As Ton has been travelling vicariously by revisiting travel photos, I have been travelling vicariously by revisiting travel blog posts. Like this one, about our 21 say stay in France:

Twenty-one days isn’t enough time to really understand anything about a place — we’ve been on Prince Edward Island for twelve years and we still don’t understand. Most of what I relate above is more about comfort and familiarity than about realizing French life, culture and history.

But I’ve a strong belief that culture is found not in the monuments and the museums but in the substance of everyday life: road signs, roof tiles, park benches, the little twist of the bag that keeps the croissants from falling out, saying bonjour to everyone you meet as you walk.

Living in the midst of what to us is a strange yet vaguely familiar land, and achieving some level of comfort and familiarity, has allowed us, if not to understand France, at least to realize that there is something here to be understood: that the wine and the land and the architecture and the parks and the croissant bag twist and the church and the war and the cheese and the strange opening hours are all part of a complex, interdependent system. This is not something unique to France, of course; it’s just that this system in this country has an integrity, a maturity, and tremendous sensual appeal that makes it an excellent selling tool for opening the mind to consider other.

If all Oliver remembers from the trip he took to France when he was four is a vague memory of that notion, then I think we will have done our job as parents well.

and then, a few days later, still in France:

But I found Au Bonheur des Jardins oddly alluring.

Somehow being amidst something so disturbingly familiar but in French (and thus completely without chance of recruitment) made for a very pleasant afternoon. I sat back and drank my mint tea (leaves left in, of course) and ate my brownie, and just watched it all unfold. I even screwed up my courage and bought some artisanal cheese (very good, from the Champagne region) and some handmade books (cookbooks about basil, eggs and olive oil).

Catherine, frighteningly at home in any situation, simply dove in. She and Oliver made handmade paper, fished for recycled stuffed toys, and watched the mimes up close. She bought some myrtle juice (we’re still not sure what a myrtle is) and some more cheese and some weird substance from which she can purportedly make tea.

Travel together was our métier, and that experience in France set the tone for many adventures that followed.

I decided that we needed to upgrade our home cinema game, which isn’t hard to do given that it’s built around a $129 projector. So I invested in a $34 screen. Worth it for the packaging alone!

From Karine Polwart’s latest newsletter:

The last song on the Come Away In EP hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, ever been released. Lovelines was co-written in fleeting session with Canadian songwriter Gordie Sampson, whilst on a trip to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where my children’s father is from. Gordie is a Nashville-based writer now, with songs under his belt for country A-listers such as Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban, Faith Hill and LeAnn Rimes. You can definitely hear his influence in the style. Still, I think it’s a bonnie wee thing, that’s much happier for not gathering virtual dust on a hard drive in my office.

We saw Gordie Sampson at The Trailside in 2007 on a memorable night where we were seated between Lennie Gallant and Tim Banks:

The only stain on the evening was the lurking presence of Lord Voldemort at the next table. And thus the ever-present, if completely irrational, fear of imminent disembowelment. Lucky for me, Lennie Gallant was sitting on the other side of us, and so my scenario-planning included situations where Lennie would leap to my defense with some freaky Rustico-style jujitsu should I be assailed. In the end Voldemort kept to himself, no eye contact was made, and I lived to fight another day.

Gordie Sampson is certainly a virtuoso, and he put on an entertaining couple of sets. If you ever have the opportunity to take in his show, especially at a venue like the Trailside, do so. We capped the night be staying just long enough after the closing credits to hear the aforementioned Lennie Gallant play a tune.

To listen to the song Polwart recorded with Sampson on her Cape Breton trip requires joining Hudson Club, a subscription offering from her record company; a bonnie wee thing indeed.

As of this afternoon there were 348 songs in my Spotify “Liked Songs” list. Spotify has changed the way that “favourites” work so many times that I can’t recall when this particular slice of my musical tastes started; the first song I added was a cover of Stay With Me by Australian sun Angus & Julia Stone; the most recent was Baby Hallelujah by Norwegian duo Konradsen.

You can spot my musical rabbit holes as you scroll through the list: Phoebe Bridgers, Sylvan Esso, Ólafur Arnalds, Martha Wainwright, Jóhann Jóhannsson, The Weather Station.

But it’s time to move on, to reboot the Like Songs and start from scratch. So I added all the Liked Songs to a bona fide Spotify playlist, used a third-party service to export the playlist to a CSV, and then another service to convert the CSV into HTML. The result is this table, for posterity. And a clean Liked Songs canvas.

Insiders at The Bookmark inform me that they have two TWSBI Iris fountain pens on order:

New Titanium finish Vac700R, every single pen is slightly different and unique in its color, not one is exactly the same. 

It is a sharp-looking pen from one of my favourite pen makers.

On the product page for the pen is a helpful guide to choosing the right nib size:

• If you write small, go with an EF
• For the normal writer, F is the most popular
• If you tend to lean on a bigger font, M will be perfect
• B is for statements!! Sign a check in B, write a header in B, do some coloring/shading in B
• Stub nibs are italic in writing style (have a special card or invitation to write?)

I love that.

At the end of the debate on Motion 30 on April 21, 2021, MLA Hannah Bell spoke about “conditionality”:

Finally, we also know that one of the main things that came out of the special committee in poverty that did such great work here on a basic income, one of the most important principles that committee identified that I think we need to take to heart when we talk about how we provide services and programs to people who are living in poverty is this notion of conditionality, that we have to have conditions about how you are eligible and why you get support.

Conditionality is where bureaucracy loves to live. Conditionality is where the rules happen that prevent people from being able to get the services they need and conditionality is where somebody, somewhere, gets to decide who is and is not eligible. The core of a program that is based in security and dignity does not have conditions; it has support.

If you want to see a pure expression of conditionality-gone-mad, consult the Cohabitation Policy of PEI’s Social Assistance program: what this policy attempts to do, in the name of verifying “family living arrangements for the purpose of determining eligibility,” is to attempt to describe conditions where government should consider two people effectively “married” so that “couples living together shall not receive a financial advantage over married persons by denying the existence of such a relationship.”

This includes conditions such as “The couple attends church or benevolent organizations and their related functions as a family unit,” ”The couple is listed as husband and wife (Mr. and Mrs.) on voters’ lists, assessment rolls, etc.” and “Vacation as a couple.”

This is an instance of conditionality entirely of government’s own making: it has built a structure based on certain legacy assumptions about individuals and families, and then built an additional policy on top of that in the name of “verifying compliance” with the very fictional world view it’s created.

This is not a hallmark of a “program that is based in security and dignity,” it is, rather, condescending, onerous to maintain, and needlessly adversarial.

In February I reported the sad news that my friend Harold Stephens had died.

After Steve died, I made the acquaintance of Albert Podell, co-author of the book Who Needs A Road? that originally led me to Steve’s door.

A few weeks Al extended an invitation to attend a presentation he was scheduled to give to a meeting of Circumnavigators Club.

And so I found myself last night in the fascinating company of a group of people united by the fact that they’d all circumnavigated the globe. Al provided a cook’s tour of his 50+ years of travel, illustrated with selections from the thousands of photos he’s taken along the way. Good stories were told.

My desire for travel, which I thought I’d effectively sublimated, emerged.

The generous helping of topsy-turvy in the air caused me to think Thursday was Wednesday and thus to miss my scheduled 5:00 p.m. Charlottetown Farmers’ Market pickup.

My penance was to ride my bicycle up today, a day late and in the rain; I was happy to find Caledonia House Coffee still open, and so I am currently fortifying myself with an espresso macchiato before heading back into the now-cats-and-dogs-style rain.

A need for both groceries and potting supplies inspired me to haul the bicycle trailer up from the basement this afternoon.

By the end of my midtown run the container was filled with food, with potting soil, pots and overflow toilet paper strapped on with bungee cords.

Anyone who’s done any public speaking will know the feeling, when things have clicked, the presentation or the speech or the award-giving has gone well, of stepping off the podium with a surge of king-of-the-world adrenaline. It’s intoxicating, and something to both bask in and be wary of (for you are not, in truth, the king of the world). Coming down off that high, decelerating back to normal non-regal speed, can be uncomfortable: the adrenaline is addictive. 

I was thinking about this tonight because I realized that If there’s one thing my life has lacked over the past year it’s been intensity; previous to that, while Catherine was sick, it was the prevailing feeling for years: intensity was the air that I breathed. It wasn’t the pleasant king-of-the-world intensity, it was more the asteroid-about-to-hit-Earth variety. 

But adrenaline is adrenaline is adrenaline. 

It occurred to me tonight that perhaps I got addicted to that asteroid-adrenaline: that living in a near-constant state of panic went on for so long that it became a lifestyle, an expectation, a new baseline. 

Which would explain a lot about how I feel right now, 15 months after Catherine’s death, and why it’s felt like I’ve been served a special second helping of grief. Perhaps it’s simply that enough time has passed, enough of the practical bureaucratic details ticked, enough of a new daily routine established, enough evidence that I will survive this, that the adrenaline has subsided. I’m stepping off the stage.

The intensity has waned. And my mind, and my body, are confused about what exactly is going on: why aren’t we on the roller coaster anymore? What happened? Where’s the adrenaline?

(Crossposted from the Widow We Do Now group on Facebook).