My new LD Blog

This blog has moved.

2011-02-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

I had difficulty with blogger recently. The problem seems to have cleared up now, but meanwhile I've decided to move to Wordpress. I've also reverted to the name of my original blog - Mira's Picture. The new url is https://miraspicture.wordpress.com/

The Consumer Society -- Not

2011-01-30T13:57:00.005-07:00

When we came to Canada, we had to replace many of our electrical devices, including our bread-maker. I wanted a Panasonic, which is an American brand, so I was surprised that I could not find a Canadian distributor. In the end we bought a Cuisinart.

Twice, since we bought it, the baking tin has developed a leak and needed replacing. If we were in the USA, I could just go online, order one and it would be delivered within days. In Canada, I can only order from the local authorised spare-parts supplier (there's just one in Edmonton). The supplier doesn't keep any in stock. She has ordered one for me from the USA, and four weeks later I'm still waiting for her phone-call to tell me it has arrived. The tin is probably stuck in customs. There was the same delay last time I ordered one, and on that occasion the first tin delivered didn't fit the machine.

Moving to Canada has taught me some lessons about myself. One is that even though I dislike shopping, there are some aspects of the consumer society, such as choice and convenience, that I miss when they are no longer available. As far as the consumer experience is concerned, living in Edmonton is like living in the UK circa 1971: shabby shops, poor choice and poor service; the only difference is that unlike the UK in 1971, or anytime since, Canadian shop-assistants are excessively solicitous, without actually being helpful. For that reason, I generally adopt the tactic of sprinting into Sears or The Bay, grabbing what I want from the display and sprinting to the cash-desk before I can be intercepted. Hesitation is perilous, for example, the last time I bought a filter for our vacuum cleaner, I ended up with the wrong one, because I could not shake off the shop-assistant who was intent on giving me incorrect advice, while I was trying to choose from the display.

I particularly loathe shopping for clothing here. As soon as you enter the shop, an assistant bears down on you and starts talking, disconcertingly, as if she is a childhood friend who hasn't seen you for a while. "And how are you today" she usually begins. The first few occasions I entered clothes shops here, seeing an assistant making a beeline for me, I thought she must think I was a possible shoplifter, and I left rapidly. On the next occasion, the assistant got as far as her opening gambit, and I replied by telling her that I was sorry, but I didn't think we'd ever previously met.

Eventually I did succeed in purchasing a coat that was too small and a pair of jeans that were too big. Since then, I've tried to get all my clothing from the UK, either mail-order or on my yearly visits to my mum. Inevitably, I'm getting shabbier by the year. Not that I was very smart to start off with, since I don't buy much clothing, and when I do it's often from charity shops, but by the time I move back to the UK, I'm going to be looking like a bag-lady.

Caroline Lucas on Economics

2011-01-25T11:27:00.001-07:00

Greens don't want growth using up the world's resources. They are against over-consumption, and in fact want consumption to reduce. But, on the other hand, they are in favour of full employment and redistribution, and call for a rebalancing of the economy to green industries.

The UK economy contracted by 0.5% in the last quarter of 2010, but if the bad weather is taken into account, the true figure is probably nil, neither growth nor contraction. Output in production industries however expanded by 0.9%, whereas service industries output contracted by 0.5%. The claimant count also fell slightly in December.

Now, you would have thought that these figures would be welcome to a Green politician; reduction in unemployment without economic growth, rebalancing of the economy, and reduction in consumption. Even reduction of the deficit which fuelled overconsumption should be welcome to a Green. But no, this is what Caroline Lucas has to say:

The ONS figures heap further doubt on the Conservative-led government's policy to eliminate the national deficit at breakneck speed – and at huge social cost

Now how is that? Wouldn't green economic policies produce similar figures? A few paragraphs later, Lucas calls relying on GDP to measure success a "pure fallacy", but it seems to me that there isn't much point in adhering to an economic theory, unless you are also prepared to apply it. Ever since the economic crisis broke, the Greens have come over all Keynesian, even though the Keynesian approach relies so much on stimulating consumption, which Greens should be against. The result is incoherent nonsense.

The latest CAPP ad.

2011-01-18T17:12:00.001-07:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers regularly places advertisements defending the tar sands, and I like to comment on each one. They deserve serious attention, after all this is CAPP's bid to make a case for the sustainability of this much reviled industry.

Today's tar sands beefcake is Garrett Brown, another strong but sensitive type, smiling confidently and crouching to show his closeness to the soil, in front of a wood. The headline states : "I grew up on a farm. I know what it means to have the land restored."

Maybe it's because I'm British, but the words farmer and land restoration do not sing in harmony in my mind. The average UK farmer only becomes a friend of the environment once he's been subsidised, regulated, monitored and cajoled; in other words given the full carrot and stick treatment. Left to his own devices he'll regard the rivers and streams through his land as a useful run off for toxic waste, but I suppose it might be different in Canada. No, actually I don't suppose that at all.

Garrett is an environmental officer for Conoco Phillips, concerned with land reclamation.

In reality, only 0.2% of the land disturbed by tar sands mining has been certified as reclaimed. You don't need a degree in ecology to know that land which has had its entire vegetation and topsoil removed, cannot be restored to its previous state, even if you can plant trees on it. Currently there is no solution to the toxic tailing ponds; there is no way of restoring the land they occupy. Conoco has had a problem with birds dying in the tailing ponds.

Snow-Drops

2011-01-15T12:24:00.001-07:00

I listened to Radio 4's Book at Bedtime: Snowdrops by AD Miller. It's a very bleak novel. I've read reviews that compare the book to Chandler's crime novels, but actually Chandler was a lot more positive about human nature. Chandler's hero is endowed with the values of a British public school, Miller's only has the opportunist amoral greed of the Thatcher/Blair generation.

According to Miller, snowdrops is the word Muscovites use for the bodies found under the snow after the spring melt. That happens here in Edmonton too, bodies under the snow, murdered prostitutes and homeless people who didn't make it to a shelter, usually.

Moscow has a warmer climate than Edmonton, by a couple of degrees Celsius. Our fourth winter here seems colder than the previous three, even though there haven't been any record breaking lows so far. I think the temperature has been below -10°C for most of the last two months. It's been in the minus twenties for a lot of the time. Today it is -24°C.

Snow

2011-01-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

If you think you've had a lot of snow in the UK, you have no idea....

We went to an Edmonton Symphony Orchestra concert yesterday evening by bus, because the car was snowed in. Despite the blizzard the bus arrived on time, and so did the bus to take us home. Snow ploughs and gritters were keeping the main roads clear. The way the city copes with the weather is impressive.

After the concert we went to the Fairmont McDonald Hotel for soup while we waited for the bus. It's probably the cosiest place in Edmonton from which to watch a snow-storm.

The Archers 60th anniversary episode

2010-12-31T16:20:00.001-07:00

My money is on Elizabeth and Nigel Pargetter both getting killed in an horrible accident. Maybe they both fall into the ha-ha.

Insufficient Punctuation.

2010-12-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

Radio 3 has listed Tannhäuser, omitting the umlaut. Standards are slipping at the Beeb, or has Zai Bennett, the controller of BBC 3 decided that he agrees with the citizens of Lancre, that one should avoid unnecessary punctuation?

Have Pity

2010-12-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

This Christmas, spare a thought for those less privileged than yourself. You get the Dr Who Christmas Special, and John Hurt in Whistle and I'll Come to you my Lad. Here in Alberta we get A Conversation with the Prime Minister and repeats of Keeping up Appearances.

2010 things I didn't blog on at the time 2: Train Journeys.

2010-12-19T18:52:00.002-07:00

In May Ian and I went from London to Prague, by the Eurostar to Brussels, the high-speed Thalys to Cologne and then after an excellent dinner in a Cologne beer-house we got the sleeper to Prague. Early in the morning the Cologne-- Prague train goes through the very beautiful Elbe and Vltava valleys. Here's a taste of the scenery:

Later in the month, I returned to London from Vienna, taking the sleeper from Vienna to Cologne. That train travels through the even more scenic and romantic Rhine valley. I arrived in Cologne with time for breakfast at the station cafe on the square in front of the magnificent Cologne Cathedral, before traveling on to Brussels.

As usual I'd booked the cheapest tickets I could, following the excellent advice of the Man in Seat 61. I highly recommend both train journeys. They were the best part of my holiday, and very good value.

AAAARGH

2010-12-18T00:22:00.000-07:00

The let's- humiliate-the-unemployed movement comes to Britain. This is how we can combine the iniquity of truck payments with all the stupidity of the Speenhamland system. Lets remove all dignity from people on benefits, so that a few (usually religiously motivated) do-gooders can feel good and go to heaven. Foodbanks.

On not leaving.

2010-12-14T18:42:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of weeks my husband has been telling me that I ought to make some kind of statement of loyalty to the Lib-Dems on this blog, what with ~~rats~~ people jumping ship, media obituaries for the party, low poll ratings, and so on.

What has made me hesitate is that saying I'm staying in the party is a kind of null blog entry, like saying I'm not going shopping this afternoon, or that after serious thought I've decided to eat dinner this evening.

I could explain at length why I think the people leaving the party, or wanting the party to leave the coalition, are wrong, but there are other people doing that far more cogently than I can. So, I'll just say this: I agree with him

The problem with Michael Ignatieff

2010-12-12T17:12:00.002-07:00

The British know Michael Ignatieff as an engaging liberal academic and TV pundit, so Canadian disenchantment with him as Liberal leader must be puzzling.

This article by Ottawa journalist Susan Riley takes a cool look at Ignatieff's strengths and weaknesses.

For my part, the biggest disappointment about Ignatieff is his complete implausibility on climate change, something he shares with the leaders of the other two parties. It is a huge volte face from the Liberals under Stéphane Dion.

The other off-putting thing about Ignatieff (which as a recent migrant from the UK, I'm probably more sensitive to than most) is that in his public appearances and statements he always seems to be trying to do a Tony Blair impression. If Blair is his model, it is not surprising that he is so often in agreement with the bushy Stephen Harper. Between the two of them they give Canadian politics a dated, cheesily stale air, which makes the Globe and Mail's current slogan: "Canada: Our Time to Lead" singularly inapt.

The Union Jack

2010-12-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

The British media have recently started using the term Union Flag in preference to Union Jack, as in this article about Charlie Gilmour. I don't understand why. It is technically correct, but so is Union Jack, and less likely to cause confusion. Union Flag brings to my mind the image of the USA flag, not the British one.

2010 things I didn't blog on at the time 1: Waiting for a duck.

2010-12-11T13:28:00.005-07:00

London, April 2010.

I suspect my old friend's teenage daughter disapproves of me. She thinks I am a bad influence on her mother, who needs firm guidance. The three of us are in the car, OF driving, me in the front seat, and TD in the back.

OF stops at the roundabout. I point out a duck on the pavement, looking as if it is about to cross the road. We wait. A small queue grows behind us.

"You're not supposed to stop for ducks you know", exclaims TD, exasperated.

A car horn honks. The duck flies off.

Our journey recommences with OF reciting:

What is this life if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare?
So who really gives a .....
If we were waiting for a duck?

Tuition fees

2010-12-07T18:26:00.000-07:00

At the time Labour brought in fees, my husband was working as a history lecturer at an ex-polytechnic university in a midlands town. Following their introduction, there was an immediate drop in applications, particularly from mature students. My husband's job was at threat from that point on, and he was eventually made redundant in 2004, when the university temporarily stopped offering a single honours history degree.

The opposition to tuition fees was not a significant factor in my joining the LD's. That had more to do with Iraq and civil liberties. But, I never questioned the policy, and certainly supported it until recently. My mind has been changed by the very persuasive articles by Peter Wilby in the Guardian, which among other things has reminded me that not only did the old system have considerable disadvantages, but that I experienced those disadvantages myself, and I also agree with Chris Rennard.

I do have some reservations, but nevertheless I accept that the no tuition fees policy was an error, and I think that Liberal Democrat MPs should vote for the bill.

I also want to say that the cock-up over the tuition fees pledge is the fault of the entire party, including people like me who didn't think very hard about an impractical policy, and I have a lot of sympathy for Nick Clegg who has been taking most of the flack.

Lush Cosmetics against Tarsands

2010-12-07T15:39:00.000-07:00

Every time environmental groups report that a big company is pledging to boycott tarsands oil, it seems to be quickly followed by a denial from the company concerned. Not so with Lush whose campaign manager had a very good letter in The Edmonton Journal today which states "The oilsands represent the biggest environmental disaster of our time."

Expect smelly bath-bombs for Christmas.

The working class's fear of debt

2010-12-06T17:29:00.000-07:00

Jackie Ashley in today's Guardian rolls out the old chestnut about the deep seated fear of debt in working class households.

At least, I think it is an old chestnut. Is there any evidence for it? My gut feeling is that it is more myth than substance, and if it was once true, it is of historical interest now. If not, why haven't we still got a substantial stock of social housing, since uptake of the right-to-buy was such a failure? Why are levels of household debt so high? It seems to me that the British public of all classes have embraced debt with enthusiasm in the last few decades. That's one of the reasons we are in the mess we're in.

Thank-you Lib Dem Bloggers

2010-12-06T12:35:00.001-07:00

As an exiled Englishwoman, perennially homesick, and with a great love of the parochial, idiosyncratic and mildly eccentric aspects of English life, I'd like to thank all the Lib Dem bloggers who blog on local affairs. Today's posts include:

latest Fuller's Earth saga
Spotlight on Cricklewood (Alan Coren lives)
Grit bin requests
and Bubble cars in churchtown

The individual posts are usually mundane and worthy notices about local issues, but the English tapestry the headings create on my blog-list gives me great pleasure. Thank-you all.

Happy 90th Birthday Mr Brubeck

2010-12-05T22:06:00.002-07:00

Baby boomers and "free" education.

2010-12-04T10:51:00.002-07:00

I do get fed up with commentators referring to the free education had by my generation and comparing it to the high cost of further education for students now. Actually, taken as a whole, students now are better off than my generation for two reasons.

Firstly, far more young people have the opportunity to go to college. That was something only enjoyed by a minority of my generation. The lack of opportunity started long before you got to further education. In the London suburb where I lived there weren't enough grammar school places for all the girls who passed the 11+, so you only got a place at a grammar school on an interview and a reference from your head-teacher. That enabled the head at the grammar school I attended to weed out any children from council-estates, or who were black, or belonged to any other minority she despised.

Despite having la creme de la creme at the school, the number of girls who went on to further education was pitifully small. Each year consisted of 90 girls, and less than half went on to any form of further education, but only 15 or so to university, the rest to 2 year teacher training or nursing college.

Secondly, you could only get a grant for college if your parents were prepared to be means tested and sign a grant form. Mine refused. So, I left home and got married, which was not a good move, because when I applied for a grant a couple of years later, I was awarded a "married woman's grant" which was far less than I could live on.

If I'd been able to take out a student loan, that made me independent of my parents, and that I would not have to start repaying until I was in work and my income had reached a certain level, I'd have jumped at the chance. It would have seemed like heaven to me.

Variations on Godwin's Law.

2010-12-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

As I'm sure you know, Godwin's Law states that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.

After lengthy study of The Guardian's Comment is Free pages, I can add the following variations:

In any online discussion of an English Parliament the probability of someone mentioning Edgar the Atheling approaches.
In any online discussion of climate change the probability of someone mentioning the measurements he has been taking in his back yard approaches.
In any discussion of the economy the probability of someone mentioning the coming crisis of capitalism approaches.
In any discussion of Christianity the probability of someone mentioning Hypatia approaches.

I'll let you know if I find any more.

The Green Deal

2010-11-28T15:18:00.001-07:00

Juliette Jowit in the Guardian on Wednesday made some very good points about the loans that home-owners will be able to take out for energy saving makeovers.

She points out that on the Decc's own figures, if the loan is taken out for solid-wall insulation, the annual payments for the loan will be more than the amount saved on fuel.

Jowit does not take into account the effect on the home's value of making the improvement. At the moment insulation may not increase the home's value very much, but as fuel bills rise, buyers are going to become more aware of the value of insulation and at the very least, insulation will make a home easier to sell. So, home-owners may choose to take out one of the loans on the basis that even if they end up paying a little more than they are saving on fuel, they will increase the amount of equity in their home.

It also seems likely that solid-wall insulation will become cheaper as the market for it grows.

Nevertheless, Jowitt has highlighted a major problem with the scheme. I'm fairly certain that most of the UK's housing stock is still pre-1930's and built with solid-wall construction.

Jowit also points out that a number of policies on climate change, for example the EU emissions trading, are driving up underlying energy bills, effectively amounting to a form of regressive taxation. Surely this is true of all green taxes? Even where the taxation is a tax on industry, as with the carbon trading scheme, the cost will ultimately be borne by the consumer. I don't see that this is a bad thing. Consumers need to be encouraged to reduce their use of fossil fuels and the easiest way to do this is to raise the price. The regressive effect can be ameliorated by using some or all of the revenue from green taxes for progressive tax allowances.

Those charging horses

2010-11-26T14:36:00.001-07:00

I'm very fed up with watching videos of policemen assaulting peaceful protesters or keeping them penned in (surely false imprisonment?) for hours on end, together with bystanders who weren't even demonstrating.

As someone who has been on many marches, and also organised peaceful demonstrations, I'm very concerned that British citizens can no longer exercise their lawful right to march safely, without risking police assault.

Can anybody seriously think that the British police are dealing with protest marches appropriately or even legally? Their current methods are clearly inflaming and inciting violence and making things worse.

I agree with David Cameron that protesters who commit acts of violence or vandalism should be prosecuted, but such people are always a small minority on any march and their actions do not alter the fact that there is an urgent need to review police methods for dealing with public order.

Canada's insidious campaigning against climate change action

2010-11-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

Emma Pullman on DeSmogBlog details how Canadian and Albertan governments are using public funds to try to undermine US and EU climate change legislation.

We shall not be moved

2010-11-24T18:23:00.000-07:00

To the students in Oxford whose education has clearly been too narrow in scope -- the next line is

Like a tree that's standing by the waterside

We shall not be moved.

Canada's example

2010-11-23T13:31:00.000-07:00

If you still think that following Canada's example is a good idea, take a look at the graph on the right hand side of this BBC page.

Arctic Weather

2010-11-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

The Grauniad's In Praise of column often has an Eeyore quality, a clutching at straws by hacks forcing themselves to view the glass as half full, even though they really think the world is a damp and boggy place, leading to pathetic pleasure in a burst balloon and an empty jamjar.

Today it's "Arctic Weather". Nothing to praise from where I'm standing Sunshine! The temperature outside at midday is a balmy -9°C, up from -24° first thing this morning. Yesterday it got down to below -25° and never got above -17°.

Canada and Climate Change

2010-11-21T17:24:00.004-07:00

At Cancun, Canada will be playing its usual role of trying to obstruct any meaningful progress. Canada's own target of a 17% emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2020 is both totally inadequate and totally unreachable on current policies. Stephen Harper's Conservative government's aims are quite clear. Harper was a climate change denier when he came into office in '06, and has only changed his line since to keep in step with the USA. Under Harper, Canada is betting its economic shirt on the tarsands industry, the emissions from which are so high that arguably the industry's success depends on potential importers -- chiefly the USA and China - not treating climate change seriously.

But what of the two opposition parties, the Liberals and the NDP? If, following the next election, the Liberals were able to form a minority government with NDP support, would Canada start taking constructive steps to reduce its emissions? The recent performance of both parties does not augur well.

The last federal election in 2008 was fought on the issue of climate change. The Liberals,led by Stéphane Dion, put forward a radical and detailed "Green Shift" programme which would have used carbon taxes to force a shift of Canada's economy from carbon intensive industry to green technologies. The aim was to reduce Canada's emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. However, the Liberals lost the election, Dion resigned, Michael Ignatieff took over as leader; the green shift and carbon taxes were immediately forgotten.

The Liberal Party currently supports a cap and trade system to reduce emissions, but is vague about targets. Ignatieff has a habit of contradicting himself, and it is difficult to tell how sincere he is about this (or any other) issue. Prior to Dion's leadership, the Liberal Party's record on climate change has been described as "hot air", paying lip-service but doing nothing. The signs are that the Liberals are back to business as usual.

The NDP also supports a cap and trade system, but is against carbon taxes, and on that basis opposed the Green Shift. They want a 25% emissions reduction by 2020 and an 80% reduction of emissions from 1990 levels by 2050, but their road plan for getting there is no more substantial than the Liberals', and given that they don't support carbon taxes, the target is in the realm of fantasy.

The Climate Change Accountability Act was to embed the NDP targets into law. It was introduced by the NDP and passed with Liberal and Bloc Québécois support. The Act is a short read - little more than 2 pages - and that's only with the bilingual translation. It's a holiday brochure without a price list, an itinerary, a map, or a picture of the hotel. I've been told a lot of work went into it, in which case I'd like that job. The Act has just been killed by the Senate.

The problem with Canada adopting a target for 2020 which is actually more ambitious than the EU's is that whereas the EU had reduced its emissions by 8% from 1990 by 2005, Canada had increased its emissions by 10.54%. A lot of that growth has come from the tarsands, and although the NDP have called for a moratorium on new tarsands development (while Ignatieff has boasted about having enough oil for the USA for a hundred years), even the NDP has not suggested the tarsands should close down tomorrow.

The Senate rejection of the Act has enabled the opposition parties to complain about lack of democracy. The Act was never going to achieve much else, and cynical me suspects it was never intended to. I know a number of young people who are sincerely disappointed. Meanwhile the NDP is campaigning to abolish the Federal Sales Tax on home heating, one of the very few taxes on carbon in Canada.

Scallion Rap

2010-11-21T13:43:00.002-07:00

I've started a separate blog about cooking called Scallion Rap.

The NHS

2010-11-18T14:01:00.003-07:00

Partly due to the very poor health care that I and other members of my family received in the years before I emigrated to Canada in '06, I do not share the British NHS fetish. I am a NHS sceptic who wonders if it would be better to re-organise it following the example of some of our European neighbours who as David Laws says in his Orange Book chapter.

"succeed in delivering health services with greater choice and competition than our own, but also with better health outcomes and fairer access for lower income groups."

After we came to Canada it did not take long to decide that we would not stay here in old age, (partly because seeing homeless people freezing on the streets makes me cry). However, my first thought was not to go home, but plan for retirement in France, where as well as lovely countryside and nice food, there is a greater chance of surviving if you have a stroke. That plan was vetoed by my multi-lingual husband on the grounds that although he speaks several foreign languages, he refuses to die in one. So, England it is, and we will have to take the health service as we find it.

It follows that I am comforted by the report in today's Guardian that "the NHS fares better on free access to healthcare" out of 11 advanced industrialised nations, even though I think the report by the American Commonwealth Fund needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. There are a number of factors liable to skew the figures.

For example, it is usual for people in both France and Canada to have annual health check-ups with a full blood screen, which is fairly time consuming for the patient. I've currently got one routine screen outstanding from my annual check-up in August. It is not surprising that more people in both countries report skipping a test, treatment or follow-up than in the UK where there is far less screening. This has nothing to do with access to treatment being denied.

Nevertheless the report does suggest that the NHS is doing relatively better than I'd realised, and I am a little reassured.

Homeless families in Edmonton (Alberta)

2010-11-16T14:59:00.000-07:00

The results of the biennial homelessness count were published today. Unexpectedly, the figure is down 21% from the last count to 2,400 (Edmonton's total population is 730,000). That includes people sleeping in the streets and in hostels, but not the wider definition of homelessness we'd use in the UK.

Whereas the majority of the homeless are singles there are about 70 families. About half of these are absolutely homeless - that is sleeping on the streets, and they include sixty-two children. No you didn't read that wrong. There are sixty-two children sleeping on the streets, in a stairwell or in a tent, in this one, small, Canadian city.

The temperature this afternoon is -10°C, feels like -18°C with wind chill. Tonight it is expected to fall to -18°C (that's about the temperature of the inside of your freezer).

The stories that mattered on climate science

2010-11-15T18:49:00.000-07:00

Climate Progress has a summary of the really important climate science stories that were missed while the media (including The Guardian) concentrated on the non-story of "climate-gate".

It makes for worrying reading.

Student Fees and the Canadian example

2010-11-14T13:56:00.000-07:00

An interesting article in the Globe and Mail, by economist Armine Yalnizyan, comparing the UK's austerity measures with Canada's in the nineties, with special reference to the hike in student fees.

The author makes some interesting points about the effect of rising fees in Canada, but, note that the average tuition fee in Ontario is currently $6,307 p.a, which is roughly comparable to the fees currently being paid in Britain. That means that the increased UK fees in two year's time are going to be two or three times what Canadian students are paying.

Holy Days and Fasting Days

2010-11-12T17:55:00.000-07:00

There are a large number of web pages stating that the Holy Days and Fasting Days Act of 1551, which makes church attendance on Christmas Day compulsory, is still in force. James Paice MP is one of the authors.

I'm sorry to spoil the fun, but the Act was actually repealed by the Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1969.

Shellac, Tim Farron and Christmas Cake

2010-11-12T10:57:00.001-07:00

I was interested to discover, from Mark Mardell's blog, that shellac, as a verb, can mean trounce in North America, while we Brits only use it for varnishing. Knowing what the Washington Post meant does not alter my mental image of a shiny shellacked Obama.

I was impressed by Tim Farron's piece in the Guardian. I'm glad I voted for him.

Today I'm making a Christmas cake, although I'm not sure this is a wise thing for me to do. I may end up eating most of it myself. As a rule, North Americans, including Canadians, do not like baked dried fruit, or the flavour of mixed spice. However, Ian has promised me that if I make a cake, pudding and mince pies, he will eat his share.

Terry Pratchett Interview

2010-11-05T09:42:00.000-06:00

Prepare to be charmed. Routledge are promoting the journal of the Folklore Society with podcasts of a conversation between Sir Terry Pratchett and Dr Jacqueline Simpson, who has, as Pratchett puts it, an "accent that runs round Europe", not dissimilar to that of the denizens of Uberwald. The first podcast also features Sir Terry singing a folksong, and it's not about hedgehogs.

A weird day on Jane's blog

2010-11-03T23:09:00.000-06:00

Two things happened on this blog today:

Someone has left their entire life story in comments.

A government left a comment. Admittedly it's only the government of Alberta, population one third the size of Greater London, but it's still a government.

Beat that.

Poppies red and white

2010-11-03T15:46:00.000-06:00

The Royal Canadian Legion is yet again threatening a legal action to prevent the sale of white poppies in Canada -- this time in Prince Edward Island (the last time was in Edmonton). In recent years, as well as opposing the sale of the internationally known symbol of the Peace Pledge Union, the Legion has objected to an academic reassessment of Vimy Ridge -- a battle which has become a totemic symbol of Canada's nationhood.

I used to buy a red poppy in the UK, but I've been rather taken aback by the political stance taken by the RCL. That is not the role that I expect the Legion to play. I expect them to ensure the war dead are remembered with respect and to help veterans and their families. I don't expect them to assume a monopoly of the historic record or threaten legal action against pacifists. So I regret that yet again I won't be buying a poppy.

EU delegation to the tar-sands

2010-11-03T12:25:00.000-06:00

Yesterday an EU delegation toured the tar-sands. What is at stake is how the EU Fuels Quality Directive is implemented. Since the Directive is intended to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of fuel used in the EU, it has the potential to ban the import of tarsands oil. However, a direct reference to tarsands oil was taken out of the legislation, thanks to oil industry lobbying.

It's interesting to note the importance the Canadian and Albertan governments have attached to this visit, even though the EU is currently a very small market for Alberta's dirty oil. Federal minister Iris Evans even described it as "crucial". She stated that the fear is of the EU's influence on other states who might implement similar legislation.

Kellie Cottam replies

2010-11-03T10:10:00.001-06:00

Kellie and her mum have both replied to my post on the article about her in the Daily Mail. As I suspected, the Daily Mail contrived to give an impression of a much more luxurious lifestyle than Kellie actually has.

Food Banks and Halloween

2010-11-01T09:51:00.000-06:00

Halloween is one of the delights of living in Canada. Canadian kids are very well behaved; there is no risk of getting broken eggs all over your parked car as there can be in the UK. They only call if you have your lights on, and most will only call if they see you have a pumpkin or other Halloween decorations. We were visited by about 20 trick or treaters this year. Their costumes were mostly home-made. One child was a "transformer" made from cardboard and papier mâché, with flashing head-lights -- amazing!

There was one embarrassing moment when a dad carrying his tiny tot did not want candy, but asked for food for the food bank. We don't give to the food bank.

Food banks are a difficult issue for me. I feel very strongly that rich countries like the UK and Canada can afford for all their citizens to be adequately housed with enough income to feed themselves and provide a basic standard of living. I think that if people have to accept charity, particularly if it is in the form of goods rather than money, that is demeaning for the giver and the receiver alike. It is precisely what the welfare state was created to avoid.

I've stated several times on this blog -- and I can't state it often enough -- that Canada did not cut its deficit in the 90's without social cost. It did so by creating a permanent underclass of many thousands of homeless people in every city, dependent on charity to survive. It is not acceptable for that to happen in the UK.

Food banks fill some of the gap left by the welfare cuts, but they are not a good solution. The American experience shows that donations to food banks go down during a recession when the donors are themselves feeling the pinch, but when the banks are needed most. Much of the food donated by food producers is of poor quality or inappropriate to needs. One might hope that the existence of food banks would shame governments into increasing welfare payments, but in the USA and Canada, the opposite seems to be the case: food banks have become an accepted alternative to welfare payments, and in the USA they are funded by taxpayers' dollars as well as charitable donations.

A friend who works at a food bank in Toronto has argued with me that I should donate to food banks, whatever my reservations, because I can't deny people need the food. But I feel that if I do, I am implicitly accepting an ideology that prefers discretionary charity to welfare payments as of right, and what is more I am encouraging the decay of the welfare state by assisting in the growth of the alternative.

Enjoy your Halloween

2010-10-29T19:07:00.000-06:00

Bill Maher hating Britain

2010-10-29T09:58:00.000-06:00

Just in case you haven't seen this already:

Stuck in the corner with...

2010-10-28T14:24:00.000-06:00

Bracknell Blog yesterday led to my doing the political compass test for the umpteenth time.

As usual I'm in the bottom left hand quadrant with Mandela and the Dalai Lama, although over the years I seem to have been drifting away from the former and towards the latter. It's a bit lonely down here. I think it would help pass the time if one of us played a musical instrument. The top right hand quadrant on the other hand seems to have a party going on, though you'd want the music turned up loud to avoid having to engage in conversation with Stephen Harper or George Bush.

My position is also a long way from the placing of the Liberal Democrats for the general election this year who were put in the rarely used bottom right hand quadrant. The Greens on the other hand are down in the secular saints' corner with me.

Cobblers. I'm not a socialist. It's a crap, biased quiz.

Soros

2010-10-27T23:35:00.001-06:00

The Guardian is praising George Soros. Hear, hear. Definitely one of the good guys. I recommend his dad's book Masquerade, which is about how he survived the holocaust in Budapest. It's a good read and it gives an insight into how Soros became Soros. Tivadar Soros originally wrote it in Esperanto.

More on Kelly Cottam

2010-10-27T14:54:00.000-06:00

Let's examine Kelly's case in more detail. Why does she get such high benefits? Can they be reduced without causing undue hardship to her and her children? Is such a high level of benefit a disincentive to work? Are working parents on the median wage actually worse off than Kelly?

There are things to like and dislike about Kelly. Despite a disability and 4 kids she has done a degree and is doing a further training course. She wants to work. She's made the most of what is available and she has four presentable children. She's probably a good mother. On the negative side one wonders why a woman with an inheritable illness has had four kids and also why she chooses to be a useful fool for the Daily Mail. One also wonders where the fathers are and why they aren't paying maintenance (or are they actually paying child support direct to the CSA, which the Daily Mail has forgotten to mention?).

The Daily Mail article doesn't itemise Kelly's benefits to explain how they add up to £37,000, so I tried to estimate them using the government calculator. Incidentally, playing with the calculator will make you an instant fan of IDS's proposed simplification of the benefits system. I hadn't realised quite how Byzantine it had become.

I assumed that Kelly is paying the average rent for a 4 bedroom house in Chorley, which, using Rightmove, I estimate at £800 a month, and I also assumed that she is getting the maximum in disability benefits. Even so, I only reached a total of £34,836.88, more than £2,000 below the £37,000 she says she gets. The extra £2,000 could be because she is paying an above average rent, or because the training course she is doing is government sponsored, or she is simply taking into account the value of the benefits in kind such as free school meals for Liam and Daniel and her travel costs to hospital for NHS treatment.

So how can money be saved? The most obvious way is less expensive housing. Until Aaron is older she could manage with a 3 bed house, but it must be borne in mind that any property she is in must be adapted for her disability. It is probably cheaper to adapt 4 bed accommodation for her now, than to do it now for a 3 bed and later for a 4 bed house. Anyway, let's assume that Kelly is paying an above average rent for her accommodation and could save £2,000 a year by moving. That leaves her with an income of £35,000, still £9,000 above the £26,000 cap on benefits that is going to be imposed.

Next, could Kelly manage on less for child support? I calculate this at £10,279.36 in child tax credits and £3,146 in child benefit. Note that Kelly's child tax credits are higher because she has a child under one year old and will be going down in 6 months time. Now the really interesting thing about these benefits is that Kelly would not lose them if she started working. She keeps the child benefit as long as she is not paying a higher rate of tax. She keeps the child tax credit in full if on a low wage and it would be withdrawn in stages as her income went up. In other words the system is already designed to ensure that someone who has children is never better off not working. The rates are also already graded to take into account the economies of scale that can be made with a large family.

The final part of Kelly's income is the amount she gets for her own maintenance. I've assumed that she gets the highest rates of incapacity benefit of £4,752.80, disabled living allowance of £3,712.80 and mobility allowance of £2,592.2.

The long-term rate of incapacity benefit is significantly higher than income support. If Kelly was on income support she would only be getting £3,403.40 p.a. Whether you think that is justified depends on whether you think someone on incapacity benefit is a disabled person deserving sympathy or a work-shy scrounger. For the sake of argument we will assume that you are a Daily Mail reader and reduce Kelly's benefit by the difference of £1,349.4. But that still leaves Kelly with £33,650. We've still got to find £7,650 to dock off Kelly's income.

So shall we scrap Kelly's disability living allowance and mobility allowance completely, saving £6,305? Despite the fact that these are benefits that would not be withdrawn if she was working? Despite the fact that without them she would probably find it impossible to even look for work? I know someone in a wheelchair who has to pay £44 for a taxi every time she wants to go shopping, so Kelly's mobility allowance probably covers one shopping trip a week.

As far as I can estimate, the figure of £60,000, that Kelly says she needs to make it worth her while working, does not take into account the benefits she would continue to receive if she got a job.

So, in answer to the questions I posed earlier:

Kelly gets such high benefits chiefly because of an unusual combination of a large family and physical disability. All 50.000 of the families affected by the benefit cap probably fit this profile.
Can her benefits be reduced without causing her and her children undue hardship? Yes, but not to anywhere near the £26,000 level.
Is such a high level of benefit a disincentive to work? Apparently not in Kelly's case, and since many of the benefits she gets would be retained if she was at work, this is a question to which the answer is no. However, I wonder why we think it important to get a disabled woman with four children, two of whom are under three, into work at all.
Are working parents on a median wage actually worse off than Kelly? Since they have access to many of the benefits she has, I'd say probably not.

So, now I'd like you, dear reader, to explain to me how you think Kelly should adapt her lifestyle to live on £26,000 a year.

The crime of living comfortably

2010-10-26T18:39:00.000-06:00

Being in Canada, I can't watch the news item about Kelly Cottam, but I can see the blurb: "She admits she lives a comfortable lifestyle".

Gosh -- that's appalling isn't it? The gall of the woman. A single mother with four children living a comfortable lifestyle. What can we do about that? I know. Let's make them pick oakum.

Pension again

2010-10-25T21:27:00.000-06:00

The Guardian editorial explains that the proposed change to pensions entitlement actually scraps the state second pension, and raises the basic pension reducing the need for, not abolishing, means testing. It says the Daily Mail suggested wrongly that the pension would be granted to anyone who'd lived in the UK for a certain period of time, conveniently forgetting that the piece in Monday's Guardian did the same thing, or at least that's the meaning I'd give to the words "the new system would be based on residency".

So it seems my voluntary contributions were not pointless after all.

The latest CAPP Pin-up.

2010-10-25T18:44:00.000-06:00

CAPP's latest pin-up is John Parr. John is a hunky kind of guy, mature but still in his prime. He's wearing a crisp blue open necked shirt, that speaks no-nonsense professionalism. He has a serious, soulful look, with a slight furrow to his brow; you can tell he's deep and he cares. He's standing in front of a lake. Yes, it's that lake again. John works for Canadian Natural at the Primrose development (what a pretty name for a slice of Mordor).

The shout caps read "Through innovation we've achieved a huge reduction in fresh water use. More solutions are within reach".

One hopes he is right. Take a look at this article in The Economist. In March the Pembina Institute did a report on the steam assisted method of extracting oil from the deeper sands, which is touted as less environmentally damaging than open pit mining. "Projects were judged on general environmental management, land use, air emissions, water use and impact on climate change, and then given an overall score." Guess what, Canadian Natural's project at Primrose scored the lowest at 25%. And, they scored poorly on commitment to regional environmental initiatives.

Nobody from Canadian Natural was available to comment. Maybe they were hanging out at the lake.

The £140 pension

2010-10-25T16:14:00.000-06:00

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it.

But, I'm one of the thousands of people who have paid voluntary payments to make up for the gap in their National Insurance record. That option, by the way, is open to anyone not paying NI compulsorily, such as a full-time mother, and it can be done later, when she is back at work. Furthermore, a lot of the women pensioners, who are not receiving full pensions, voluntarily elected to pay the lower NI "married woman's rate" when they were working, knowing that it would deprive them of a pension.

That's not to say that the present system is fair to women who are full-time carers, but the fact is that it is possible to get a full pension even if you have gaps in your employment, and there will be a lot of people who took care to cover those gaps feeling they might as well not have bothered.

State Pension Age

2010-10-24T11:53:00.000-06:00

I'm grateful to Radio 4's Money Box Live for providing a calculator for the new pension ages. It was reassuring for me personally because it shows that Ian's retirement age is unaffected and mine is only delayed by a month.

On the other hand I can't work out whether I'll get any of the Equitable Life compensation. I've always been confused by this issue, and I've probably made the wrong decisions. I had a small fund with a guaranteed endowment rate which does not mature until I'm 60. I lost the guaranteed annuity as a result of the collapse. I've read that anyone like me who invested before 1992 hasn't lost anything, but I don't see how that is the case. However, I also invested after 1992, so maybe I get some compensation for that. Apparently I should also have taken my fund out of Equitable Life and invested it elsewhere, but at the time there was such a whopping penalty for transferring my fund that I thought it best to leave it where it was. I suppose I should have consulted an IFA, but by that point I'd been given some very bad investment advice by an IFA that lost me thousands, so I'd decided to make my own investment decisions from that point on.

The fact is that market investments are too much of a gamble for people who are on small or medium incomes, but some of us have no choice but make our own provision if we are not in employment with a pension scheme. If I had to do it all again I would not take out a private pension policy at all, and do all my saving in building society accounts, or National Savings. Alternatively I'd just put all my money into buying a property. Despite the recent dip in property prices and the further fall we will probably have, property has been the best investment in my lifetime.

Appeal for middle-class families.

2010-10-22T15:11:00.000-06:00

I've spent an enjoyable morning going through the Two Ronnies clips on YouTube trying to find their charity appeal for middle-class families sketch. I can't find it, which is a pity because it would be a wonderful response to the surgeon's wife (economising by growing her own courgettes), the IT consultant interviewed on Radio 4 (deserves child benefit for putting the children to bed) , and all the other rich women who've been pleading poverty because they are losing their child benefit.

As I remember it, Ron and Ron made an appeal for donations for "middle class families who haven't got quite enough", the sketch ending with a solemn reminder that "this Christmas thousands of children will go without a skiing holiday."

Since I can't find the sketch, here's Ronnie Barker as the Minister of Cuts:

The Spending Review

2010-10-20T10:01:00.000-06:00

My instant reaction.

Overall, I'm relieved that it is not as bad as I feared.

The measures for schools which show definite LD input are the most satisfactory. My two oldest friends are teachers in inner-city schools, who voted LD for the first time this year. I've been wondering if they are still speaking to me ever since, but I think they are going to be pleased by this.

However, I'm very unhappy about the prioritisation of universal benefits over welfare. I fear that British society is going to increasingly look like Canada, with an underclass who are homeless and/or dependent on charitable handouts. I don't find that remotely acceptable.

I predict that the rise in the age threshold for housing benefit will result in a flood of homeless young people sleeping on the streets as we had when Thatcher removed benefits for young people. Expect tent-cities in London parks. There will be a reduction in sex-trafficked migrants smuggled into the UK because the pimps will find plenty of recruits among our homeless young women.

The time-limited invalidity benefit together with the cap on benefits for large families is going to have a disastrous affect on the lives of many vulnerable people. It will result in broken marriages, children going into care and single parents and disabled people who would benefit from the support of a relationship being forced to struggle on alone.

Protecting non means-tested fuel allowance while slashing welfare benefits is breathtakingly cynical, and of course exactly the kind of thing Brown would have done.

I'm also very conscious that were Ian and I still in the UK, the spending review would be a disaster for us personally. We are in Canada because Ian's an historian who was made redundant by his university in 2004, but if he'd kept his job he'd be facing redundancy now, and I'd be losing my incapacity benefit, leaving us subsisting on very inadequate pensions. I used to be a legal-aid family lawyer, so even if I'd still been working, I would be hurting now. There are a lot of measures in the review that look a lot more bearable from 4,000 miles away.

Ian and I are going to be affected by the rise in state pension age. I think all people in their fifties would like the details as soon as possible so that we can amend our plans for our retirement. This is going to be a big blow for many women. However, it is also something I accept as a necessary and fair economy.

My mum is likely to be affected by the changes to social care. I'm pleased by the localisation, but if the NHS had not been ring-fenced, social care would not need this level of cuts. Should we expect a log-jam of elderly people to taking up much needed hospital beds because there are no care places for them?

What is very clear is the Liberal Democrat input into the review. That is a boost for us. I can't pretend to be happy with the coalition economic policy. I would have preferred the deficit to be reduced over 2 government terms, not one, and although some regressive measures are inevitable with cuts of this size, I think the most deprived are being hit too hard. However, the Conservatives on their own would be far worse.

Dr Who again -- again.

2010-10-19T13:28:00.001-06:00

Excuse me for posting this, but not everyone who reads this blog reads John Rentoul. My domestic experience suggests that the humour of Questions to which the answer is No doesn't survive the Canadian irony deficit. Anyway this is my patriotic fix for the day:

Shock Announcement: Environment not Top Priority for Alberta

2010-10-17T23:10:00.001-06:00

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/alberta-offers-toned-down-green-emphasis/article1757799/

You couldn't parody these clowns, and anyway they make it unnecessary to do so.

Fair Chance

2010-10-15T09:46:00.000-06:00

I received Nick Clegg's email today titled "Giving a Fair Chance to Every Child". Surely that should have read "Giving a Fair Chance to Every Child except those from Large Families"?

Lego Don

2010-10-14T23:11:00.002-06:00

I love this election video from one of the candidates in the Edmonton City Election:

Universality and the Welfare Safety-Net

2010-10-11T19:43:00.000-06:00

To me, it seems a very big leap to say that the coalition is abandoning the welfare state principal of universality, just because it is removing child benefit from higher rate taxpayers. As Michael White has pointed out the welfare state has always been full of quirks and anomalies. The way some politicians and commentators have reacted, you would have thought that Osborne had announced the introduction of means tested health care.

I'm much more worried that the coalition will do the opposite: that is maintain universal benefits at the expense of the welfare safety-net. Based on my observations since I moved here, I'd say that is exactly what has happened in Canada. Universal benefits such as education, libraries and health care are generally very good. The contribution based state pension is better than the UK's (no surprise there). But, on the other hand, the welfare safety-net fails many thousands of Canadians who need help, who end up on the streets, or dependent on food-banks to feed themselves and their families, and even more live with the stress of being just one or two paychecks away from disaster.

There are good grounds for being concerned that the coalition will prioritise universality over welfare. It is already doing so; not only is the NHS ring-fenced, but less justifiably universal benefits for the elderly are, as yet, only subject to rumours of cutbacks. It is the means tested benefits of last resort which are being reformed, and children in large families on welfare will lose the most through the cap on payments. I see absolutely no justification for this. However galling it is to see large families on benefits getting more than than the median income, the fact is there are very few such families, and the saving for the state is tiny. Since some children will probably end up in care as a result of their family's loss of income, there may even be an overall financial loss.

I don't like living in Canada. I don't like living in a society that has thousands of people sleeping on the streets. I don't like living in a society where thousands of people need help from food banks. I regard that as too high a price to pay for good schools and libraries and free health care. I don't want Britain to become like that, so I'd welcome the slashing of universal benefits, if that will preserve the welfare safety net.

My year of Shingles

2010-10-08T10:30:00.001-06:00

I spent the first four months of 2010 nursing my mum through a bad attack of shingles. Now I've got it. On Wednesday evening I noticed what looked like a mosquito bite on my waist (we are having an Indian summer here, so a bite was not impossible). Yesterday evening the single blister had become a line running for a few inches round my waist -- a classic shingles rash. I've been feeling under the weather for a few weeks and had an itchy back; that is often how the disease starts.

I didn't catch it from mum. You can't catch shingles from someone else. I've got it because I had chicken pox as a child, because I have a genetic vulnerability, and because I've been under physical and emotional stress (I've just had two abscessed teeth treated and we've had a death in the family).

On New Year's Day I blogged about the vaccine (currently unavailable in the UK), and about the ethically dubious UK policy of not vaccinating children against chicken-pox in order to protect the older generations, so I won't repeat myself, but I will say this:

IF YOU ARE OVER 50 YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SHINGLES. The chance of getting the disease increases with age and by the time you are retired you are very likely to get it and the symptoms will be more severe. Treatment with anti-viral drugs can lessen the symptoms, but you need to start taking them within 72 hours of the rash appearing. Make sure you know how to recognise the rash.

I'm still within the 72 hours. I'm seeing the doctor at 1.30 today, so hopefully I'm not going to go through the agony endured by my mum and my brother.

On Romney Marsh

2010-10-07T14:49:00.000-06:00

National Poetry Day is an excuse to share this poem by John Davidson with you:

As I went down to Dymchurch Wall,
I heard the South sing o'er the land
I saw the yellow sunlight fall
On knolls where Norman churches stand.

And ringing shrilly, taut and lithe,
Within the wind a core of sound,
The wire from Romney town to Hythe
Along its airy journey wound.

A veil of purple vapour flowed
And trailed its fringe along the Straits;
The upper air like sapphire glowed:
And roses filled Heaven's central gates.

Masts in the offing wagged their tops;
The swinging waves pealed on the shore;
The saffron beach, all diamond drops
And beads of surge, prolonged the roar.

As I came up from Dymchurch Wall,
I saw above the Downs' low crest
The crimson brands of sunset fall,
Flicker and fade from out the West.

Night sank: like flakes of silver fire
The stars in one great shower came down;
Shrill blew the wind; and shrill the wire
Rang out from Hythe to Romney town.

The darkly shining salt sea drops
Streamed as the waves clashed on the shore;
The beach, with all its organ stops
Pealing again, prolonged the roar.

Davidson was a Scotsman who abandoned a career as a teacher to write. He committed suicide aged 52 in 1909, by drowning himself at sea. When I was a small child my family spent summers on Romney Marsh, and as a London child, I loved the open space and freedom to roam there. When I was given this poem to read for a drama exam, it was the first time I'd read anything that echoed my own experience. I liked the truthfulness of including the pervasive sound of the wind in the telegraph wire in a nature poem.

Climate Prosperity

2010-10-07T10:23:00.000-06:00

"While the phrase ‘climate change’ is familiar to many — and a scientifically accepted phenomenon — the phrase ‘climate prosperity’ is newer. It is a phrase the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy wants Canadians to embrace."

The Canadian Government's spin on climate change. Richard Littlemore dissects it here.

Edmonton Civic Elections

2010-10-06T11:52:00.001-06:00

Edmonton's civic election, which is held every 3 years, takes place next Monday. Edmontonians vote for a mayor and 12 councillors, one per ward. I'm fairly certain that the election is FPTP. Elected councillors receive a salary, currently $79,787; the mayor gets $144,061. These salaries are augmented by health care, a vehicle allowance, and partial tax exemption. The small size of the council is admirably lean and efficient, and the salaries, while good enough to attract able candidates, are not excessive.

For some reason that I don't understand, the political parties have no involvement in civic politics. All candidates are non party-political. Campaigning is very low key, which makes it very difficult to work out what candidates stand for or believe in, except for their position one or two current high-profile issues, such as whether a new sports arena should be built downtown. The elephant in the room is homelessness, which only fails to be treated as a current crisis because it is chronic; I've not been able to discover how any of the candidates in our ward would deal with the issue.

I don't have a vote (which I resent), but Ian does. So far he has not received one candidate leaflet. No canvassers have come to the door. Most candidates seem to think the watchword for success is anodyne. The incumbent councillor in our ward is Ben Henderson; view the first interview with him on this page for a demonstration of how to spend an entire minute talking but saying absolutely nothing.

Homelessness in Canada

2010-10-05T13:49:00.001-06:00

Edmonton is carrying out its annual count of the homeless, that is of rough sleepers or people in temporary shelters - a much narrower definition of homelessness than in the UK. The last time the count was done was in 2008 when there were 3078. It is expected that the figure will be higher this time. Edmonton has a total population of less than 1,000,000. Those homeless figures will be repeated in every city in Canada.

By way of comparison, there are around 500 people sleeping rough in the whole of England and between 90,000 and 100,000 households in temporary accommodation (many of whom would not be classed as homeless by the Edmonton criteria).

I often wax lyrical about the standard of Edmonton's public library service, and I could also praise the quality of their public buildings, and the funding for further education and the health service; but the fact is the priorities for public spending here shock and appal me. A large number of the people on the streets have obvious mental health or substance abuse problems or are learning disabled, and this is a city which in the winter can become the coldest place on the planet. Yes, people do freeze to death.

capitals

2010-10-04T11:34:00.000-06:00

i just want to point out that david marsh in today's guardian, setting out the case against using capitals, nevertheless capitalises Estate Agents.

More Kindling

2010-10-03T11:27:00.000-06:00

My experiments with downloading kindle files from the Internet Archive have not been an unalloyed success. Some of them are too garbled to be easily read. Two of them were completely different books to the book described. One of them crashed my Kindle and I needed Amazon's technical help to get it up and running again. On the other hand, I've managed to get a complete collection of Peninsular War memoirs from members of the 95th Rifles and the regimental history by Sir William Cope, and it is a lot easier reading them on the Kindle than in PDF form on my computer screen.

On the plus side, I've discovered the cheap classics sold by Amazon and am building up a huge library just because I can. So far I have the complete works of Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Edith Wharton. I'm disappointed that I can't find a complete Proust.

Karl Pyrdum, of Got Medieval is delighted by the Kindle screensaver from the Lindisfarne Gospels and may augment it with another 24 medieval images. I hope he does.

Religious Knowledge

2010-10-02T11:43:00.000-06:00

Michael Tomasky didn't set a Friday quiz this week, so I searched for another quiz to do and found my way to the Pew Research Centre's quiz on religious belief, via Richard Adams blog.

I scored 100%, which apparently makes me more knowledgeable about religion than 89% of Americans, and that's despite my shameful ignorance about Cardinal Newman.

Tony Curtis

2010-10-01T10:19:00.001-06:00

None of the obituaries I've seen so far have mentioned Tony Curtis's philanthropy. He helped restore the synagogue in Budapest. It is quite beautiful and well worth a visit.

Family history and "cultural identity"

2010-09-29T18:01:00.000-06:00

I answered a questionnaire today, set by a cultural studies researcher doing a doctorate on how family history research affects cultural identity. I don't think my replies will have helped her much. For example, one question was "How did you see other people's cultural identities before you started doing family history research?" My reply was "It was something I never thought about". I found most of the questions baffling. Are there really people who have thoughts beginning "My cultural identity is..." or "His cultural identity is..."? That is, apart from cultural studies academics.

I attempted to answer the questionnaire for two reasons. Firstly I'm always in favour of people completing their doctorates, even in the field of cultural studies. There are far too many abandoned doctoral theses out there haunting their hapless progenitors' lives like the ghost of Jacob Marley. Secondly, I think that the popularity of family history research is an interesting cultural phenomenon and someone should be studying it.

Amazon gift certificate and Kindle

2010-09-27T09:59:00.000-06:00

My brother sent me an Amazon.ca gift-certificate for my birthday. He was probably thinking that I could use it to buy e-books for my new Kindle. Only I can't, because to buy e-books I've got to use the Kindle shop at either Amazon.com or Amazon.uk, and Amazon gift-tokens cannot be transferred from one of their domains to another. He wasn't to know this, but you'd think Amazon.ca could flag up "Hey, if you buy a gift-certificate here it can't be used for e-books!".

Amazon as Big Brother for Kindle

2010-09-19T14:25:00.001-06:00

There is an interesting debate going on on the Linux Ubuntu forums about the implications of e-books for freedom from censorship.

What this amounts to is that the Kindle owner does not have ultimate control over the books on their Kindle. This is retained by Amazon which can delete them.

This may not matter much now, but imagine a society in which physical books are no longer produced and everyone has their library on an e-book reader instead. Then suppose the government in that society decides to ban Orwell's 1984. One press of a button and 1984 is deleted from everyone's library simultaneously.

Even now, one can see how the potential of e-book readers like Kindle might appeal to regimes like China that want to control their population's access to information and monitor what they are reading.

The Pope again

2010-09-17T13:21:00.000-06:00

I admit that I'm finding the Pope's visit to Britain quite disturbing. I'm reminded that I may be an atheist but (to use Christopher Hitchen's terminology), I'm a protestant atheist. I learned Latimer's words to Ridley at the stake by heart when I was at school, and somewhere deep in my brain, all that early indoctrination must have stuck.

I wish the Pope didn't have such a cloth ear for history and culture. For a Pope to visit England and then make references to Sir Thomas More is not tactful. I can almost hear my puritan Congregationalist ancestors turning in their graves. It makes me want to go out and lay a great big flowery wreath at one of the memorials to Protestant Martyrs.

On the other hand, as a humanist and a secularist, I find the people purporting to speak on my behalf almost equally annoying, and none more so than Polly Toynbee. Her astonishingly shallow statement in today's Guardian that the great moral question of our time is how to share the nation's wealth, almost makes the Pope look like a profound thinker, rather than the intellectually sclerotic old man he really is.

So thank whatever isn't up there, for Julian Baggini's article in today's Guardian. In my opinion he's spot on.

Bushiness post Bush

2010-09-13T12:05:00.000-06:00

Also in today's Edmonton Journal, a report that the Harper Government is muzzling scientists working for Natural Resources Canada. NRCan was even prevented from discussing a study in a major research journal that had nothing to do with climate change, but was about a huge flood caused by a collapsing ice-dam that occurred 13,000 years ago. It's reminiscent of Bush's attempt to muzzle climate scientists.

Another CAPP ad

2010-09-13T11:47:00.001-06:00

CAPP's latest full page ad in today's Edmonton Journal features Syrie Crouch, who works for Shell, looking soulful with some rocks.

Syrie works on C02 storage and she finds it exciting. I wonder if she was excited by the report that said that CCS cannot significantly counter the high levels of greenhouse gases emitted by the tarsands and the process cannot possibly achieve what is claimed by the oil companies and the Canadian government?

Parading my ignorance

2010-09-13T10:39:00.000-06:00

While I do not oppose the Pope's visit, the complaint by Opus Dei's spokesman that nobody knows anything about religion in the UK and we Brits know more about Paul Newman than Cardinal Newman is a provocation.

I decided to apply the 1066 and All That test -- i.e. everything I can remember about Cardinal Newman without Googling:

He was a Roman Catholic cardinal.
He was effeminate
He had a very good friend, never got over his death and asked that they be buried together, which makes him the Heathcliff of repressed homosexual priests.
I know a lot more about Paul Newman.

I'm puzzled by the beatification thing. This Pope and the last Pope seem to do a lot of beatifying. Applying the 1066 test again, I thought that to be a saint you had to be an apostle, a martyr, an angel, a demoted celtic god, or a pubertal girl trying to get attention by claiming to see visions.

Green v Nerd

2010-09-11T17:53:00.000-06:00

My inner Green who wishes to consume less and my inner Nerd fascinated by gadgets are in frequent conflict, and currently the Nerd is winning.

A while ago this was not the case. Nerd wanted to buy an all American coffee maker that actually ground the beans as well as filtering the coffee. Nerd almost won on the basis that the device was space saving, but then Green noticed the machine also had a programmable clock. Green drew the line at coffee makers that tell the time.

However Nerd learned from that experience and now realises that if she wants something she only has to say the magic words "you need this because it is energy efficient" and gullible Green will weaken.

Earlier this week our electric kettle died so today we went to the kitchen shop to replace it and came away with a Chefs Choice Smart Kettle which can be set to turn itself off at any temperature you choose up to boiling point.

It is an interesting fact about Edmonton that although the landscape is as flat as a pancake, we are in fact about a thousand feet above the comfort zone for a Swiss mountain goat. Our high altitude means that boiling point is lower here than at sea level, around 208˚F rather than 212˚F. This may have been why our old kettle packed up. It always took a while to shut itself off after the water boiled and eventually the automatic cut-off failed altogether.

Cunning Nerd used these facts today to defeat Green. Nerd argued that since the Smart Kettle can be set to cut off at 208˚F, electricity will be saved. Only when we got home did Green realise that the Smart Kettle has to be filled with a minimum of half a litre of water -- a lot more than one cup of coffee, and there is an LED display, which means the kettle has to be unplugged when not in use.

Nancy Pelosi discussing tar-sands

2010-09-08T17:38:00.001-06:00

Nancy Pelosi is in Canada today and tomorrow to discuss the tar-sands issue in a series of meetings with Canadian politicians, campaigners and oilmen. She is accompanied by democrat congressman Ed Markey. Both Pelosi and Markey are known for their support for environmental causes, so this bodes well.

The Pope's Visit

2010-09-08T12:15:00.000-06:00

I'm an atheist, so I could be expected to support the Protest the Pope's campaign. Actually, I don't. I neither object to the Pope's visit, or object to public money being spent on it, and I think the protests are a little ridiculous.

Stating the bleeding obvious, there are more than a billion Roman Catholics in the world which makes the Pope a significant world leader whether we like it or not. Yes, the church's opposition to condoms is helping spread AIDS and it has dealt too slowly and very badly with sexual abuse of children by priests, but for human rights abuses I don't think that puts the Roman Catholic Church in the same league as China or Saudi Arabia, two countries whose leaders have also made state visits in the last decade.

Dialogue with the RC church makes a lot more sense to me than campaigning to have the Pope arrested, so I have no problem with the state visit.

Tarsands employees love fluffy bunnies.

2010-09-06T13:54:00.001-06:00

The oil industry and the governments of Canada and Alberta, continue to respond to the growing international concern about the tar-sands ecocide as if it is nothing more than a public relations problem.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) have started running a series of ads in which photogenic tarsands employees state how much they love fluffy bunnies, or words to that effect. For example a full page ad today's Edmonton Journal shows biologist Megan Blampin looking soulful beside a lake with the quote:

"We know what was here before, what's here now, and what we need to do before we leave".

Which is really informative isn't it? I bet reading that you've realised how wrong you were about the tar-sands up to now.

Bamplin works for Devon Energy which has a tarsands project at Jackfish using steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) to extract the oil. It is claimed that this method is more environmentally friendly than open cast mining since it has less impact on the forest. However, SAGD requires vast amounts of energy, far more than open cast mining, and huge areas of forest still have to be destroyed to make space for the necessary infrastructure.

But that's all right because Megan's out there monitoring

"rare species like Arctic Grayling and Woodland Caribou. Everyone I work with loves the outdoors."

That's the outdoors that Albertans love exploring in their mammoth 4x4 pick-up trucks.

So what if the world temperature rises by a few degrees by the end of Megan's life and the millions of people we saw affected by climate catastrophe this year increase every year, until our species itself is threatened? At least Megan, with her creamy skin and blonde highlights cared.

Cookery Books

2010-09-02T13:03:00.001-06:00

With the grim prospect of another winter in Alberta before me, I've been cheering myself up by buying lots of cookery books so I can liven up our diet over the winter, which has inspired me to make a list of my favourite cookbooks:

General

The Dairy Book of Home Cookery

If you are a new cook, this is the one to get. I don't currently own a copy, but I'm intending to inherit my mum's, and meanwhile I can ring her up and get her to read out the recipes.

Delia's Complete Cookery Course

I have mixed feelings about Delia. My main criticism is that the book uses too many different different sizes of casseroles, cake tins, etc. You'd need a farmhouse kitchen to house the containers to do all the recipes, not the single cupboard that most of us have. Secondly, some of the recipes are not good (use the Dairy Book's recipe for lemon meringue pie, and don't do Delia's chocolate mousse either). Nevertheless, I admit that my copy is dog-eared.

La Varenne Pratique also published as the Reader's Digest Guide to Cookery

Anne Willan is not well enough known in the UK. This is a superb book for the serious cook; it has some recipes, but it concentrates on explaining cooking techniques in detail. I used it to learn how to joint a chicken. I followed its guidance to prepare garden snails for cooking, and I had it open in front of me while I plucked and drew a pair of wood-pigeons and then made a casserole of them with vegetables and herbs from the garden.

The Constance Spry Cookery Book

Ian consults it every time he wants to boil an egg. I use the jam recipes.

The Pauper's Cookbook

Jocasta Innes is best known for her interior decorating shops, but this is a very good book for the starter cook. It's a great present for someone setting up home for the first time. Unlike Delia, Jocasta does not assume you have the space or the money for huge amounts of kitchen equipment.

English

Jane Grigson's English Food

Sussex Pond Pudding, Gooseberry Sauce for mackerel, Gooseberry fool. Actually, I'd buy it for the gooseberry recipes alone.

Farmhouse Kitchen

This book is from a 1970's series on Yorkshire TV that showcased regional recipes sent in by the general public. It includes Staffordshire oatcakes, Nottingham gingerbread and so on. These are the real local kitchen recipes, not made over by a TV chef.

Italian

Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

by Marcella Hazan

I own the American edition. Widely regarded as the best Italian cookbook in English. I use it constantly. As an Americanised Venetian, Hazan uses very large quantities of salt and butter; I reduce the salt and substitute olive oil for the butter.

Marcella Cucina

A more health conscious Hazan.

Eat Right, Eat Well - The Italian Way

by Edward Giobbi

I found this book on a second-hand stall years ago, when I was looking for a book on southern Italian cooking which uses more olive oil and less butter. Giobbi is not a southern Italian, but an Italian-American artist who lived for a while in Tuscany, but I prefer a lot of Giobbi's versions of classic Italian dishes to Hazan's, including his meatball recipes and caponata.

The Silver Spoon

I've just acquired this classic, having coveted it for years. I'm overawed by the size of the book and the number of recipes.

French

Anne Willan

As well as La Varenne Pratique (see General Cooking above), I own three other books by Willan: French Cookery. Chateau Cuisine and Country Cooking of France. She is a marvelous teacher, but she is also a very prolific author, which leads to some repetition. Many of her books are sumptuously illustrated, which makes them expensive and not very practical for use in the kitchen. Nevertheless, I'm a big fan and I prefer following her instructions to Elizabeth David or Julia Child.

Vegetarian

The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen

Everyday Vegetarian and Food Reform Cooking by Clare Bryant

I was a vegetarian until my mid-thirties. These two books were my main cookbooks in the seventies and I still use recipes from them. As far as I know, Clare Bryant never wrote another book, whereas Mollie Katzen is still going strong -- there is now a whole Moosewood library available.

Unclassifiable

The Edible Flower Garden by Kathy Brown

This very pretty book has given me a lot of fun and the nasturtium and beetroot salad has become one of our summer favourites.

Britain's Finest Year

2010-08-31T15:02:00.000-06:00

Peter Kellner's article led me to the YouGov poll on Britain's Finest Year. Apparently Liberal Democrats tend to choose a year of social or democratic advance rather than military. I find the choice difficult.

I'd reject The Magna Carta - 1215 as in reality too limited a reform which at the time affected only the aristocratic class. I'd also reject Women's Suffrage -- 1928 as nothing to crow about since other countries had granted women the vote years earlier. I'd also reject The NHS -- 1948 on the grounds that other European nations were setting up socialised health care at the same time. I wouldn't be tempted by The Abolition of Slavery -- 1833 either, on the grounds that it is equivalent to a husband being proud of having stopped beating his wife.

Of the military years, Agincourt -- 1415 is out -- there is nothing about the 100 Years War to feel proud about. The defeat of the Armada -- 1588 had more to do with luck than judgement. I've changed my mind about the Falklands War; at the time I was anti, but since then I've come to think Thatcher was right. Nevertheless I would not pick 1982 as our finest hour. I reluctantly reject Waterloo, since our victory was a jointly shared with our allies, although the lion's share of the honours go to Britain and the victory ensured that the nineteenth century was Britain's century.

That leaves one "social" year and one military: The Bill of Rights -- 1689, and 1940, but I can't decide between them.

More on the Tarsands

2010-08-31T13:21:00.000-06:00

Levis's, Gap and Timberland have joined the tarsands campaign. The Alberta Enterprise Group has called on Albertans to boycott Levi-Strauss, Gap and Timberland. I've just bought my first pair of Levi's for about twenty years (and they are very comfortable).

Meanwhile the indefatigable Professor Schindler of the University of Alberta has produced a report showing that the tarsands monitoring by government is totally incompetent -- conclusive evidence for what we already knew was probably the case.

Not long after we came here we decided that since Environment Canada and Environment Alberta could not be trusted on the tarsands, or the oil industry generally, then it seemed unwise to trust any other environmental monitoring here, in other words the food, the water and the air quality are also suspect, so we buy our food at a rather expensive organic supermarket, and filter our water, but there isn't much we can do about the air.

Kindle

2010-08-31T09:53:00.000-06:00

My first Kindle arrived yesterday. It's a birthday present. I wanted it primarily as a travel accessory, but also because my whole personal library is going to have to be shipped back to Blighty in a few years time, and with that in mind I've been operating a strict one-in-one-out policy for paper books. Now I can expand my library electronically without guilt.

The jury is still out on whether or not e-books are less environmentally damaging than paper books. Cleantech in Los Angeles claims that Kindle is environmentally friendlier, but the study assumes that a Kindle user would otherwise buy 3 new paper books a month, rather than borrow from a library or buy second-hand. Hmmm. Ian's library is so big that when we were buying a house here in Alberta I had to get advice from a structural engineer on whether the building could cope with the weight, but even Ian does not buy three brand-new books each month.

This is my first electronic book-reader. I wasn't able to try out the Kindle software on my computer first because I use Linux Ubuntu (that's an 0pen source operating system) and Kindle is very difficult to install on Linux. This is silly of Amazon, because they use open source software for the Kindle, and not making it compatible with Linux loses them friends who would otherwise be supporters.

I bought the 6" Kindle because it is the most practical for travelling and small enough to slip into a capacious pocket. Its design may not be up to Apple standards, but it is still good looking. With its leather cover on it looks like a smart travel journal or a filofax. You buy the cover separately. I chose a green leather Amazon cover with an integral light. The cover looks sturdy enough to last for years. The light is very useful but held on such a fragile stem that its life-span has to be limited.

It didn't take me long to learn how to operate my Kindle. It is much easier than a mobile phone. The point of Kindle, and what makes it different from reading book on a computer screen, is that it is not back-lit, making the experience less wearing on the eyes, and more like reading print on paper. Amazon's mantra is that the Kindle should "disappear", that is that you should forget that you are reading a machine. That works for me. You can customise the font, and font size as well as choose whether to view the text in portrait or landscape view. Navigating around a volume is very easy. There is a dictionary tool, which is useful, and you can bookmark pages, plus there is a search tool. You can also annotate what you are reading using the keyboard, but that is fiddly compared with using a pencil and for that reason, if I was studying I'd prefer a paper textbook.

Making my first purchase from Amazon and downloading to my Kindle was a doddle. I chose The Girl Who Played with Fire because I'm 74th in line for this book at my local library. I've read that Amazon e-books are cheaper than print in the UK, but they are not in Canada. I have to buy from the Kindle store in $ US. The book would have been $1.00 CAN cheaper in print from Amazon.ca, although it would have been more expensive with postage. For second-hand books the saving is even greater. For example, the Kindle Jane Grigson's English Food is $9.99 US ($10.62 CAN), but I've just bought a second-hand copy for $5.57 CAN which included postage.

E-book fans make much of the thousands of free volumes on the web, but reading these with Kindle is not problem-free. I transferred a Project Gutenburg PDF file: Adventures in the Rifle Brigade by Sir John Kincaid to my Kindle from my computer, but I could not read it. If I email it to my Kindle instead, Amazon will convert it to a Kindle file, but they will charge me for doing so, so it will no longer be a free volume, and since I can read it for free on my computer I probably won't bother.

The new Kindle also comes with some experimental features, including a web-browser. I tried this to see if I can read my gmail, which would be very useful while travelling. Yesterday I could do so, but I've been unable to make a connection today. If the web browser could be improved and Google maps made accessible the Kindle would become an ideal travel companion.

One more thing. Every time you open the Kindle it displays a screensaver, which is usually a portrait of an author. One of the portraits (I won't tell you which) bears a disturbing resemblance to my first husband. You can't change the screensaver and I'm going to find that very irritating very soon.

Paying Down

2010-08-30T15:31:00.000-06:00

Today (it's till Monday here in Alberta) Larry Elliott uses the phrase in Economics on Monday.

I think the first use in a British context, of the American phrase paying down, to mean reduce mortgage debt was in the first TV election debate when David Cameron used it. I suspect he picked it up from the American advisors he was consulting.

Nick Clegg used it in his last email to Liberal Democrats.

Now Larry Elliott.

All the Building Society and Bank web sites that I've checked are still using reduce.

It will be interesting to see how the phrase progresses. Will it stay confined to politicians and journalists, or will it get taken up by the British financial services industry and the general public?

Bastard and other terms

2010-08-28T11:36:00.000-06:00

Writing my last piece this morning, it struck me that although the stigma of illegitimacy is long gone, its legacy is that there is no satisfactory term for someone whose parents were not married.

Natural child is probably the least potentially offensive, which makes it a favourite with family historians, but it is also rather odd, implying that children with married parents are unnatural.

Born outside wedlock is cumbersome and sounds archaic and coy. Born outside marriage is not much improvement.

Illegitimate is precise and formal, but carries an undertone of illegality, seeming to imply such a child has no right to exist.

On the whole I think I prefer bastard, which may still be used as a term of mild abuse, but has the capacity to be reclaimed.

Who were the illegitimate children?

2010-08-28T09:51:00.000-06:00

"Florence becomes the second child born to a serving leader in a decade after Leo Blair in 2000, who was the first legitimate child born to a serving prime minister in over 150 years — since the birth of Francis Russell in July 1849." states the Guardian today.

This is the second time I've seen that proviso legitimate, which strikes me as unusually cautious for the modern British journalist who is usually cavalier about historical accuracy. So, have there been any illegitimate children born to serving Prime Ministers? A quick skim through the Wikipedia biographies doesn't reveal any. I've only found two bastards, but neither was born, or even conceived, when their father was in office. Lord Palmerston was reputed to be the father of Lady Emily Cowper, whose mother later became his wife. The second, of course, is Lloyd-George's daughter by Frances Stevenson.

Why not to pick a fight with a desk

2010-08-27T12:39:00.000-06:00

I've recently had two root canal fillings, and I was wondering what the prognosis was for keeping them in the long-term, so I did a web-search and came across this video which did not give me the information I was looking for, but is entertaining:

Will they let me declaim poetry?

2010-08-23T18:42:00.000-06:00

I have a family history website for the benefit of my relatives, but I try to keep it separate from this blog because my family history is really very dull, and this blog has enough problems with my life being boring. Certainly I can't compete with Nick Clegg or David Cameron's genealogies; nobody in my family has ever been beaten to death by his own peasants, had an affair with HG Wells, or been King of England.

Alas, not only are none of my ancestors famous, but they are also all English: there's not even an Irish, Scots or Welsh person, let alone a Jew, Huguenot or freed African slave, thus making my family history so un-PC that it must be ineligible for BBC Radio 4's Tracing Your Roots which seems to require at least one immigrant strand to your family to be included in the programme.

However, I discovered a week ago that one of my great-great-great-grandmothers, named Elizabeth Watkins, was briefly famous in the last year of her life for being the last surviving witness of the Battle of Waterloo. This was in 1904, she was 94 years old and she'd been five when she helped her mother bandage the wounded. Her father Daniel Gale was in the 3rd Battalion of the 95th Regiment of Foot - the same regiment as the fictional Sharpe, which gives me an excuse to insert a picture of Sean Bean. Please feel free to admire him for as long as you wish before continuing:

Elizabeth's longevity with all her wits about her has been repeated in every generation of her descendants, which gives me cause for optimism for my old age. But, there's more: when she was interviewed in 1904 they let her recite a poem about Waterloo "with much dramatic action", which must have been a sight since she was wearing a voluminous black skirt with a bustle.

My mum wanted me to talk nice, so I did speech and drama lessons from the age of five to sixteen, which left me with an RP accent, fearlessness about public speaking, and a large stock of memorised Victorian poetry which I've been wanting to perform ever since, but whenever I launch into verse people either leave the room or throw something at me, so my ambition remains frustrated. Can it be that if I make it to my nineties I'll get an audience at last? I'll start rehearsing now:

"It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintery sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company...."

The Giant Rat of Bradford

2010-08-22T10:22:00.000-06:00

Our local paper, The Edmonton Journal, covers world affairs by culling stories from English language papers worldwide and re-writing them for an Albertan audience, often with surprising and delightful results.

Yesterday it informed its readers that the Kremlin's past owners include "two royal dynasties -- the Ruriks and the Bolsheviks".

The Journal had the cheek to keep the Daily Telegraph's Moscow correspondent Andrew Osborn's byline on the piece. I think he should sue.

Today the Journal informs its readers: "The rats commonly seen in England are already huge by Canadian standards -- comparable in size to a cat or a lapdog".

This is a re-write of a tongue in cheek Sun article about an escaped coypu in Bradford transformed into a tale for which the world is not yet ready.

Nick Clegg's letter

2010-08-18T08:59:00.000-06:00

"When the history books are written, I want them to say that this government paid down the budget deficit..." [my emphasis].

Is that American history books? I hope British history books don't adopt that Americanism, which Nick Clegg seems to have picked up from David Cameron who used it in one of the TV debates. "Paid off", or "reduced" please, not paid down.

The Canadian Ecocide.

2010-08-16T17:10:00.001-06:00

Canada, through its tar sands industry, is engaged in a callous, venal and mercenary rape of the environment on an almost unimaginable scale. An area the size of England will be denuded of boreal forest in order to extract the dirtiest oil on the planet. Tar-sands oil has three times the emissions of conventional oil because of the energy used in extracting and processing it. In the process air and water are poisoned with disastrous consequences for the local population.

The industry is the reason that Canada cannot meet its emission reduction commitments. Defence of the industry has turned Canada into a spoiler and saboteur of climate change negotiations.

Contrary to the claims of the Canadian government, there is no way to make this industry environmentally sustainable. It should simply be stopped.

When I moved to Canada in June 2006 I knew almost nothing about the tar-sands, but by the end of that year I was wondering if moving here was any better than emigrating to South Africa during apartheid, and I've been wondering that ever since.

The EU Fuel Quality Directive, when implemented, should stop tar sands oil entering Europe, but Greenpeace say the oil companies are lobbying hard to weaken the legislation. Greenpeace are asking people to write to Theresa Villiers to ask her to support a strong law.

Speed cameras

2010-08-10T13:28:00.000-06:00

There is only one reason for opposing speed cameras and it is because you want to break the law without being caught. All the other reasons are rubbish.

If there was a camera in a supermarket which could be magically programmed to only record an image when it had a shoplifter in its sights, would anyone object? Or, if there was a similar camera outside a pub that only recorded an image when it witnessed a knife or gun fight, would anyone protest? Would there be concern that the cameras were being financed by the fines from successful prosecutions? If it was erroneously claimed that the fines exceeded the cost of the cameras would there be outrage?

Supposing those magic cameras existed, would you hear your neighbour, or workmate, complaining he'd been caught and fined for nicking a tin of baked beans from Tesco's when he was only doing what everybody did, and as an experienced shopper he was the best judge of when to shoplift or not?

It is a small miracle that we have the number of speed cameras that we have, because although they are popular with the majority of the population they are not popular with habitual speeders who are mostly middle-aged men, and most politicians and media pundits are middle-aged men.

Personally, I'd have a speed camera on every street corner, and I'd have them hidden. That would deal with the objection that a camera in one place only moves the accidents somewhere else (for which there is not one shred of evidence).

So, middle-aged middle-class man, boring me to tears explaining that you are a better judge of the safe speed for the road than the highly qualified County Accident Prevention Officer, I have this to say to you: Be grateful that you were only fined because if there were no cameras you might have killed a child by now. Next time you are caught, take the opportunity offered to do a re-training course because I guarantee that you will learn something.

Who cares who got the vote and when?

2010-08-03T15:20:00.000-06:00

I guess the story of how we got the vote is just too complicated and boring to be taught in schools any more. Who wants to hear about £10 copyholders when they could be studying Nazis?

Earlier this year I visited a county archive to do some family history research and asked the county archivist for the 1830's electoral rolls, explaining that my ancestor had been a draper and I wanted to know if he had been enfranchised by the 1832 Act. "Oh no" she replied with an impressive air of authority. "Only the really big landowners were enfranchised in 1832."

A month later, during the general election campaign, I got talking to a man in his early twenties who told me that he wasn't voting. I told him that he should think about the fact that people died so he would get the vote (well yes, I was being a pompous ass -- but it had been a long day). He reacted with astonishment. It turned out he'd done the Suffragettes at school, but nobody had bothered to inform him that men hadn't always had the franchise.

Finally, I've just listened to the second instalment of this week's Women's Hour drama -- The Shooting Party by Elizabeth Colegate, set in 1913. In it, one agricultural labourer says to another "They'll never give the vote to the likes of we". His companion replies "And if they do, who will be next -- townsfolk?".

I have no idea whether this excruciating, historically illiterate dialogue is in the original 1981 novel or was added by the dramatist, but it makes me want to weep.

Investors in People UK

2010-07-26T22:30:00.000-06:00

As far as I can see, even the Grauniad has not yet found someone to mourn the abolition of Investors in People UK -- the quango for distributing meaningless awards. Is there a public building left in Britain that is not exhibiting one of their plaques? Might they become collector's items? If a few got sold at car boot sales at least IiP could be said to have contributed something to the economy.

Z, a free cat, not a clockwork soft toy.

2010-07-24T15:30:00.001-06:00

This is Z and his friend. They are both outdoor cats who perform a useful role reducing the number of rodents around human settlement, as their ancestors have done for the last 4 thousand years They catch large numbers of house-mice and deer-mice. Deer-mice carry the deadly hantavirus which can be transmitted to humans.

Under Edmonton city bylaws any of my neighbours is entitled to trap Z and deliver him to the city pound where I may have to pay a $100 fine plus kennel fees to get him back.

The City of Edmonton would like to eradicate all cats from the outside and limit them to the inside of people's homes. As far as I know, the City has no plan to deal with the explosion in rodent population in the unlikely event that their policy is successful.

Z's sister is an indoor cat. In order to stop her scratching the soft furnishings her owners had her declawed. This is the equivalent of having the tips of all your fingers and toes removed to the first joint. It is regarded as cruel and is outlawed in the UK and 22 other countries, but not in Canada or the USA.

Kitty Controversy

2010-07-23T13:17:00.000-06:00

I opened our local paper today to discover that I have managed to enrage a large section of the Endmonton public, not by supporting the Rethink Alberta Campaign, but by writing a letter about pussy-cats!. The replies are here. They take up nearly a whole page in the print edition. What larks! Beam me up Scottie!

Another Skunk Video

2010-07-20T14:29:00.000-06:00

The accidental soundtrack consists of background music by Elgar and a commentary by Ian.

Don't visit me

2010-07-15T10:25:00.000-06:00

The link to the Rethink Alberta video didn't work, so use this link instead.

The NHS

2010-07-12T19:06:00.001-06:00

In 1988 I was admitted to hospital as an emergency because of a kidney infection. I lay on a trolley for several hours because no bed could be found in the intensive nursing ward. If you have a kidney infection it is important to keep up your fluid intake. I should have been on a drip, but no-one had time to rig one up for me, so my mother ferried plastic beakers of water to me from the wash-room. However, I was eventually found a bed, put on a drip and from that point on received excellent care.

In 2005 my father was admitted to hospital as an emergency with complications of Parkinson's disease. No bed in intensive nursing was available, but the hospital had to meet a target limiting the amount of time a patient could spend in casualty, so Dad was placed in a general nursing ward instead. Over the next fortnight my father was not given any of his medications for Parkinson's, or the other conditions he suffered from. Initially he was put on a drip, but when he pulled it out in delirium it was not replaced. He could not drink properly so my mother attempted to keep up his liquid level by posting water down his throat with a teaspoon. Dad died two weeks after being admitted. His death certificate records one of the causes of his death as dehydration.

I can take cold comfort from the bleak fact that if Dad had been given a bed in intensive nursing he might not have fared any better, as Margaret Hayward exposed a few months later.

So forgive me for being cynical about the so called improvements to the NHS under Labour. I didn't experience them. I can't say that it is really clear to me how Andrew Lansley's proposed reforms might improve the NHS for patients, but I don't think he can do worse than the Labour government.

Skunk update

2010-07-12T16:56:00.000-06:00

At least one skunk kit has survived and is still foraging in our backyard. Last night she dug up some of our leeks. The video shows her (or him) paying a visit to our garage. We hope she will find his way back to the river valley because, as my neighbour Karen said, life is tough for a skunk in the big city.