Since the start of The Meditation in March, Tom Cullen, personable owner of Purity Dairy, has kindly dropped milk and yogurt by our front vestibule each week. My bicycle is on the road now, though, and it’s a beautiful sunny day, so rather than calling on Tom again, I rode up to the dairy myself after breakfast.

There’s nothing better to remind you that you live in a small town utopia than having an early morning chat over the counter with Tom and his cousin Greg about how the milk business is holding up.

It is so great to be back on my bicycle again after winter: it’s like powering my body up after a long hibernation.

A new song from Henry Jamison to end the week.

Alison Stine writes in Belt:

And when you look for a model on how to remake the world after the pandemic? Make it a place where strangers care for strangers without expecting anything in return. Make it a place where the community is only as strong as its weakest member, and where help is given, as much and as often as it can be. Make it like Appalachia—but don’t forget us this time.

You can wash pillows. In the washing machine.

You can make a stir fry from kohlrabi, shallots, and tempeh.

Nobody’s coming to empty the upstairs wastebaskets; it’s on me.

If you enable it in your settings, Zoom meetings can have “breakout rooms,” created manually or automagically, where sub-hives can gather for smaller discussions.

Shopify has a retail point of sale system.

Mail from Belfast to Charlottetown takes two days. Mail from Charlottetown to Belfast takes a week.

For someone known to claim he has no friends, I sure have a lot of good friends.

(Read the oral history of this blog post).

(Yes, you can click on the underlined links)

I’ve owned this blue Roots cardigan for a long time, long enough that there are certain people in this town who associate me with cardigan-wearing, even though, in recent years, I’ve worn it seldom. In part because it’s been missing the bottom button.

You’d think, what with Catherine being a seamstress and all, this is something that could have been rectified long ago. But a combination of my reticence and hers to ask her to take her work home (the same reticence that meant she never really had a proper website) meant this never happened.

This morning I took matters in to my own hands, removed the old buttons and replaced them with a Lori Joy Smith rainbow of colour, extracted from Catherine’s button jar. The buttons might all fall off soon, given my lack of button-sewing prowess. For the time-being, I’m proud of my efforts, and will become cardigan-wearing Peter again, for a while.

My mother and I agreed the other day that we much prefer musicians playing from home in their pyjamas. Here’s Phoebe Bridgers doing just that.

This Letter to the Editor ran in this morning’s Guardian (paywall):

As spring arrives and we all spend more time outside, those of us who live in downtown Charlottetown are awakening to a very changed urban landscape, where there are more pedestrians, wheelchairs and bicycles than there are vehicles.

We’re discovering that, suddenly, we have the wrong kind of streetscape for the times: vast swathes of pavement devoted to the absent automobiles, while we all crowd together on the sidewalks and sides of the streets.

And so I have a proposal: during the time of this pandemic, let’s declare the streets of Charlottetown, from Grafton Street to the water, as an “active transportation first” zone. Encourage vehicles, other than those of residents and those making deliveries, to stay out of the area. Lower the speed limit to 20 km/h. And allow wheelchairs, bicycles and pedestrians to freely and safely use the streets, to get the exercise and fresh air that we all need so much.

We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to experiment with what a car-free downtown might look like; let’s take this horrible pandemic and try and leverage the slivers of opportunity it offers us.

I’m hopeful that this will happen in the next week.

From The Guardian, Therapy under lockdown: ‘I’m just as terrified as my patients are’:

For the 35 years I have practised as a psychotherapist, I have discouraged people from seeing themselves as hapless victims of forces arrayed against them. That’s the whole premise – that whatever brought you to my office, it is hampering your ability to direct the course of your own life. So let’s name your pain and then do something about it. Tell off the boss, walk out on the husband, confront the perpetrator, whatever it takes, and then move on, become the agent of your existence.

It’s a profession that has been good to me, and I hope good for my patients. But what if the premise is undone by circumstance? What if it turns out that we are hapless victims of a force arrayed against us, that will mercilessly hijack the machinery of our lives, that is silent and invisible and leaves us with nothing to do but cower in our homes and wash our hands and hope that it will pass us by? Is there a role for therapy in a pandemic?

I love this for its clear-eyed look into the practice of psychotherapy.

This Karine Polwart concert-of-three-songs made my day.