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Charles James Pickersgill: On his centenary
There’s something strange about dads. Maybe not all of them. Probably most. Certainly mine. Possibly me. Too often we don’t get to really know them until it’s too late to matter any more. Sometimes we learn that the person we think we know is not the person we thought we knew. I think I got to know mine in the last couple of decades of his life. He was living in Stratford and looking after my mother as she struggled against the irreversible fog of dementia. She could remember every grievance she suffered as a child but not how to do the laundry. My dad
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Assange must go to Sweden first
Sometimes good people do bad things. Sometimes bad people do good things. I don’t know if Julian Assange is good, bad or somewhere in between. For about seven years now he’s been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The government of Ecuador became getting increasingly impatient with having him there. The ambassador claims he’s not the best-behaved house guest a person could want, and his patience got shorter and shorter as the country inched closer and closer to debt relief from the World Bank. Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, called Scotland Yard last Thursday and asked them to take Assange away. They were more than
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Ontario: Not suitable for children
The good news is that Ontario is running out of problems to solve. We can turn our attention to the province’s license plate slogan. For about 37 years now, Ontario has been ours to discover. It was, in 1982, an ironic choice of a slogan. Our license plates were telling us to keep Ontario beautiful. Then the Great Lakes Paper Products Company was caught killing people in Grassy Narrows First Nation by dumping Mercury into northern rivers. We were also learning that Dow Chemical was dumping waste into the St. Clair River. The Sarnia Blob showed us the government wasn’t having much luck keeping Ontario
Different sides of Glasgow
This evening I finished sorting through my photographs from my week in Glasgow and posted them to my SmugMug photography blog. There are many different sides to the city, and
Book Review: Stephanie Land, Maid: hard work, low pay and a mother’s will to survive. Hachette Books, 2019
Everyone has a story to tell and people with few physical possessions often have several. Stephanie Land has written her story into a memoir tracing her journey through the poverty