King, read us a chapter of an Enid Blyton book every Friday afternoon; a Famous Five story would thus last all term. I write elsewhere about comics (see "Comics"). I also remember reading as a young boy adventures of Biggles and Gimlet, as well as classics like Treasure Island and Kidnapped. Then is was The White House Boys and Quo Vadis. By then I was in my teens. I improved my French with Balzac, Duhamel, Stendhal, Flaubert and company; my colloquial French with Astérix and San-Antonio; my current French with Le Monde and Libération. My Spanish and Italian weren't good enough for me to be able to read them with pleasure, so I read Perez-Reverte and Eco in translation, either English or French. Nowadays, my favourite reading matter includes authors like Tremain, Mantel and Unwin. I find that I am allergic to the Americanisation of British writers. This happens when a British author is published in North America; a North-American publisher will change the spelling, and even the meaning, to suit a North-American reader, whereas a British publisher will generally respect the spelling of a North-American writer. The worst example I have encountered of the North-Americanisation of a British book is the North-American edition of Bill Bryson's At Home. I read "they (bats) were laying low" and "X immigrated to North America", where I was expecting "they were lying low" and "X emigrated to North America". I consulted my daughter's copy (the original, British edition, procured in England), and, sure enough, read "lying" and "emigrated"; the former ("laying low") is bad English, the latter ("immigrated") changes the meaning entirely. Gone are purchases at Indigo-Chapters, replaced by orders from Abebooks. Reading and singing to my children At bedtime, I read to my children the Carroll, Grahame and Milne books I had read as a child. I would make up voices for the White Rabbit, the Red Queen, Ratty, Mole, Eeyore, Piglet and company. I don't remember being read to myself as a child. I gave up reading out loud, when half-way through David Copperfield, as I realised my 11-year-old youngest could probably read it faster than I, so we never got to "Donkeys, Janet". Among the bedtime songs I sang to them was "All in the April evening". In our early days in Canada, our cleaning lady, called Verona, I think, gave us a high chair which served all three of the children. One of the favourite eating songs was "Last train to San Fernando". A trick which amused both the youngest and me was to pretend that the contents of a spoonful of food were a crate of eggs going down to the basement in an elevator. The eggs inevitably smashed, so another crate was needed... I still have the sterling-silver pusher of the spoon-and-pusher set I had as a child. Clothes In the generation before me, it was usual for boys to wear dresses for several years after birth, even after they had been "potty trained". My Uncle Charlie still wore a dress at the age of five (see left). I myself wore a dress at the age of eighteen months. In those days, there was no such thing as a onesie, and pink and blue had no importance. (In fact, at one time in the past, pink was a "boy's colour", blue was for girls.) When I was a boy, one went to the tailor to have a suit made. The classic French English-teaching method says "My tailor is rich". That is no longer the case, as off-the-peg clothes (what the French, and Robert Altman, call prêt-à-porter), introduced in department stores after World War II, gradually took over from tailor-made. That didn't stop me from being embarrassed when my mother took me to Winter and Worth to be measured for a "knicker suit". After all, knickers were for girls. In the trade, the term knickers was used for short trousers (cf. knickerbockers), then the norm for young boys. Boys exchanged their short trousers for long ones when they started shooting up in their early teens. Being colour-blind (see "Colour blindness"), I had to depend on my mother and, later, daughters for the purchase of shirts and ties. Things have changed a lot since the 1940s. Tailors still exist, but are for the rich. Everyone else needs to know their chest, waist and inside-leg measurements when buying shirts, trousers or suits. Boys now wear long trousers as soon as they are out of nappies (pants and diapers in North America). My clothes when I was a boy consisted of vest (undervest), pants (underpants), shirt, long-sleeved or short-sleeved pullover in winter, blazer or jacket, short or long trousers, socks and shoes. When I was eighteen, I dressed as a teddy boy for a Wimpson Methodist Youth Club float with the theme "Rock through the ages" taking part in a youth parade through the centre of Southampton. I didn't have any teddy boy clothes so had to borrow from Ron next door. I decked myself in shocking pink shirt, string tie, padded jacket, drainpipe trousers, pink socks and either winkle pickers (pointed toes) or brothel creepers (thick crepe soles) - I don't remember which. The hairstyle was a problem as my hairline was starting to recede, but I was more or less able to reproduce a quiff at the front and a duck's ass at the back. During the swinging sixties, I bought a mustard-coloured jacket in Carnaby Street. This all changed when I went to university. The student "uniform" comprised duffle coat, university scarf, bulky sweater, drainpipe jeans and moccasins, besides shirt, vest, pants and socks. During my year in Alençon, I wore a tie and a beige cavalry twill suit. I also wore tie and suit when I was teaching in Besançon. For the first few years of my teaching in Toronto, I wore a suit and tie. I also addressed my students as "Monsieur", "Madame" or "Mademoiselle" plus their surname. By the end I was wearing shirt with the top button undone and a sweater in winter. I was also calling my students by their first name, while maintaining the formal "vous". Ties were for special occasions. Vestimentary terminology, like many others (e.g. Anne was a boy's or man's name in the Middle Ages), is subject to temporal and spatial variation. For example, a frock is thought of as an article of female clothing (dress is now the more common term), whereas in the past frock and frock coat were articles of male clothing. Vest and pants are under-garments in Britain, over-garments in North America. Department stores The advent of department stores in the nineteenth century is famously depicted in Zola's Au bonheur des dames. Parisian department stores I have frequented include La Samaritaine ("on trouve tout à la Samaritaine"), currently closed, les Nouvelles Galeries, Printemps, le Bon Marché, and the much-lamented Marks & Spencer (its gourmet food, much appreciated by the French, has made a comeback on the Boul' Mich). In London, the best-known department stores would be Selfridge's (Oxford Street) and Marks & Spencer (Marble Arch). In Manchester, I frequented John Lewis. The first department stores I went into were Mayes (Below Bar, Southampton) and Edwin Jones (East Street, Southampton). I worked for three years in the January sales at Edwin Jones, twice in the children's clothes department. The first time, when I was 16, I worked in the outdoors rubbish disposal department. One day, I fell in sodden ash, and cut my hand. I was given an anti-tetanus shot, and discovered I was allergic to penicillin: almost straightaway my face swelled up so that I couldn't see, and a week after the shot my back was covered in painful hives. When I came to Toronto in the 1960s, the big department stores were Timothy Eaton's at College and at Queen, and Simpson's on Queen, all long since gone, to be replaced by the Bay at Bloor-Yonge and in the old Simpson's on Queen. Come and gone was Marks & Spencer, now only to be found in Britain. Moving home During the year I spent in Alençon, 1960-1, I went with Janine to visit a couple she knew who had just moved into an apartment in Sablé. One of the things I remember, because I thought it outrageous, is that the previous occupants had taken with them the ceiling lights along with the flex, cutting the latter flush with the ceiling. My eldest daughter, who spent a year in London in the 1990s, said it was the norm in England to let flats fully furnished and to forbid tenants putting anything on the walls (walls are dealt with separately in the following story). I discovered the unfurnished apartment when I came to Canada. I also came upon the highly sensible norm of leaving, in a purchased home, all appliances, such as refrigerator, dish-washer, stove, washer and dryer. In Europe, it is the norm to take one's appliances with one to their new home. I remember the days of the "right-handed fridge". Since the great majority of human beings are right-handed, so was the ordinary refrigerator, regardless of where it was placed in the kitchen. "Left-handed fridges" cost extra. Fortunately common sense has since prevailed. Walls My youngest daughter and family, wishing to move out of the city to live in the country, were interested in renting a house in the Georgian Bay region, until they found out that occupants were forbidden to put up anything on the walls. In other words, they were not to live normal lives. Any person, and particularly a family in which there are young children, needs walls to show body and spirit. Growing children's heights are marked on walls or doorways; one's art, that of family members, or of others needs walls for it to be seen. It is no accident that Lucy Worsley entitled her history of the home If Walls Could Talk. In Terence Davies' film The Long Day Closes, there is a scene where the protagonist, Bud, is in bed looking at the wallpaper in his bedroom. It is a summer evening, when young children were sent to bed and gazed at the wallpaper or curtains until the daylight faded. I also, like Bud, was born before the Second World War, and spent many summer evenings gazing at the curtains and wallpaper in my bedroom, imagining animals or fantastic beings. (See also below the story "Walls (2)".) Caravan In 1951, I went to London with my mother and cousin Jennifer to the Festival of Britain, with its Pleasure Gardens in Battersea. Then, in 1958, I went, with school friend John Prior, to Expo 1958 in Brussels (see left). I came to Canada in time to go with Kay and my parents to Expo 67 in Montreal. We enjoyed the food in the Cuban pavilion, the glass and films in the Czech pavilion, the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the British pavilion. Until it came to a sad end, Toronto's Caravan was a continuation of these international exhibitions. One could sample the cuisine of each country and region, purchase its products, enjoy its music and dancing. I well remember my 3-year-old daughter dancing on the table while singing "Ah! Si mon moine voulait danser" in the Quebec pavilion, and watching flamenco dancing at the Spanish pavilion in the Don Quijote Restaurant on College Street. Snows of yesteryear François Villon asked six centuries ago "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?". The question, "where did the past go?", is timeless. The fields, streams and woods of one's childhood have, in many cases, all disappeared, just like last winter's snow. A timeless bar sign which I particularly like promises "Free beer tomorrow". To the hopeful "Tomorrow is another day", Macbeth replies pessimistically "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow": life will bring the same drudgery. So, is change internal or external? Can one's present surroundings can be as stimulating as those of the past? Are perspective and point of view absolute or relative? If one finds such questions interesting, does this mean that there is hope yet? Are all circles vicious? The perfect round can mean both "perfection" and "zero". Library Tour de France The Tour de France is the most famous cycling race of all, taking its participants, and - via television - millions of viewers, around the cobbles, plains, valleys, hills and mountains of France, a spectacular tour. The journey undertaken by Astérix and Obélix in their Tour de Gaule is, on the other hand, a gastronomic tour of regional specialities. During the summers of 1972 and 1973, we undertook by car two journeys around France. The purpose, as far as I was concerned, was to check first-hand what various libraries said they held, or what different authorities said that libraries held, in the domain of early dictionaries. While Kay took our two small children to play on the beach or in the park, I pored over dusty catalogue cards or sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tomes. In this way, we visited, among others, Abbeville, Amiens, Angers, Auxerre, Avignon, Beaune, Belfort, Besançon, Bordeaux, Bourg-en-Bresse, Chalon-sur Saône, Chantilly, Châteauroux, Chaumont, Coutances, Dole, Grenoble, Laon, Le Mans, Lille, Limoges, Lyon, Marseille, Montbéliard, Nancy, Nantes, Nîmes, Perpignan, Quimper, Rennes, Rouen, Soissons, Soleure, Toulouse (see left), Tours, Troyes, Vendôme, Verdun, Vesoul. We did not, however, neglect the realm of gastronomy. I remember particularly a soupe de poissons in Toulouse, a plâteau de fruits de mer on the Atlantic coast, a crêpe in Quimper. One in four This story is mainly about extremes and mad youth. "One in four" refers to road gradients; in modern terms, "one in four" (a vertical difference of one unit for every four horizontal ones) would be expressed as "25%". These steep gradients are to be found typically in Devon and the Alps. Thus we walked up a one-in-four gradient from Lynmouth to Lynton on our bicycle tour of Devon and Cornwall in 1956. Thus we just managed to get over the Alps in first gear from Austria and into Yugoslavia in our 1937 Morris 10 in 1959 (see left). On our walk up the hill in Devon, the four of us (Gus, Rog, Johnny and I) were struck by the sign which said "Beware of cars going backwards" - for many cars of the time, the only way to get up was in the lowest gear, reverse. Our prewar car had many adventures. On the Belgian coast, we (Ray, Jan, Eddie and I) got stuck in the dunes, and had to be towed out. The exhaust pipe gave up the ghost in Germany; we bought the mechanic who mended it a crate of beer. On the Italian Riviera, we sheered off the half-shaft of one of the back driving wheels when first gear was engaged on a steep climb while the car was starting to go backwards. Consequently, we spent two nights in our sleeping bags on the nearby pebbly beach, while a mechanic welded the half-shaft (over six weeks spent in continental Europe, we only spent two nights under cover, either canvas or in a hostel). By the time we got back to England, to put on the driving lights we had to insert two wires directly into the battery. When we left England, the four car doors had to be kept closed with pieces of string; by the time we got back, the doors fitted perfectly. Modern cars don't have the problems of ones built several decades ago. Radiators no longer boil over; double-declutching is a thing of the past. On the other hand, only on the Tour de France (or the Vuelta or the Giro) or on wannabe rides do humans tackle 25% climbs on their bicycles. Distinctions In the England of the 1940s and 1950s, football (soccer) was termed a gentleman's sport played by hooligans, whereas rugby (rugby union) was considered to be a hooligan's sport played by gentlemen. Cricket team lists distinguished between amateurs (family names preceded by initials) and professionals (last names followed by initials). There was an annual cricket match between Gentlemen (amateurs) and Players (professionals). Only amateurs could compete in the Olympic Games and at Wimbledon. On the other hand, soccer players travelled by public transport, and professionals did not receive the astronomically high salaries of today. When I came to Toronto in 1966, Jews were not allowed to be members of the Granite Club, and taverns (there were no pubs) had two entrances: one for "Men only", the other for "Ladies and escorts". On both continents, some schools still have two entrances: one for "Girls", and one for "Boys". Single-sex schools are to be found on both, although secondary education in public (state) schools is now taught in mixed-sex comprehensive schools in Britain, replacing the old grammar schools (often single-sex) and secondary moderns of old. Single-sex private schools are to be found on both continents. In North America, mixed schools are often called co-educational, and for some unfathomable reason a "co-ed" is used to refer to a schoolgirl. Engaging and distancing media Marshall McLuhan wrote about hot and cool media, but in the terms of this short discussion the distinction is different. Perhaps the best medium for the creation of the imaginary world in a person's mind is the book; among the distancing media, I would place television. Radio comes between the two. Thus, in the novels of P.D. James, Commander Dalgliesh is imagined in the reader's mind as one person; the same goes for his assistant Detective Inspector Kate Miskin. Yet in the television adaptations the former is played by two actors, the latter by four. (One of the Dalgliesh actors, Martin Shaw, tells the story of a car ride taken with driver father and passenger grandfather when he was a boy: father "We have just passed the oldest pub in England."; grandfather "Why?") The long-running television soap Coronation Street avoids this trap by simply killing off a character when the actor playing the part becomes unavailable: Ena Sharples disappeared when Violet Carson could no longer play her; Ken Barlow, now a retired teacher, was a student when the programme began. Radio is better than television in engaging the listener. As Spike Milligan said in The Goon Show, "It's all in the mind." Radio plays have always been a favourite of mine. However, I remember as a boy being disillusioned when The Archers character Walter Gabriel switched voices upon being played by a new actor. My imaginary world was shattered. The medium had got in the way. On the other hand, when I came to Canada, I was immediately entranced by the many voices of Max Ferguson on CBC radio - the radio worked wonderfully well as a medium for the mental creation of characters. Love and friendship Many writers have commented on the differences between love and friendship. I shall mention two. The novelist Michel Tournier said "La grande différence entre l'amour et l'amitié, c'est qu'il ne peut y avoir d'amitié sans réciprocité." (in "Le Miroir des idées", Mercure de France, 1994, reed. 1996), which would translate as "The big difference between love and friendship is that there can be no friendship without reciprocity." In the sixteenth century, the essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote "Un bon mariage, s'il en est, refuse la compagnie et condition de l'amour. Il tâche à représenter celles de l'amitié.": "A good marriage, if there be such a thing, refuses the company and condition of love. It tries to represent those of friendship." At university, Kay and I were good friends. Then we made the mistake of marrying each other. All went well for a number of years, including the production of three wonderful children (which fully redeemed our conjunction). Then I had what is glibly known as "a mid-life crisis" (crise de la quarantaine in French), followed a few years later by Kay's. We divorced amicably, had affairs (see "Girlfriends"), then slowly discovered that we had lost what had been most precious in our relationship: our friendship. Fortunately, we found our way back, and, in the several years before Kay's death, enjoyed each other's company once again. Signs This is a facile category. Many are the social media pages that quote "amusing" signs, often with photographic support. Hereunder my own contribution. Seen in Bradford-on-Avon: a directional sign "To the church" (see left), originally, no doubt, horizontal, seen after it had loosened to point up to the sky, to become a sort of "Pie in the sky". Sign photographed during a visit to Longleat (see right), categorising toilets among the attractions not to be missed. Sign outside a church in the town where I now reside: "Give up intolerance for Lent", the implcation being that one can in good conscience resume it afterwards. Cultural differences There are obviously many, too many to comment on here. I shall restrict myself to the following observations. Discussion over coffee of maternity leave, including national differences. For example, Canada guarantees paid maternity/parental leave for 35 weeks; the United Kingdom, paid maternity leave for 39 weeks, but paternity leave for only 2 weeks; France, paid maternity leave (congé de maternité) for 16 weeks for the first child (34 for twins), 16 for the second, 26 for the third (cf. the French concept of la famille nombreuse born after the depopulation caused by the two world wars). (Cf. BBC study of parental leave by country (published online).) A heterosexual Canadian woman will talk about her "girlfriend", whereas a man talking about his "boyfriend" would be categorised as homosexual. A Canadian father will address his child as "buddy". His drinking friends are his "buddies", the equivalent of the British "mates" (French "copains"). A young single male is, as has been the case for centuries, a "bachelor". A single woman used to be referred to as a "spinster"; now, a "spinster" is the same as a "maiden aunt"; a young single woman is sometimes cringe-worthily referred to as a "bachelorette". A one-room apartment is still called a bachelor apartment, regardless of the sex of the occupant. Regardless of sex, university undergraduates work towards a bachelor's degree; they may go on to take a master's degree. In the English-speaking world, a female instrumentalist or vocalist may recieve the plaudit "bravo" at the end of a very good performance. In Italy, she would hear "brava" or "bravissima", "bravo" being reserved for males. The same language-world reserves divinity (diva) for outstanding female opera singers, the Paverottis and Bocellis of this world merely being supreme tenors, their divinity (divo) restricted to Italy. In the same way, Italian uses both maestra and maestro for an outstanding performer, but English has only borrowed the masculine form. In French, maître is the correct way to address a lawyer. The 1966 adaptation of Jean de La Fontaine's fable Le Corbeau et le renard, about flattery - the crow, Maître Corbeau, has in his beak a piece of cheese coveted by the fox, Maître Renard, who tells the crow he has a beautiful singing voice - stars a barrister, M. Corbeau, his beautiful, and carefully guarded, wife (the cheese) and a local garage owner, M. Renard, who catches a glimpse of Mme Corbeau and wants to get to know her better. M. Renard develops, by various devious ways, a relationship with M. Corbeau. A crucial moment occurs when M. Renard is addressed by M. Corbeau as tu, in place of vous, a passing from the formal to the informal. This important psychological moment is entirely lost in modern English which, alone of the major Western European languages, has no way of distinguishing between a formal and an informal second person (thou and derivatives only used now in parts of the North of England). During a sabbatical leave spent in the South of France, my son had occasion to speak to his friend's mother on the phone. After the conversation, I told him that it was incorrect to address her as "tu". When my immersion-French Canadian students asked me when he would be able to pass from vous to tu, they were aghast when I told them it would never happen. As a teacher who had lived for several years in France, I found myself in the absurd position of addressing my Canadian students singly as vous, while they addressed me as tu, the only second-person pronoun they had learned. Cinematic experiences When I was a little boy, I went, with cousins Pauline and Jennifer, to the Saturday morning threepenny dreadfuls in Maltby. I thought Hopalong Cassiday was tall and thin, as we sat near the front on the side. I also remember going, when I was about 12, with Mr Barker to see The Cruel Sea, the first of many World War II films I saw. At grammar school, I often went to the Gaumont on our free Wednesday afternoons (there was school on Saturday morning) with Terry Conroy, who had two free passes from his father, who worked at the nearby Polygon Hotel where many of the stars of screen and stage stayed. We sat in the front row of the gallery, smoking illicit cigarettes supplied, at a price, by Terry. Terry and I both had blond hair and sat next to each other in most classes. The chemistry-with-physics master, St. John, called us "Peak and Freen", or "Tate and Lyle", or "Huntley and Palmer", or other commercial pairings. At university, a crowd of us had the habit of sitting in the front row. One of the films we saw was Lawrence of Arabia. For days afterwards we greeted one another with cries of "Hut! hut! hut!", as we urged on our imaginary camels. As a member of Film Soc, I saw such classics as Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal (I later saw the parody De Düva), Juan Buñuel's Viridiana, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Federico Fellini's La Strada. During my year in Alençon (see "Vive..."), I went to the cinema every week, often several times a week. I saw, among many other films, La Vérité. I had already seen Brigitte Bardot's first film, Et Dieu créa la femme, which Tony and I went to see in Paris. BB jokes: 1) On learning that an anti-seal-hunt group had already left, BB exclaimed "Phoque!"; 2) American reporter asking how the honeymoon with Sacha Distel has gone, BB replies, with stress on the second syllable instead of on the first (English tonic accents are unpredictable and aspiration poses difficulties), something which sounds like "What a penis!" (instead of "What happiness!"). Amongst my favourite French film actors and actresses: Yves Montand (Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), Jean de Florette); Jacques Tati (Les Vacances to Monsieur Hulot); Fernandel (Topaze, Don Camillo); Philippe Noiret (Cinema Paradiso); Jeanne Moreau (Jules et Jim); Isabelle Adjani (L'Histoire d'Adèle H.); Isabelle Huppert (La Dentellière); Juliette Binoche (Bleu). Experimental films. Popularisation of the matchstick game due to Alain Resnais' L'Année dernière à Marienbad. Went to sleep watching it. By the same director: Smoking (alternative film: No Smoking). Again, weird. Long films include Jacques Rivette's La Belle noiseuse, at four hours less than half as long as the original version of Abel Gance's Napoléon. Toronto Film Festival. I went with Fred to the cinema (no longer there) at Yonge and Belsize to see Kieslowski's trilogy Bleu, Blanc, Rouge (with Binoche, Delpy and Jacob). Luc Besson period: Le Grand bleu, Subway, La Femme Nikita, Léon. Preceded by Beineix's Diva, which I saw with Geneviève in Nancy. The two of us also saw Peter Sellers' last film, Being There, in London. Jean Reno (Le Grand Bleu, La Femme Nikita, Léon) is one of my favourite actors. During a sabbatical leave in Nice, we all went several times to the cinema on Place Garibaldi in the old town (le vieux Nice). Amongst the films we saw were Trois Hommes et un couffin (Three Men and a Cradle) and the two-part cinema adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's L'Eau des collines: Jean de Florette and Manon des sources. Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil were superb, Gérard Depardieu less so; in my opinion, Emmanuelle Béart can't act. Live, participatory, 3-dimensional cinema. My most extraorinary cinematographical experience happened when I went to a conference at Dalhousie University. Unlike a colleague who wanted to stay in at the hotel to revise his notes for his paper to be given the next day, I wanted to explore the night life of Halifax, particularly its lobster restaurants. After satisfying my stomach, I came across a queue of people waiting to enter a cinema to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I joined the end, and found myself the oldest member of the midnight audience. To my astonishment, at one point I realised that I was the only person seated; everyone else was down at the front. I watched in amazement as everyone else lit cigarette lighters, chanted lines in unison with one of the film's characters, danced, sang, and so on. I knew it was a cult film, but hadn't realised the extent to which it was also what used to be called a "happening". A 21-minute Nouvelle Vague film used in university French language classes and a favourite of the students: Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (by Jean-Luc Godard and Éric Rohmer, 1959). This was one of a series of short films that colleague David and I worked on in the days when money was plentiful. The department also had a French Week; at one of them, the invité d'honneur was the playwright and film director Claudio Arrabal, whose film J'irai comme un cheval fou we had projected in a cinema on College Street. In the 1960s and 1970s I had seen many Nouvelle Vague films, such as Truffaut's Les 400 Coups, Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless), Rohmer's Le Genou de Claire (Claire's Knee), Chabrol's Le Beau Serge. David and I also ran a free cinéclub on Friday evenings in a raked room with a projector booth in University College. The room was always packed to see two shorts and a feature film, all in French without subtitles (rented from the French embassy in Ottawa or from a company in Montreal). We called it Ciné Cent Quatre, or, when the room number was changed, Ciné Cent Six. Favourite films include John Huston's The Dead and Gabriel Axel's Babettes Gæstebud. On the subject of celebratory meals, a common theme of both, I was disgusted by the indulgences contained in the French film La Grande bouffe. On the other hand, I enjoyed thoroughly both Les Visiteurs (with Jean Reno and Christian Clavier) and Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Dany Boon and Kad Merad). Also the films of Jacques Tati. I should also mention the films of Laurel and Hardy, favourites both of mine and of my children (see "Parties"). Special singing on special occasions "Special" in the sense that the singing was marked by the special nature of the occasion and is part of what I remember. Perhaps my earliest memory was hearing the beautiful treble voice of Peter Frost singing carols door to door in Maybush Road when I was eight years old. I was much later entranced by the voices of a choir made up of alumni of St Michael's Choir School singing carols in Honest Ed's in Toronto. I was fortunate enough to be present when Charles Aznavour sang at an outdoor event in Alençon; to see and hear Georges Brassens sing in the municipal theatre in Besançon; to see and hear Donovan sing at the Glastonbury Festival; to attend a performance by Louis Armstrong (see "Satchmo"), and another by Ella Fitzgerald, both at Manchester's Free Trade Hall; to see and hear the young Gordon Lightfoot perform at Massey Hall; to attend two Steeleye Span concerts given at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall. I remember listening to Melanie singing "Look what they've done to my song, Ma" in a café in Washington; dancing with Kay to Edith Piaf singing "Milord" in a café in Carnon-Plage, and, later, in an Oldham café to Frank Ifield singing "I remember you"; singing, with the other players, Beatles' songs on the way to a basketball game when I was a student. Autres temps, autres mœurs ... as English says, borrowing from the French. It has been said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Eton is known, somewhat bizarrely, as a "public" school, being in fact what is called more properly in North America a private school. The term "public" dates from the time when the upper classes sent their sons to school rather than having them educated at home by a tutor. The term has weathered the change from private, fee-paying, education to the introduction, in the nineteenth century, of free, state organised, education for all, while private schools remained as an alternative. Thus the distinction "public school" vs. "state school". When I took, somewhat foolishly, the scholarship exam for admission to Cambridge University, grammar school pupils (free education) were still regarded - this was the 1950s - as an inferior species to public school pupils. At that time, many grammar schools aped public schools: my school still had Saturday morning lessons (Wednesday afternoon was for sports), the classes were called forms (including Remove), the teachers masters. It was a matter of pride to be listed in the Public Schools Yearbook, and for a grammar school headmaster to chair the annual Headmasters' Conference (mainly for public school headmasters). A good send-up of the latter is the film Clockwise, starring John Cleese as the headmaster of a comprehensive school. The character of the grammar school I attended is shown to some degree by the types of its clubs and sports. The school had a "Young Farmers' Society", a "Young Conservatives Society" (no Labour), a "Philatelic Society", a "Railway Society", as well as catering for chess, music, debating and drama. Sports included musketry and fives, besides football, cricket, swimming and athletics. Sailing I went sailing in a two-man sailing boat with Ned and his two children in the Solent, with Barrie on Tatton Mere and Coniston Water as part of our Outdoor Activities in our Graduate Certificate of Education year. Many decades later, the celebration of the life of Kay was held at the nearby yacht club, in a building overlooking Lake Ontario. I liked the setting, and was grateful to my two daughters for giving me, as a Christmas present, a year's membership to the yacht club. I thought I would enjoy sitting in the window of the yacht club, reading a book and gazing at the lake while sipping a cup of tea. I was quickly disillusioned when I found out the clubhouse was only open on Friday evenings, when one was supposed to dress up in some sort of appropriate costume to partake of Cajun or Scottish (or whatever) food and join in the "fun". No solitary reminiscing of one's sailing youth was allowed. Town and country When I was a young boy, the unpaved cul-de-sac I lived in was on the edge of town, having fields, a farm and a minnow stream starting at the bottom of it. When I was about 12, the road was paved and extended as part of the new council estate which replaced the fields of my childhood. In the summer term of my first year at Manchester University, Bill and I went for Saturday lunch at the Darrochs' café in Great Western Street, in Moss Side. To get there we went past Victorian terrace houses with doorsteps and doors proudly scrubbed and painted by their owners. In the 1960s, the councils of a number of English cities decided that Victorian terraces were eyesores; they were torn down, replaced by cheap flats (soon to become eyesores and the source of social problems) and their occupants shipped off to soulless housing estates, in the case of Manchester to Wythenshawe (where fields had been before). I visited Miss Edith and Shirley in their council houses in Wythenshawe; they had lost the sparkle they had had in Moss Side. When I came to Canada in 1966, Buttonville Airport was out in the country, as also were the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Milton, Black Creek Pioneer Village and the Terra Cotta Inn (see left). At Richmond Hill, the University of Toronto had an observatory (originally next to University College, now in the Andes); Fran's sister-in-law's father also had a farm there, now built over. Drinks I was brought up by Methodist, i.e. teetotal, parents. Up to the age of seventeen, my most daring drink was finishing up the Ribena, along with the bread cubes, after church communion. Then I discovered cider, drunk in the garden of a pub near the UnaStar laundry where I worked for the summer. During the subsequent youth-hostel bicycle tour of the West Country, we went one evening to a pub in Dorchester, where I drank a couple of pints of cider, after which I was emboldened enough to "treat" the other residents of the youth hostel to a few songs, accompanying myself on the piano. My other favourite teenage tipple was rum and blackcurrant. When I went to university, I ran riot. Beer in the men's bar of the students' union and on pub crawls in the shadier parts of Manchester. Pints only; of bitter, mild and bitter, black and tan (stout and bitter). Then wine (mainly rouge) in France. Other French drinks: grog (rum, hot water and lemon); un demi (half a pint of draught beer); une carafe de vin (rouge) to accompany restaurant meals; un kir (cassis and white Burgundy wine), named after le chanoine Kir of Dijon; various alcools blancs drunk mainly in Lorraine; Ricard pastis, enjoyed in various places, particularly in le Midi; muscadet-sur-lie white wine to accompany oysters in Brittany; calvados, drunk in Normandy (cf. le trou normand). I went for a conference to the cradle of the Castilian language (Spanish), San Millán de la Cogolla, in the heart of the Rioja region. We visited several rioja wineries, ending each visit with a glass of delicious rioja and a piece of chorizo. When Kay and I were teaching English at the Péchiney training centre in L'Argentière-la-Bessée, in the Hautes-Alpes, we were taken at the weekend by one of our students and his wife into Italy, where we bought a bottle of Lacryma Christi. My favourite drink in Canada and Mexico is the margarita (I had tequila smashes at the Glastonbury Festival in England). In my early days in Toronto, Kay and I were surprised to be served an old sandwich with our beer when we had only ordered the latter - it was a Sunday in old Ontario. Non-alcoholic favourites in Europe: my mother's tea in England; in France, express coffee at the end of a meal or at the counter on the way to a cinema, café crème on a café terrasse as I watch the world go by, café au lait with a hotel breakfast; in Italy, caffè latte or espresso coffee (much cheaper at the counter than served at a table); in France or Italy, citron pressé. The press When I was growing up, we had subscriptions to three newspapers - The News Chronicle, The Southern Daily Echo and The Methodist Recorder - and to The Radio Times. My mother received two magazines, Woman and Woman's Own. I got The Eagle and Lion comics. I also devoured all the newspapers and magazines, enjoying the adventures of Captain Pugwash in The Eagle and The Radio Times, those of Japhet and Happy in The News Chronicle and the stories contained in Woman and Woman's Own. Later on, I bought The Wizard, with its adventures of Limp Along Leslie and The Great Wilson, reading it surreptitiously in class at school. At university, a group of us gathered for coffee in the students' union and did The Manchester Guardian crossword. On Sundays, Kay and I compared notes by telephone on the crossword puzzles contained in The Sunday Times and The Observer. I managed to win one of the latter's, receiving a guinea postal order for my pains. In France, I read Le Monde and Libération for news and opinions on what was going on in the world, Ouest France, during my year in Alençon, for the crossword puzzle. For satire, I read Private Eye and Le Canard enchaîné. When I came to Canada, I was fascinated by the adventures of Pogo and the other denizens of the Okefenokee swamp; the comic strip was contained in either The Globe and Mail or The Toronto Star (I don't remember which). I particularly remember the Christmas take-off ("Nora's freezing on the trolley", adding to my repertoire of "While shepherds washed their socks by night" and "Gladly, my cross-eyed bear"). For a time, I read The Guardian Weekly, with its selections from Le Monde and The New York Times. I now have a subscription to The Globe and Mail, purely for its puzzles: sudoku, kenken and cryptic crossword. Moral care vs. medical care Gary found an 1880 issue of the London publication Public Opinion in his attic. It contains an article on a dispute at Guy's Hospital between the medical staff and the nurses, the former putting medical care first, the latter wanting to give first place to the spiritual welfare of the inmates. Spiritual matters had for centuries been the focus of hospitals, which were places for the accommodation of the sick or weary poor (the word hospital is etymologically related to hospice, hostel, hotel, hospitality, host). The poor were the recipients of charity (alms), the hospices being run initially by monks and nuns (cf. the French hôtel-Dieu = hôtel de Dieu). Andrew Taylor writes, in The Lover of the Grave (1997), set in postwar (WWII) Britain, about the opposition medical vs. moral in a conversation between a police inspector and a medical doctor, who has referred to an aging colleague with the words "Dr Wintle was born in the Victorian age and has remained there ever since." The inspector presents a hypothetical case: "Now, let's say one of his patients had a problem - a medical problem, and she didn't want to take it to this GP because he would treat it as a moral problem, not a medical one." The reforms instigated by Florence Nightingale endowed nurses with dignity and cleanliness (the concept of a sterile environment came much later). As John Wesley had said in the previous century, "cleanliness is next to godliness". Hospitals and workhouses were, however, still considered places for the indigent, and there were still Poor laws. An important component of hospital care was the moral well-being of the inmates. Nowadays, the moral imperative is no longer the concern of the hospital, which is solely devoted to the physical well-being of its patients, poor and rich. Nevertheless, the nursing profession remains the domain of women; according to figures published by statista.com, as of 9 August 2019 "Around 92 percent of nurses in Canada are female and only about 8 percent are male." On the other hand, according to the 2018 figures published by cma.ca, amongst physicians there is more of a balance between the sexes: of all physicians 42% are female, 58% are male. At the time of the Public Opinion article, all doctors were male, all nurses female. Language teaching My first experience of teaching language was at the Lycée Alain in Alençon, where I was employed as an assistant d'anglais after my second year at Manchester University. The headmaster (monsieur le proviseur) was not pleased with me, as I taught my students to play cards in English and learn the words of the Top of the Pops songs. He also brought me up in front of him in his office for "climbing the wall" (faire le mur) to get into the lycée where I was a boarder. The fact that after ten o'clock in the evening one had to ring the bell to get the night watchman (le veilleur de nuit) to open up, and that the latter was away drunkenly counting, and recounting, the beds (he was supposed to count the boarders, but that was too difficult) in the dormitories, was not taken into consideration. My next language-teaching experience took place during my post-graduate years, when I was student and teacher at the university of Besançon. The intensive spoken English courses I taught to adults were far more structured and serious than the sessions I had led in Normandy (see left). I was able nevertheless to interest my students, during the conversation sessions held in the last three weeks of the course, in some of the peculiarities of the cultural life of my native England. Then I was appointed to the University College Department of French at the University of Toronto. During the first few years of my time there, before the age of the generalisation of the computer, I used a number of literary texts, including Hergé's Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (see "Summer teaching"). The computer allowed me to keyboard Simenon's Le Chien jaune, which my first-year students read to improve their French. The red barn During my first sabbatical leave, spent in East Anglia, I went one day to the village of Polstead, in Suffolk, to see if the monumental brass in the church was worth making a rubbing of. I was struck by three things: the beauty of the village and its surroundings; the colourful costumes of the fox-hunters who had gathered for a meet; the local attention given to the melodramatic retelling of the nineteenth-century murder in the Red Barn. In the television series A Very British Murder, Lucy Worsley tells the story of the murder, in the Red Barn, of Maria Marten by her lover, William Corder. High jinks In the 1960s, Cathy's Newfoundland grandfather wrote a column under the name "Culleton" (an Irish family name) in The Newfoundlander newspaper, published in Toronto. In one column, subtitled "A Vignette of life at Salmonier", he writes about some of the stunts pulled in the logging camps: "On several occasions some of the woodsmen would find their long rubbers with molasses in them, this on a cold winters morning! But a little shrewd questioning and deduction usually found the culprit, who on retiring for the night would go crash on the floor as the legs of his bunk would be nearly sawn through. Other stunts were to loosen the covers on the pepper and salt shakers, and put hunks of wood in somebody's bunk all rigged out with the owner's clothes." On reading this, I was reminded of the high jinks carried out in the dormitory of the Collège Stanislas, where we stayed when we went to the Sixth Form Conference in Paris, in 1957. Our school had the largest contingent from any British school, and I remember the evening when we dismantled the beds of the boys from a rival school. As a punishment, we weren't allowed to take the planned bateau mouche cruise on the Seine. Moustaches When I was a boy, many men had moustaches (see "Trust and obey"). The English county in which I lived, Hampshire, seemed to be full of retired colonels, who, deprived of military action and their swagger sticks, gloried in their clipped speech and heavily-waxed moustaches. A dapper, and most assuredly non-military, bearer of an elegant, waxed moustache was my Uncle George. While Auntie Emmie was still alive, he lived in Sheffield. I remember trips to his allotment, where he would brew tea in his well-appointed shed. After her death, he came to live with us. He sometimes took me along with him to buy his daily buttonhole carnation or rose from a wholesale merchant in Southampton's High Street. Although moustaches have gone out of fashion, a wonderful moustache of the type described can now be seen in the Spanish television series Gran Hotel, a take-off of several British productions, including Downton Abbey and films featuring Agatha Christie's Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot (the character of Christie herself makes a cameo appearance). Detective Ayala is Poirot with humour. He has the latter's perceptiveness and moustache, but also has the ability to find himself, and appreciate them, in comical situations. Harvest beer and temperance One of the features of the nineteenth century was the temperance movement, led, amongst others, by the Methodist church. Britain had to some extent rid itself of this sense of a moral crusade when I emigrated to Canada, but I found Toronto still to be marked by it when I arrived in 1966. Parts of Ontario were still "dry", and in order to be served alcohol on a Sunday one had also to be served something to eat, usually an untouched, several-days/weeks-old sandwich. "Toronto the Good". In Ronald Blythe's book Akenfield (1969), about a rural community in still largely feudal Suffolk, the author quotes an agricultural worker who says, in reference to the harvest in the beginning decades of the twentieth century: "We were allowed seventeen pints of beer a day each". This contrasts with the tone contained in the letters printed in the Church of England Temperance Chronicle of 1882. I quote from the issue of 17 June: "When of old beer was given the quarrelling in the fields and out of the fields was beyond bearing; when money was substituted, this and other evils ceased." (One can but imagine the subsequent evening atmosphere in the local pubs.) The points of view are of course quite different. Flexible English One talks about British English, American English, Australian English, and so on. There is also, officially, something called Canadian English, although it is fast becoming the same as American English. For example, the spelling colour is officially considered correct in both British and Canadian English, but since most North-American books are published in America, Canadian children learn their colors. Strong verbs are subject to a great deal of flexibility. More and more, regardless of continent, the forms rung, stunk, sung, sunk are used as preterites rather than rang, stank, sang, sank, instead of being used only as past participles (e.g. Andrew Taylor, The Suffocating Night, 1998: "Phyllis sunk on her knees."). The strong preterite shone is now a rarity, replaced more and more by the weak shined; on the other hand, the weak fitted has become rare, giving way to the strong fit. This morning, while drinking my coffee at The Human Bean, my gaze was drawn to the back of a truck where there were two posts bearing signs which said "ALTERNATE ROUTE". On the back of a British lorry, they would probably have said "ALTERNATIVE ROUTE". Beaches The beaches of my childhood and youth: Eling Mill, Calshot, Lepe, Milford-on-Sea, Highcliffe (all Hampshire), Ryde, Sandown and Alum Bay (Isle of Wight), Bracklesham Bay (Sussex), Swanage, Weymouth, Chesil Beach and Lyme Regis (Dorset), Ballycastle (Co. Antrim). Sunday School outings to Sandbanks (formerly in Hampshire, now in Dorset). During and for a few years after the Second World War, the Channel beaches had steel-pole barriers in the water to impede military invasion. Bathing remained, however, possible. Later: West Bay (Dorset), Sandy Bay (Devon - see left), Mousehole (Cornwall), Woolacombe (Devon), Weston-super-Mare (Somerset), Cwmtydu (Ceredigion), Lytham St Annes (Lancashire), Cromer (Norfolk), disappearing Dunwich (Suffolk), desolate Aldeburgh (Suffolk), Clacton-on-Sea (Essex), Southend-on-Sea (Essex), Juan-les-Pins (Alpes-Maritimes), Carnon-Plage and Palavas-les-Flots (Hérault), Deauville (Calvados), Cabourg (Calvados), Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine), Mondello (Sicily), Bordighera (Liguria), Rijeka (then Yugoslavia, now Croatia), De Panne (Belgium), Gilleleje (Denmark), Atlantic City (New Jersey), Bar Harbor (Maine - see right), Langlade (St-Pierre-et-Miquelon), bathing at the yellow-sand beach of Mauna Kea, no bathing at Black Sand Beach and Green Sand Beach at the end of the Road to the Sea, snorkeling at Kahalu'u and Hilo (all on Big Island, Hawaii), Casitas (Costa Esmeralda, Mexico). Best swimming: Bude (Cornwall), Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (Bouches-du-Rhône), Casitas (Gulf of Mexico). In Britain, one "goes to the sea"; in North America "to the ocean"; in France "à la mer". Punters In this account, a punter is not someone who bets on the gee-gees (horses), but a person who propels a punt. Venice has its canal gondoliers, Oxford and Cambridge have their river punters. Gilbert and Sullivan only celebrated the former. At Oxford, one punts on the Cherwell; at Cambridge, on the Cam (see left). The British television film Lost in Austen, a (in my opinion) brilliant take-off of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, has twenty-first century Austen fan Amanda Price unexpectedly time-travelling to find herself a guest of the Bennet family. Upon becoming, despite her often thwarted efforts to keep events true to the original, the object of the attentions of Charles Bingley, who in the book is meant to marry Jane Bennet, she implies falsely that she is lesbian. Since, in Jane Austen's day, such a thing would only be expressed, if at all, by a circumlocution, particularly in "polite" society, Bingley (an Oxford man) replies gallantly "Oh, you mean you steer from the Cambridge end". Oxford don Charles Dodgson took Alice Liddell, daughter of his boss, Dean Henry Liddell (author, with Robert Scott, another Oxonian, of A Greek-English Lexicon, still in use today), and her friends punting on the Cherwell, as he invented for their entertainment Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A colleague told the story of his time at Cambridge, during which he went punting on the Cam. His badly-steered punt went into another, pitching its occupant into the water. On resurfacing, the latter, in a posh accent, said: "I say, awfully sorry about that, old chap". Climbing This is not about mountaineering but about climbing hills as an outdoor activity without special equipment. In England, I climbed to the top of one of the Brecon Beacons with the scouts during the week we camped in the Wye Valley. With other members of Manchester University Meth Soc I went climbing in the Peak District. In my last year at MU, I climbed with the other members of the Outdoor Activities group to the top of Goat Fell in Scotland during the week we stayed in the youth hostel on the Isle of Arran, and also to the top of The Old Man of Coniston during the week we camped near Coniston Water. My brother and I scattered our parents' ashes at the beginning of the Pennine Way in the Peak District of Derbyshire (see left). In France, I climbed to the top of the Mont Gerbier de Jonc from the nearby source of the river Loire, which I visited with Janine. I was struck by the stalls selling heather honey at the foot of the mount. While Kay was teaching our aluminium foremen English, Gene and I went climbing the nearby peaks at L'Argentière-la-Bessée in the Hautes-Alpes. With my eldest daughter I climbed the Col des Aravis in the French Alps. In Switzerland, John and I climbed to the top of Vue des Alpes, during the time we spent in Neuchâtel. Places I have lived I grew up in a house in Maybush Road, on the outskirts of Southampton. I was born in Nurse Foster's Nursing Home in Shirley. My parents had the house built in 1936. It cost £750. When I went to Manchester University, I started off in digs in Chorlton-cum-Hardy. In the summer term of my first year, I moved into a flat in Moss Side with Bill. In my second year I lived first in digs with Pete, a friend of Bill's, in Stretford. Then in digs at Henry and Min's (nicknamed after two of the characters from the Goon Show) in Whalley Range, until Barrie and I were thrown out after Kay and Jen had spent the night chastely in our room. Barrie and I then moved back to the flat in Claremont Road in Moss Side, where we also spent our third year. During the year we both did our Graduate Certificate of Education, we lived at Mrs Pierce's in Rusholme. She and her seven children lived in a beautiful Victorian house. Barrie and I had a room at the back. Then I went to Besançon. During the first year, I lived in digs in the flat of M. and Mme Scherler. After my marriage, Kay and I lived in a fifth-floor (no lift!) flat in Rue Rivotte. Our landlady, Mme Masson, ran a haberdashery on the ground floor. When we emigrated to Canada, Kay and I started off in an apartment on Bernard Avenue, in Toronto. Then we moved to another on Kendal Avenue. Our first house, on Elvina Gardens (see "Inflation and home buying"), cost us $35,000.00. Our second was nearby on Keewatin Avenue. After our divorce, I bought a house on Davisville Avenue, before moving into a condominium apartment on High Park Avenue. After my retirement, finding Toronto noisy and in a continual state of (re-)construction, I moved to a condominium in a quiet town to the East of Toronto. Each abode was just right at the time. If I had to single out particular dwellings, I would mention Claremont Road for its feeling of liberation, Kendal Avenue for its spaciousness and old elegance, Elvina Gardens for its adventure garden where my children grew their wings (see left), and my present address for its calm. Cars I have driven I learned to drive in the first car my father owned, a pre-WWII Wolseley (see "Then and now"). While still at school, I admired, but didn't drive, an old Austin 7 which his mother had bought for my school friend Chris. I also admired, later on, an Austin 7 bought by university friend Brian. While a student at Manchester University, Eddie, Jan, Ray and I bought between us a pre-WWII Morris 10, in which we visited Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Italy and France (see "One in four"). While still a student, I rode in, but didn't drive, a Jaguar XK120 driven by friend Graham Rowles, whose father ran a car dealership in Chandlers Ford. Barrie, Dave, Cyril, Bob, Godfrey and I drove in a rented Simca Ariane from Montpellier to Barcelona to watch Barcelona play against Real Madrid in the semi-finals of the European Cup (see left). During the two years Kay and I lived in Besançon, we had a Citroën 4 CV which we called Jumping Gertie (from the letters "JG" on its registration plate), which lurched along, and an old Renault 4 in which we drove from Besançon to Palermo and back, and froze our way back one January from Southampton to Besançon. One day, during a stay at Butts Ash, Uncle Freddie asked me to drive Auntie Ethel and him in his black Jaguar XJ12. At the end of our stay in France, Kay and I bought a new Volkswagen Beetle for $700, and exported it to our new home in Canada. There we had first the Beetle, then a Fiat 128 (a lemon), two Volkswagen Rabbits/Golfs (one red - the "Carrot", registration "KRT" -, one white), and a Volkswagen Jetta Carat. I now have a Subaru Crosstrek. During one English stay, Kay and I rented an Austin 1100. I rented a Renault Clio to take Janine and me from Molsheim to Porvoo (see "St Petersburg"). Before that, I had driven Yvette's Clio bearing my youngest daughter and me from Nice to Llandewi Brefi in Wales. In the 1970s we spent one summer in Ditcheat (Somerset) and another in Broadstairs (Kent); on each occasion my cousin Paul generously lent us his Ford Capri. During the two summers we spent in Exeter in the early 1980s, when we swapped houses and cars, we had the use of a white Volkswagen Rabbit. In the 1990s I bought in Wales a second-hand Ford Sierra, which I drove there when I stayed with my brother, and used to get to France to teach at the university of Limoges, and get around during my sabbatical leave in Nancy. In Wales, I also drove Isabelle's Volkswagen Passat during the summer she and her children visited me at my brother's. Chess My father taught me chess at the age of eleven. When I went to grammar school, I became a keen member of the chess club, playing once a week after school and entering the competition for the chess cup, reaching the final in my last two years. I played on the first board in the school team. My greatest satisfaction was beating my opponent in the match against Winchester College. After school I played against a number of people. I played a great deal with my brother-in-law Peter, first over the phone during the time he lived in Canada (Scarborough), then with a travel set, usually in pubs or on beaches (see left), once in a stream in the Lake District, while our children fished for minnows. The last time I played against Peter, was via iPad, with him in England and me in Canada. One summer his father, Tim, stayed with us. The two of us played a number of times, usually in the garden (see second photo in "Places I have lived"). On one occasion, while my children played on the swings and in the paddling pool at Sherwood Park, we played each other in our heads, reconstructing the position on a board as soon as we got back to the house. Other opponents have included colleagues David (once in a plane travelling back to Canada) and Fred (usually with a chess clock), son-in-law Vince and grandson Isaac. A friend of Janine's, Christophe, was for a while my long-distance opponent via the web. Cooking and eating My mother was a great cook and baker, particularly her roast beef, plum pie and rice pudding. School dinners were stodge (see "School dinners"). During my time at university, I remember Saturday lunches at the Darroch's café in Great Western Street (see "Town and country"). I discovered real cuisine in the country of its birth, France (see photos). Seafood at Mont-Saint-Michel and anywhere along the coast of Normandy and Brittany, moules (mussels) marinière in Honfleur, crêpes and galettes in Brittany, oysters and palourdes (clams) in St-Malo and Cancale, morels in Besançon, comté cheese in the Jura, bouillabaisse in Marseille, soupe de poissons (fish soup) in Nice and Toulouse, endive au jambon in Lyon, flammekueche (tarte flambée) in Nancy, asparagus in Strasbourg, cheese and poire au vin in Cantal and Auvergne, poulet (chicken) aux herbes de Provence in Vence, everything in Paris, particularly the steak-frites of the Bouillon Chartier. Kay did all the cooking while we were married. I remember with mouth-watering fondness her meat lasagne. Now I live on my own and spend a lot of enjoyable time cooking and baking. Amongst my favourites are: waterzooi, beef stew, Moroccan chicken, peach crumble, plum tart. New Age My brother moved to Wales, like other young dropouts from the English rat race. He lived for a while, like other English youths, in a caravan, before ending up in a rented cottage. He had learned silk-screen printing in London, and earned his living in Wales producing Welsh dragon advertising material, as well as making silk-screen prints from his artistic photographs. With him I attended dance camp in Pembrokeshire (see left), a Harvest Festival in Fishguard, and, on three occasions, the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset. At dance camp, the food was strictly vegan. Dress was optional, the saunas and showers were unisex. At the first camp, my daughter and I named one naked Amazon "Spiderwoman". Another unforgettable sight was a man in nothing but a air of wellies. One day, my daughter, nephew and I were glad to get away so that we could eat a greasy meat hamburger and visit St David's Cathedral. The first time I went to Glastonbury, I dressed like the many pseudo-hippies who haunted the festival. Then I woke up to the fact that the British idea of a North American Indian was an idealisation akin to Rousseau's noble savage - white people dressed in moccasins, Davy Crockett jackets, plaited pigtails and feathers in their hair - in other words, a shameful cultural appropriation. I should add that Wales hosts a "Tipi Valley", where naked white people live in tepees. What redeemed the occasion for me was the street theatre and, above all, music. It was at Glastonbury that I attended performances of such artists as Donovan and Dead Can Dance. What put me off New Age practices, apart from cultural appropriation, was the role "the Goddess" was supposed to play. One year at Glastonbury, I helped Pete in the Healing Field with incense making. The punters, guided by the "experts", could make their own mix of powders and essential oils. When the resulting mixture was lit, they were supposed to chant some sort of New-Age rigmarole. I substituted for this a private meditation - whether the person meditated or not was entirely up to him or her. Markets "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig". In the West, the modern shop derives from the Medieval eschoppe, which was a simple stall overlooking an urban thoroughfare. The invention of affordable glass enabled the transformation of a noisy, dusty, public space into a vertically enclosed, specialised space, whose separation from the street was completed by a discrete door, thus creating the modern shop. The outside aspect of the medieval shop is found in the occasional sidewalk sale, or the centuries-old weekly market and annual fair. Another modern invention is that of the fixed price, which one sees on stickers in shops. The age-old concept of bargaining, or arriving at a price agreeable to vendor (merchant) and buyer, common still to the souks of other parts of the world is better seen in French than in English. The market (le marché) is a space where the buyer bargains (marchander) with the seller (le/la marchand/marchande); to come to this sort of agreement is faire/conclure/passer un marché. The first market I remember going to was in Barnsley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. I was particularly struck by the sales patter of one of the vendors. Sales pitches depend, for their efficacity, on the gullibility of the buyer, a lesson driven home to me by my later one-week experience as a vacuum cleaner salesman (see "Holiday jobs"). During my boyhood and youth, I often had occasion to go down the stall-lined pavements of East Street in Southampton. I have never been to the Smithfield Market in London, nor to the old market at Covent Garden, but I did go to Les Halles in Paris, before the market was moved out to Rungis. Every town and city in France has a food market, held either weekly, several days a week or daily. The same goes for many towns and cities in England, and in other countries in Europe and the rest of the world. I have a particularly fond memory of the food market in Die, in the Vercors region, especially the many varieties of edible fungus for sale, on the way from Alsace to visit the Cévennes, in the South of France; also of the flower market in le Vieux-Nice. Climate is, of course, a vital factor in the viability of the open-air market. In Toronto, the Saint Lawrence Market can function all year round, as it is held inside. The same goes for the Kensington Market, which is housed in shops. Other markets, mainly "farmers' markets", only function in warm or warmish weather (see left). The best market I have frequented in Ontario is the St Jacobs Market, near Waterloo. Another type of market is the flea market. Good examples of this are the Portobello Road market, where I bought Kay's engagement ring, the Marché aux Puces in Paris, where I bought a belt, and the flea market in Palermo, where Kay and I bought a piece of a decorated Sicilian cart. Time and space There is absolute (abstract) time and relative (concrete) time. The former is the domain of the Gregorian calendar (in the West), of horology and of astronomy, the latter that of ordinary people. In the past, the majority of parents didn't know in what year their offspring were born (abstract notion), but they did know the season of their birth (concrete event). In one's childhood, the summer went on forever, as its timespan constituted a large fraction of one's existence. A good illustration of abstract and concrete time is to be found in Ann Cleeves' 1997 novel The Baby-Snatcher. I quote: " [Inspector Ramsay] 'What time were you here on Saturday?' he asked. / They looked confused. They didn't own a watch between them. / 'Before tea or after tea?' / Again that had little meaning. They seemed to eat continually when they weren't at school, scrounging crisps and biscuits from whichever mother they could con into providing them. / 'What was on the television before you went out?' / 'Live and Kicking. When that was finished there was only the sport.' / 'And what was on when you went back in?' / 'Baywatch,' [...] / 'So you were out all afternoon?' / They nodded." Similarly, there is abstract space, that of geography and navigation, and concrete space, here and there. For those whose existence is geographically limited, a person from elsewhere is different; a person who comes, or whose ancestors came, from elsewhere is often regarded as an "incomer". The concepts of latitude, longitude and coordinates belong to abstract space, except in expressions like "in warm/cold latitudes". In the world of wine and, increasingly, gastronomy, locality is important. The nature and the quality of a wine depend on the vineyard where is was produced, what in French is called a terroir viticole. Similarly, a meal consisting of local ingredients is called in French a menu du terroir (or simply menu terroir). In the worlds of oenology, gastronomy, wine-growing and wine tasting, of great importance, besides the place where a wine was produced, is its vintage (French millésime), the year it was produced. A good vintage is un bon cru or une bonne cuvée. Country living Mr Mansbridge and son Peter were farmers and local preachers at Longdown Methodist chapel. Big, rough hands, uncultured Hampshire voices. I gaped in wonder, as a boy, at the kitchen pump which fed the big stone sink. One day, I wandered into the pig sty, and ruined a pair of shoes mistaking pig swill for concrete. I went with Janine to visit a farmer, friend of her family, in the Calvados region. His morning ablutions consisted mainly of a quick face-rub of home-made calvados, which both woke him up and gave him a dark red complexion. To keep them quiet, his children had been given a drop of calva with their milk in their baby bottles. During my first year in Besançon, I accompanied forester Raoul in his 2 CV van on his visits to farmers in the Jura. At each farm, we observed the ritual of drinking un verre de gros rouge (a glass of local red wine, or "plonk") seated round the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. The wealth of each farm was measured by the size of the dung heap in front of it. The best illustration of town mouse vs. country mouse was Odile, a slim girl and pupil at the Lycée de jeunes filles in Alençon and a farmer's daughter at home. I went one day with Janine on the scooter to visit her at the farm. I gazed with wonder as she led a huge shire horse to plough a field. When we stopped for a snack (un casse-croûte), we ate bread, cheese and cider, that is to say rough farmhouse bread (baked in the farm kitchen), homemade, strong cheese called crotte (literally "dung") and homemade strong, rough cider. Used to it, Odile wolfed it all down. Townie I had more trouble. Archie Archie Darroch owned a café and a grocery shop in Great Western Street, in the Moss Side district of Manchester. He had a great sense of humour. Bill and I went to the café for our Saturday lunch. As we arrived, Archie, a lapsed Methodist, would be singing sotto voce "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam". Bearded I was Jesus, Bill my disciple. Sally worked in the shop and the café. On more than one occasion, Sally and Archie chased each other through the café, one throwing a wet dishcloth at the other. I went once with Archie to Old Trafford to see Lancashire play against another county team. When Brian Statham, an England fast bowler and the best known player in the Lancashire team, was bowling, Archie, pretending ignorance, said "Who is that?", to which neighbouring spectators on all sides and in front turned on him and said indignantly "Don't you know who that is?!". Cheese Cheese has played an important role in my life, in England, France and Canada. I only came to know, and appreciate, English cheeses after I had spent some time in France. During my time in Besançon, I got to know Jean-Claude, a fellow student. One summer he obtained a grant from the grocery distributor Docks de France to study X. Kay and I persuaded him that a good subject of study was English cheeses, a notion difficult to accept for a person from the 300-cheeses country of France. He duly went off to England, using my and Kay's parents' homes as a base for visiting dairies and shops in such places as Stilton, Cheddar, Wensleydale, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Lancashire and Leicestershire. His written report made fascinating reading and, to his and our great satisfaction, won him first prize at the national level. Amongst the "300 cheeses" of France, my favourites include Comté from the Jura (see "Meals"), Munster from the Vosges (my younger daughter and I bought some in the town of Munster), Cantal from the Centre of France (my elder daughter and I enjoyed some in the Cantal region when we visited Jacques-Philippe), Port-Salut eaten by my daughters and me when we stayed in Honfleur. I should add that the Comté sold in Canada is bland compared to the nutty variety obtainable in the Jura and elsewhere in France. I shall never forget the arrogance of the Toronto grocery employee who assured me, in the 1970s, that there was no such thing as Comté cheese! One of Raoul's brothers-in-law was the mayor of Rennes-sur-Loue, which had a Comté dairy (see left). Although "real" Cheddar can only be made in Somerset, several very tasty varieties of a similar cheese called cheddar are produced in Canada. Amongst my favourites is Black River cheese made in Prince Edward County. One of Kay's Canadian students in Villefranche-sur-Mer told her, when shown the display of French cheeses in the dairy section of a Nice hypermarket, that he only liked "real" cheese, meaning the processed slices of what is called "cheese" by Canadian supermarkets (see "Closed minds"). Hiking In the scouts I hiked through the woods when we went on wide game. Much of what I call "climbing" was, in fact, hiking (see "Climbing"). My father walked the Pennine Way in 1973 after his open-heart surgery (see left). Kay, the children and I met him at the end in the south of Scotland (see right). I'm too old now to go climbing, but I still enjoy hiking - in the woods of Presqu'île Provincial Park, in the Proctor Park Conservation Area, in the Cobourg Conservation Area, along the Cyprus Lake part of the Bruce Trail. Shoe shops now stock light, but sturdy hiking boots and shoes. Chestnuts Two completely different trees (from different families) are confused owing to the similarity in size, leaf formation, fruit and fruit husks (also called burs, or burrs): the sweet chestnut and the horse chestnut. Both are well-known to a boy growing up in England because of their fruit: edible, in the case of the sweet chestnut; the basis of a game, in the case of the horse chestnut. Chestnuts (the fruit of the sweet chestnut) are consumed at the base of the tree in the autumn, or at Christmas, having been purchased in a shop. One can still find, in the winter, sellers of delicious roasted chestnuts, usually in open-air markets. I have a vivid boyhood memory of gathering chestnuts in Nightingale Wood, in Nursling. The seasonal game of conkers, now banned in many places as being dangerous, was an important part of being a boy. The confusion between the two types of tree and their fruit can be found in other languages. In French, a sweet chestnut tree is called un châtaignier, its fruit une châtaigne; a horse chestnut is called un marronnier d'Inde, its fruit un marron. When candied, a chestnut (fruit of the sweet chestnut) is called un marron glacé, since plump chestnuts are called marrons. When I came to Canada, I was amazed to see conkers lying unattended on the ground, since in England they would have long since disappeared into boys' pockets. The game of conkers is less popular in Canada than in Britain. During a sabbatical leave spent in Nice, I had occasion to spend an autumn weekend up in the Alpine region north of the city. On the Sunday, the Fête des Châtaignes was celebrated in the village of Isola with roasted chestnuts in the square, a parade of drum majorettes and a mass. Boat rides and ferries Ferries run to a schedule and go from A to B. Boat rides are chartered and leave from and return to A, with possible stops at B. Ferries I have taken: from Southamton to Hythe, from Southampton to Ryde, from Lymington to Yarmouth; from Poole to Saint-Malo, from Southampton/Portsmouth to Cherbourg / Le Havre, from Ouistreham to Portsmouth, from Dieppe to Newhaven, from Calais to Dover - all journeys across what the English call the English Channel, and the French simply La Manche. Also, across the North Sea from Harwich to Ostend. Other ferries include one across the Seine at Jumièges, another from Vancouver to Victoria, from Reggio di Calabria to Messina, from Stranraer to Larne, from Dublin to Liverpool, from Helsinki to Stockholm (a beautiful voyage), from Kingston to Amherst Island. The longest "ferry" ride was on the S.S. Empress of England from Liverpool to Montreal, when Kay and I emigrated to Canada (see left). Boat rides include one from Cannes to the Îles de Lérins, another from Plymouth to Bristol on a frigate when I was in the naval cadets at school (in this vein I should also mention a ride on an aircraft carrier during the Spithead Review, and one on a cruiser undertaking speed tests in the North Sea), another from Saint-Pierre to Langlade, a tour of Thousand Islands in the Saint Lawrence River (see right), one round Manhattan Island. The boat rides I most remember are one in a bay near Santiago de Compostela to see the dolphins (1989), and a trip from Tobermory in a glass-bottom boat to see the shipwrecks and Flowerpot Island (2011). Walls (2) There are walls that exclude and walls that enclose. The two functions usually go together, with one being more important than the other. Examples of the first kind are city walls, such as those of Carcassonne or Aigues-Mortes (see file "Photographies de la Francophonie"), or Hadrian's Wall in northern England, built by the Romans to keep the inhabitants of Caledonia out of the province of Britannia (see left). They are usually notable for their thickness and strength. Enclosing walls include those which demarcate a property, and are often known as garden walls. They are often decorative (see right). House walls and room walls give protection (age-old) and privacy (a modern concept). (See also above the story "Walls".) Mary Berry I first came across Mary Berry in the television series The Great British Bake-off. In the last few years I have taken up cooking and baking, and Mary Berry is one of my chief inspirers. Her recipe for lemon drizzle cake is much appreciated by my two daughters and two grandsons. I am now watching two other series on Britbox: Mary Berry's Country House Secrets and Mary Berry's Absolute Favourites. In the first, I was particularly struck by the episodes at Powderham Castle and Goodwood House. The former is in the Exe estuary, near where my two eldest took sailing lessons and to Sandy Bay, where I spent two caravan holidays, one with my parents when I was a boy, and one with my own family in 1984. The latter is in West Sussex, where I worked on the buses in 1960 and 1961; I attended a formula 1 race at the Goodwood race track, and saw, among other drivers, the young Stirling Moss. The first episode of the second series is situated in Broadstairs, where I, along with my wife and three children, spent a month in the summer of 1977 in a rented house (see left). The second episode takes place in the countryside near Bath and in the New Forest. The five of us spent a sabbatical leave in Bath in 1979-80, and I grew up in and near the New Forest. Like Mary Berry, we (first with my parents, later with my own family) foraged for mushrooms in both locations. Mary Berry also tries her hand at fly-fishing in the River Test, where I camped and swam with the cubs and scouts. The Test is famous for its watercress and its trout. Disobedient cars Firstly, two literary examples, then one experienced incident, all funny to the onlooker. In his autobiography And Now... Here's Max, Max Ferguson writes about Allan McFee's old banger which the latter punished for misbehaving by kicking dents in it. In Fawlty Towers Basil Fawlty thrashes his recalcitrant car with an uprooted tree sapling. During my year in Alençon, I had occasion to get a lift in Christiane's 2CV. Christiane was a bad driver, causing the car to stutter and buck. When we alighted, she kicked the poor inanimate vehicle, exclaiming "Pouffiasse!" (more or less "You stupid bitch!", though more expressive). Land acknowledgement Land acknowledgement is an important component of the history of North America (as it is of other continents). Land acknowledgement is based on the concept of sharing, as opposed to ownership. For example, the recorded history of the presence of human beings in Britain starts with the Roman occupation of the province of Britannia, in which the Romans considered themselves to own the land. When the Normans conquered England in the eleventh century, it became the custom to "give" tracts of land to military leaders who were deemed to have acquitted themselves well in battle. Until recently, only landowners could vote in parliamentary elections. On the other hand, recorded history demonstrates clearly that many European settlers have considered themselves to be the rightful "owners" of the land they have occupied in North America (other examples are to be found elsewhere, such as in Australia). A good example of sharing vs. owning is be found in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which a Bushman (or San) is charged by his community with throwing a coke bottle (considered to be unshareable) off the edge of the world. Gold fever On the way back from Vancouver (see "The train") in the summer of 1974, we stopped in the Fraser Valley (Sto:lo in the Halkomelem language), where the prospectors came in the gold rush of the nineteenth century; in accordance with the general mass of European tourists, I duly bought a prospecting pan. A few years later, I was involved in a university millennium programme which took me to Edmonton. The restaurant where we ate our evening meal was, as local publicity shrieked, near the Edmonton start of the Klondike Trail. The best fictionalised account of gold fever I have come across is contained in Rose Tremain's novel The Colour, about the West Coast New Zealand gold rush of the late nineteenth century. The North American Klondike gold rush is, of course, famously lampooned in Charlie Chaplin's film The Gold Rush. Wales is famous for its gold, mined since at least the Bronze Age, but not for gold fever. One gold complex, the Dolaucothi Gold Mines, is near where my brother used to live. The global village I have written elsewhere (see "Doudou and Bush dodgers" and "Learning in class and online") about the realisation, through the creation in the 1990s of the World Wide Web, of the global village which Marshall imagined nearly sixty years ago. Now the pandemic caused by the coronavirus has created the global village schoolroom. My eldest daughter is a high-school teacher who normally teaches in a Toronto classroom. Since the fall of 2020 she has been teaching online Canadian History and Civics to 15-year-old students who are not only in Toronto, but, in a few cases, through being trapped elsewhere while visiting family, also in other countries, such as Mongolia, Nigeria and Jordan. North and South Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South is mainly concerned with the divide between the industrial North of England, where the poor mill-workers live, and the moneyed South of England, home to the rich owners. This divide, whose effects are still visible today in styles of living and in regional accents, has existed since before the industrial revolution, one of its manifestations being the Pilgrimage of Grace, which pitted the mainly Catholic North of England against the Protestant monarch, Henry VIII, whose court was in the South (London). I, living in the South, had the good fortune as a boy of visiting grandparents in the West Riding of Yorkshire and later, as a teenager and young man, of attending university in Manchester. Thus I was used to differences of culture and language. Not so friend Brian, freshly arrived in Manchester from Dover, in Kent. When hearing for the first time the word brass pronounced with a flattened short 'a' - in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) /bræs/ - (cf. the Yorkshire saying "Where there's muck there's brass."), he naively responded "You don't say /græs/, do you?". Similarly, Vietnam is pronouced with a long back 'a' in the South (/α:/), a short 'a' in the North (/æ/). I have a Canadian friend who knows a man from the South of England, formerly a professor at the University of Bath. When talking of him she always says, in an exaggerated fashion, that he was at the University of /bα:θ/. Public and private Among the absurdities to the North-American ear of British English is the use of the term "public" when referring to private schools. Canadians distinguish (logically) between public and private schools, where a Brit will talk about state and public schools. The reason for the usage difference is, of course, historical, free education for all coming into being much later than the creation of (fee-paying) schools. Similarly, grammar schools (now replaced by comprehensive schools) were for centuries fee-paying before becoming part of the state system of free education. I attended a (free) grammar school, where my class-mates were mainly from lower-middle class families. When I was in the sixth form, the (respected) headmaster died and was replaced by a (mocked) product of the British public school system. He took sixth-formers for "religious" studies in the actual form of a pep talk about keeping a straight bat and not letting the side down. During his rants, we boys played virtual cricket, where a "public-school" pronunciation of off as "orff" was counted as a six or a wicket, depending on whether the speaker was deemed to be fielding or batting. Little wonder that the French have a popular image of the English as speaking with a potato in their mouth. Travel In the days of sea voyages, it was usual to wish the traveller "Bon voyage". In the days of the railroad, it would be wrong to wish someone "bon train", since aller bon train means "to fly back and forth" in talking about such things as rumours or conversational repartee. A journey means the distance covered (on horseback) in a day (journée), but Bonne journée means "Have a good day". If a person is travelling by aeroplane, one might say "Have a good flight" (bon vol); if by car, "drive safely" or bonne route. Whether airborne, seaborne or landborne, the traveller may correctly be wished "Have a good trip". When we left the Estops or the Nobles to return home (by car), my mother would say (somewhat anachronistically) to my father "Home, James, and don't spare the horses". When, having acquired a party telephone line, we had safely returned home after a visit to relatives, one of my parents would telephone the Estops or the Nobles, and put the receiver down after three rings to save money. Nowadays, one simply sends a (free) text on one's mobile phone. Counting rhymes As a child, I learned, or heard, a number of counting rhymes, either chanted or sung. To find out who was to be "it", we balled up our two fists, and one child went around the circle tapping the fists with one of his, chanting: "One potato, two potato, three potato, four; five potato, six potato, seven potato, more". "More" was "it". A rhyme used in learning to count: "One, two, three, four, five, / Once I caught a fish alive. / Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, / Then I let it go again. // Why did you let it go? / Because it bit my finger so. / Which finger did it bite? / This little finger on the right." An eating rhyme for small children: "One, two, buckle my shoe; Three, four, knock at the door; Five, six, pick up sticks; Seven, eight, lay them straight; Nine, ten, a big fat hen; Eleven, twelve, dig and delve; Thirteen, fourteen, maids a-courting; Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen; Seventeen, eighteen, maids a-waiting; Nineteen, twenty, my plate's empty." A skipping rhyme (sung or chanted by girls): "Five/Four/Three/Two/One little monkeys jumping on the bed, One fell off and bumped his head, Mother called the doctor and the doctor said, 'No more jumping on the bed!'" Chanted by a girl removing petals from a dandelion or daisy, or counting plum stones after eating plums and custard, to find out what sort of man she will marry: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief". Annie Proulx gives a rhyming variant in her novel Barkskins: "rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief". Removing the petals from a daisy or blowing a dandelion clock: "He/She loves me, He/She loves me not." The one chance in two of being loved contrasts with the French effeuiller la marguerite: "Il/Elle m'aime, un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, à la folie, pas du tout" - here the chances of being loved are five in six. Trains The first train I remember going on was the Flying Scotsman from London King's Cross. My mother and I, a small boy, were travelling to Sunderland, where my father was stationed with the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. I gazed with wonder at the mighty Flying Scotsman locomotive before boarding the train. When I went to grammar school, I travelled by train each day from Southampton to Winchester. Many years later, I crossed Canada with wife, two small children and parents, from Toronto to Vancouver on The Canadian (see "The train"). During that trip I saw my first trestle bridge (see left). Also, in Canada, I went by train several times from Toronto to Montreal to see my thesis director. One such trip was undertaken one February during the worst blizzard of that winter, worst to the extent that all roads and airports were shut down by the massive snowfall. The journey took twelve hours, as the train collided with a car at a level crossing, and it and its occupants could not be found. I ended up at the Ritz-Carlton, as all the other hotels were full. I went out in the evening: never has the big city been so quiet! In England, we took our children to see and, in some cases, ride on historic engines and trains in Manchester, the Lake District and the York Railway Museum (see left). The romantic world of the railway is present in novels such as The Railway Children, Anna Karenina, Murder On The Orient Express, Zola's La Bête humaine. In the 1960s the extensive British railway network was trimmed back, with, as one result, the creation of country paths along the course of former rail beds. One example of this - a walk I have taken several times - starts from Lampeter in West Wales. I have ridden on a variety of trains, ranging from the bumpy Hythe two-foot gauge pier railway linking Southampton Water ferry to Hants and Dorset bus to the fast, modern TGV in France, by way of the high-security train running between Helsinki and St Petersburg. Snowdrops and daffodils I am entranced by the beauty of a number of wild flowers. I have written elsewhere of bluebells (see "Bluebells"); here I wish to mention snowdrops and daffodils. The strongest memory I have of snowdrops is coming across a wonderful carpet of them in the churchyard of St Margaret's Church at Felbrigg in Norfolk (see "Grass rubbing"). I went to rub some of the monumental brasses there, taking my five-year-old daughter with me (see photo 1). Carpets of wild daffodils have gladdened my eyes by the roadside in Wales, around the duckpond in Westley Waterless in Cambridgeshire, in Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire. The owners of private gardens can rarely afford carpets of flowers, so there were only a few, beautiful nonetheless, in the garden of our first house in Toronto (see photo 2). Signs 2 The intriguing name "Plucks Gutter" (= Pluck's gutter) is better known in Kent than in the county of Avon. Apparently, at one time in the past a Dutch engineer by the name of Ploeg drained a marsh near Canterbury, giving the name of the ditch thus created to the hamlet at that place. Subsequently, one of the cottages became the Dog and Duck public house. In 1980, I took a photograph (see left) near the toll bridge over the River Avon between Bathford and Batheaston. As in Kent, Plucks Gutter is associated with a Dog and Duck pub, even to the identical pub sign (chain?). Thatched cottages When my children were small we played various games to keep them happy in the car. One of the games consisted of espying certain things in the countryside, such as five-barred gates, hay ricks and thatched cottages, which the children called "fat sausages": "There's a fat sausage!" Thatched cottages are an important component of "Merrie Olde England", but are gradually disappearing. I have a cousin who lived in one until it burned down. One can, however, still see new thatched roofs being constructed in the English countryside (see left). In 2014, my ex-wife and I went to Ireland to celebrate fifty years of marriage and divorce (we spent our honeymoon in Connemara). In the little town of Dunmore East a number of the houses had thatched roofs (see right). Of geese, ducks and bowls When I was a student at Manchester University, I lived part of the time in a flat in Moss Side. The flat overlooked Alexandra Park, where there was a pond, frequented by waterfowl, and a crown bowls green. In the South of England, where I grew up, bowls was played on a flat green; it was made exclusive by the formation of clubs, teams, membership fees and a dress code; many had a bar and served afternoon tea. In the Ontario town where I live now, the model of bowls green is that of the South of England. One would be tempted to say that the ducks and geese I saw in Manchester were basically the same as the ones I saw later in East Anglia (see left), although perhaps Darwin would not have agreed, since the shape of the beaks of the finches he studied in the Galapagos was largely dependent on habitat. Now living near one of the largest lakes in the world, I am daily impressed by the skeins of honking geese flying overhead, amused by the skeins of hell-for-leather ducks, and awestruck by the majesty of the occasional skein of swans. Fairs In Southampton I went to the annual fair held on the Common. I remember Michael handing out sweeties while we were standing on the tarmac; one fell; Michael said "One for the road". The fair at King's Lynn in Norfolk had vintage rides (see left). In France, a fair was held on the square near the Lycée Alain where I was teaching; I remember the delicious croustillons (small doughnuts). In the same town there was a Corso fleuri, a flower parade held in July. The carnaval in Nice was another flower parade. Staying with friends in the South of France, I was kept awake all night by the amplified music echoing across the fields from a nearby village's summer fair. The hectic nature of the French Disneyland near Paris convinced me to stay away from the American versions (see "Hanging on"). Near Antibes was Aquasplash, which my younger daughter and I loved going to. In Canada, we all went to Canada's Wonderland, where Kay won a big (and hideous) stuffed animal toy. I went on all the roller coasters with my teenage children at the CNE in Toronto. My favourite experiences, however, were going to Ontario Place and Expo 67 (see left). Other world fairs I attended were London 1951 and Brussels 1958 (see "Caravan"). Cities vs. the provinces When I was a boy visiting my grandparents in the West Riding of Yorkshire, asked to explain my funny accent I said I was from the South. "Oh, you're from London" was the typical response - the only place in the South a Yorkshire inhabitant had heard of. Robert Galbraith's Troubled Blood: "And when we come to London Wall, / A pleasant sight to view; / Come forth! come forth! ye cowards all: / Here's men as good as you. / '"The Song of the Western Men?"' / 'That's the one.' / 'Why d'you think they feel the need to tell Londoners they're just as good? Isn't that a given?' / 'Just London, isn't it?' said Strike, as they crossed the road. 'Pisses everyone off.'" Same phenomenon in France: Paris and the "provinces". Toronto has a similar standing among small-town dwellers in Ontario; on a larger scale, Ontario vs. the western provinces. Every country has its "big smoke". Currencies I grew up with pounds, shillings and pence ("£sd" pronounced "elessdee"). In primary school I learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide prices expressed in three columns. "1/6" was pronounced "one and six", and meant one shilling and six pence; "10d" was ten pence, pronounced "tenpunce"; "2½d" was two pence and half a penny, pronounced "tuppunce haypny"; "1½d" was one penny and half a penny, pronounced "three haypunce". There was a pound note, a ten-shilling note, and coins with values of two shillings and six pence (2/6), two shillings (2/- or 2s), one shilling (1/- or 1s), six pence (6d), three pence (3d), one penny (1d), half a penny (½d), and a quarter of a penny (¼d). The corresponding notes and coins were called a pound (or "a quid", "ten quid"), a ten-shilling note (or "half a quid"), a half-crown (or "half a dollar"), a two-shilling piece (or "a florin" or "a two bob piece"), a shilling (or "a bob", "two bob"), a sixpence (or "a tanner"), a threepenny piece/bit (pronounced "threppny" or "thruppny"), a penny (or "a copper"), a halfpenny (pronounced "haypny") and a farthing. There were 20 shillings to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling. The coins were large and heavy, meant to be carried in a leather purse, not a pocket (quickly becoming a holey pocket - I once found a half-crown, a florin and a sixpence in the field at the bottom of the road). Recently obsolete coins were the guinea (worth 21 shillings; suits and dresses were still misleadingly priced in guineas), the crown (worth five shillings; still minted to mark special occasions, but not used as currency) and the silver sixpence (still used in Christmas puddings). Decimal currency, bringing the disappearance of the shilling and the replacement of the old penny ("d" for denarius) with the new penny ("p"), took place in 1971. According to the television series This Farming Life, the prices at livestock auctions in Scotland are still calculated in guineas; and then there are the famous 1000 and 2000 Guinea Stakes held each year at Newmarket. Idiomatic expressions (there are many) include: "worth a bob or two", discussing someone or something worth a lot of money; "penny for your thoughts"; "to spend a penny", euphemism when talking about going to the toilet/lavatory (both euphemisms); "not to have two halfpennies to rub together" = to be poor; "a penny a day keeps the doctor away". Another idiomatic expression is to refer to any archaic term of measurement as "in old money"; in the BBC television series Countryfile a host comments that his interviewee, a bodger, is talking "in old money" when he uses the term gross to refer to 144 (144 chair legs). French currency underwent a similar, though ambiguous, change. With inflation the franc had lost much of its value (a lot less than the Italian lira, however). The old franc (or franc léger) was replaced by the new franc (or franc lourd) in 1960, the new franc being worth 100 old francs. This caused much temporary confusion, as people often did not know if such-and-such an item was priced in new or old francs. And then, at the turn of the century, the currency of many West-European countries was replaced by the euro. Learning French currency was hard for me, new British and Canadian both easy. Tricky elisions The English language is fond of elisions, particularly negatives and auxiliaries: "I do not" -> "I don't"; "I cannot" (< "can not") -> "I can't"; "I will not" -> "I won't"; "she would" -> "she'd"; "we have gone" -> "we've gone"; "he had seen" -> "he'd seen"; "they will go" -> "they'll go"; etc. This can lead to change, which some would call mistakes. The expression "He has yet to" + verb (e.g. "score/register") is commonly reduced to "He's yet to". the elided form "'s" can be either "has" or "is". It is common nowadays to encounter such sequences as "He is yet to (score/register)". Another example, in which the auxiliary simply disappears. The construction "I had better" + verb (e.g. "I had better do it") is commonly reduced to "I'd better". It is now easy to come across such constructions as "I better go now". Neckwear As a boy I typically wore shirt and tie (see photo1). At grammar school I had to wear a uniform in which the school tie was de rigueur. At university I wore the typical student "uniform" of duffle coat, university scarf, sweater, narrow striped jeans and moccasins. Definitely no tie. Except for graduation, which called for rented university tie, gown, hood and mortarboard (see photo2). The only other time I dressed up as a penguin was for my wedding, where I, father-in-law, best man and ushers wore (or carried) rented top hat, tails, striped trousers, gloves and tie (see photo3). As a university lecturer, then professor, I started off by calling my students, Madame, Mademoiselle or Monsieur and wearing suit and tie. By the time I finished teaching, I was calling my students by their first name and wearing sweater and open-neck shirt. Except for final exams, where I wore suit and tie to cheer my students up, as I felt that all that final exams showed was the ability to take exams. I thought that ties were absurd, choking the wearer and getting in one's soup. Then my elder daughter showed me the usefulness of decorative bandanas, worn under an open-neck shirt. The minnow streams of yesteryear The medieval French poet François Villon is famous for the line "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?" ("Where are the snows of yesteryear?") used to express a disappeared past. I grew up in England on the edge of Southampton among fields, allotments, trees and minnow streams in an unmade cul-de-sac, whose surface consisted of compacted gravel, outside of the boundary of the municipality, so that I had to choose between Brockenhurst and Winchester when I changed from primary to grammar school. My son-in-law grew up in Ontario among the woods and streams of Barrie. Fields, woods and streams have long since given way to houses and macadammed roads. The protagonist Frieda Klein created by the literary couple known as Nicci French is fascinated by the hidden rivers of London (cf. Paul Talling's book London's Lost Rivers). Nearly every city and town has built over rivers, streams and creeks, so that it is a common sight in early summer to see Mother Duck leading her brood of ducklings down the street to the lake. Another reminder of the past is the roads bearing the name Old X Road or Old Y Street, e.g. Old Yonge Street in Toronto or Old Kingston Road in Grafton.