With forty-five's recent visit to London, we thought this column about an encounter with another controversial politician was appropriate.
I used to say, when people would accuse me of being a hopeless romantic just because I studied the Middle Ages: "If you want to understand what is going on today you have to understand the Middle Ages." It never worked of course. Everyone "knows" that the Middle Ages was full of all the things we have risen above: ignorance, superstition, cruelty, and--the list of horrors always concludes--dirt. "People never bathed, did they?" is the usual rhetorical question. To which the unrhetorical answer is, “Of course they did,” but the deodorant industry has convinced us otherwise. An age which coined the word 'genocide' - the term first appears in print in 1944 - and made it a common term on the evening news, and in which 'holocaust' acquired both a definite article and a capital 'h' seems to be on rather shaky ground when it comes to pointing fingers and calling names, but then we always see our own times in terms of what is best and all other times and places in terms of what is worst. Middle Ages and modern times came cheek by jowl during my time in Oxford, England, some years ago, and the Middle Ages came off rather well, I thought. It all happened this way.... "You came to town to see your president?" the Pakistani driver of the bus asked, hearing my accent as I asked for a ticket on returning from a four-day trip to Cornwall. "What president?" I hadn't heard of any president of mine being in Oxford. "President Clinton!" he crowed. "He's getting an honorary degree from the University tomorrow." "He's not my president," I replied and dragged my suitcase to a seat and sat down, wondering as I did so at the firmness of my reply and its promptness. After 32 years in Canada since coming from the States I was delighted to discover where my loyalties lay. "If everything seems to be going well you've obviously overlooked something." -Anon. I don't remember my parents' home being filled with little slogans or plaques covered with the "Serenity Prayer" and that sort of thing. Nowadays you can't even get a teabag that doesn't feel it has something uplifting to tell you. I do remember some of the places we rented on vacation went in for homey things like the verse about the owl. The crash of rhythm and meter in the last line -in a desperate attempt to get some thought in before the form died - has stuck with me all these years: The old dinner horn has blown for the last time, I think. The rubber bulb which gave it voice has cracked with age. This was a horn built to a heroic mold, the sort of horn that in an earlier day would have vanquished scores of dragons with the blast of its breath alone. It came from Calcutta, India, the gift of Alice's brother who had spent several years there working for the Ford Foundation. In Calcutta it had graced a taxi, and no doubt done daily battle for years with the wicked dragon Holdfast, the patron deity of traffic snarls. Its shape or signature, appropriately enough, was serpentine, a sign of the tangles it should untangle. Beyond the dull black rather pear-shaped rubber bulb where dwelt the winds that gave it voice, it was brass, dulled with the years, dented and scratched, and looked old. But old is a slippery term. Some people I know look as though they were born old - 'born on a bar stool' as the phrase has it - and never learned anything worth knowing. As promised, another great 'Word Article' and part 2 of our story on the Minotaur. Enjoy! Conversation turned, a while back, on the subject of the Minotaur. You will recall that his birth to the wife of Minos, then living it up as the king of ancient Crete, really had the old phone wires humming as the news got out that Mrs. Minos (her friends called her Pasiphae) had been delivered of a baby with a bull's head, and, according to all accounts, a bull's personality. Doubtless you also recall that this unfortunate event was the direct result of some sharp practice in cattle trading carried off by Minos, who had got the better of a rather watery deity named Poseidon. Minos stood to make. a fortune in breeding fees on Poseidon's bull, and Poseidon. was not pleased. The Minotaur (his friends - if he had had any, which he didn't - would have called him Asterius because that was his name) was Poseidon's revenge, in the form of a rather nasty but witty practical joke. We've taken to calling articles or columns that don't explicitly talk about farm life as 'Word Articles'. Please enjoy this Word Article as much as we did. This last patch of cloudy, cold weather left me for once with some time on my hands and the opportunity to do a bit of reading. Ordinarily. I wouldn't think of reporting on this sort of thing but I was reproached by one of my constant readers for my off-handed allusion in an earlier column to Duke Theseus and the Minotaur, and so it seemed that another of those great old tales has temporarily dropped off the hit parade and needed to be reintroduced. I must say I spent a few delightful hours catching up on some of the more scandalous doings and the Who-was-married-to-whom's of ancient Greece. Now you may think that every-body around here is related to everybody else but you ain't seen nothing yet - not until you start to mix in the Greek gods and goddesses who got around in the most amazing way and with the most amazing results. Take the minotaur, now. He was what you might call bull-headed and as far as his personality went, he didn't have any. In fact, he had the friendliness of a Jersey bull on a difficult day but instead of being a vegetarian he insisted on steak but I'm getting ahead of myself. We've been a bit negligent in posting material for the past few months, but spring is here; and with it a sense of renewal and purpose. Originally posted in May of 1987, I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did. We are in that "in‑between" season right now when it is too early to do much to the garden but the seed orders are in and there is really no reason to go through the catalogues another time, although I got a seed catalogue from a company down in South Carolina a few weeks back that has me thinking disloyal thoughts about our puritanical climate. My wife, more given to action than to words, seized a garden fork and a rake the other weekend and produced a raised bed within minutes. It was obviously the work of one who was tired of waiting for 40 growing degree days (GDD) to arrive with some sort of regularity. © R. L. Whitney. Originally Published in the King's County Record, February 21, 2012. It all started when we came down here to stay. There was a country-store type thermometer hanging on the little kitchen porch and I had my father's old barometer to hang up inside. What could be more inevitable than to begin to keep track, in a gardener's calendar, of the progress of the temperature and barometric pressure with a view to being able to tell when it was time to do whatever we needed to do, like plant beans or pick the tomatoes? The first summer we were here a long series of days with temperatures in the 30's gave me joy, having always preferred heat to cold. Many years in Toronto where it was perfectly possible to have really hot weather at Easter and chilly weather the rest of the summer made us long for country where summer meant something more (or rather, less) than long sleeves and sweaters.
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Words & ImagesWe moved to our farm in Sussex, New Brunswick from Toronto in 1977, only moving away in 2014. Archives
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