The Welsh Girl

“The Welsh Girl,” by Peter Ho Davies, (2007: ISBN 978-0-340-93827-0) is set in Wales during WWII.

Hauntingly vivid characters, beautifully crafted and lovely prose. A complex plot of intersecting lives embracing the stories of a captured German soldier being held in a POW camp in Wales, a local girl and a German-Jewish interrogator working for the British.
The story unfolds during the days following the D-Day landings in a small Welsh village. The characters lives intertwine as Karsten, a young German soldier escapes from a POW camp in Wales. His disappearance from the camp prompts investigation by Rotherham whose German Jewish identity makes him useful as an undercover interrogator for the British.It is Esther’s life on a sheep farm in Wales which provides the backdrop to the story. Her encounters with the English soldiers and then with Karsten, the escaped German soldier highlight the meaning of war and how dishonour as a civilian parallels the dishonour of a soldier.
Totally riveting. The best read I’ve had since The Kite Runner. ***** 5 stars.

Best Buy

What do you do when your laptop crashes? Well after last year’s big crash I got wise and invested in an external hard-drive.The drive from Canso to Best Buy where I initially bought my laptop is three plus hours from Canso, so the data crash was especially inconvenient; a long drive to the Best Buy outlet and then waiting around until they could identify the problem and tell me how long it would fix. Lucky for me I’d taken my daughter’s advice when I bought it- a sort of insurance policy against the “planned obsolescence syndrome,” and signed up for the three year warranty.

Best Buy’s Geek Squad down in Dartmouth were amiable enough. They recovered the data for a fee, suggested I bought an external hard-drive as my data back up source, and returned my laptop cleaned of data and apparently as good as new. The real problem though was that I didn’t really want it as good as new, I wanted it as good as it was just before it crashed, that is with all my data intact. At the time I counted my blessings. After all, what price data? Priceless? So I willingly went away thinking it was a
lesson learned, though my pocket was lighter to the tune of around $250.00! Now 10 months further along, I am in the middle of backing up my data to the external hard-drive when it grinds to a halt. The solution to my data storage has just died on me.

External hard-drive by Simpletech

So we call the manufacturer, Simpletech, and ask them for help. “You must have dropped it!” was the response. “No, we were in the middle of a download when it ground to a halt,” we said. So, it seems that it must indeed be a fault with the equipment after all. “Yes, ship it to us: No we don’t do data recovery,” was the advice we got from Simpletech.

Back to Best Buy, this time in Newmarket, Ontario. My spirits rose to their words, “Yes, we can look at that for you!” It was looking hopeful. Then my hopes for a resolution to the problem without incurring another round of data recovery costs were dashed. “John” (an exceptionally skilled customer relations negotiator at the “Geek Squad” desk), gave an in depth account of Best Buy policies as we discussed the “fairness” of my having to pay yet again for data recovery. I wondered how many people actually know that that “a one year manufacturer’s warranty” from Best Buy means you ship at your own expense to the manufacturer. Did you know that Best Buy’s liability is only for 14 days, (except occasionally when it is 30 days,). I never knew that! How is it, I ask myself that Best Buy can sell an item and not have liability when it fails to perform the function it was designed and sold to do? So that’s my beef with Best Buy. It’s looking like a case of “Buyer beware!”

My solution to this? I thought very carefully about the lost data and decided that for the most part I could live without it. It’s rather like going through your wardrobe and discovering that there’s an awful lot of stuff that you don’t actually need anymore. The data I really wanted to keep, turns out to be my photos. Luckily, I did have another back up source from my photos. I never did quite trust downloading my photos, so I had never erased them from the original flashcards, except for those that were edited out on the camera. But this presented a new problem, since the incurable disease of “planned obsolescence” had also recently attacked my precious Canon camera (faulty imaging sensor,) so I now needed amulti-card reader. I have to thank my mother for this suggestion, (you have to be over 80 years of age to come up with such great ideas). Cost of multi-card reader, $49.99 (Best Buy). It seems that there is more than one way to skin a rabbit! ( A similar  solution arose to therecent death of my wireless card in my laptop. It is still under warranty, but the possible loss of my new data is enough to convince me that a USB wireless adaptor for $25.00 +S&H from TigerDirect (www.tigerdirect.ca) is as good as it gets.

The sting in the tail? My brother works in the data recovery field specializing in disaster recovery software, data recovery, and data restoring with Thinking Safe (www.thinkingsafe.com) !

Twitter on the ocean

So I just joined Twitter!

 http://twitter.com/lizontheocean

Lured by The Toronto Star’s invite to Crack the meaning of life”… I may discover, or rather uncover, the meaning of life as I twitter.

But what exactly is Twitter?

Twitter is texting on a phone or on the internet.

Twitter is micro blogging. A ”tweet!” must be less than 140 characters.

Twitter answers one simple question, “What are you doing.”

How can I start to twitter?

Get a Twitter account. Go to www.twitter.com and sign up.

How do I find the meaning of life?


The answer may be too long to tweet…you can only use 140 characters!

What if I think I have discovered the meaning of life?

Join The Star’s challenge if you think you’ve found the answer.

Start your post with “@meaningoflifeis“, then tweet the meaning of life according to you.

My twitter diary.


I shall be posting a few of the twitter help links I discover as I start my twitter journey……more to follow!

Easy to follow beginner’s guide, (just read the first few pages to get started):

Become a Twitter Expert in 24hrs.  http://www.tinyurl.com/bp7u8r

It’s a bit daunting to start up- you wonder if you’re just talking to yourself! Helpful tip from a twitter guru (James Rivers) for twitter newbies: reply, retweet, share! info!

April 9th. Day 5 of twitter diary!

Getting the hang of the “dm” “RT” and “reply”.

Everyone needs a twitter guru!

Playing with the twitter background with twitBacks.com and uploading custom photos.

The Subsidized Mineowner-Poor Beggar! From "The Trade Union Unity" Magazine (1925)

The headlines in The Cansobreeze and Guysboro County Advocate, a rural newspaper in Nova Scotia, from June 20th 1925 appear to have some useful lessons for us as the country faces what has now been dubbed as The Great Recession, the most difficult economic crisis since The Great Depression, (1929-mid 1930s.)

Glancing through the news of the 1920’s you might imagine that we would be turning back the clock. Apparently not so; if you look more closely at the column headlines in the newspaper here and see what issues preoccupied the columnists, the electorate and the politicians. A snapshot in time, the 1925 Cansobreeze newspaper was for me, until this year, an amusing relic of the past, a source of anecdotal information about life in rural Nova Scotia. Scanning through my photo files on my laptop I came across some of the photos I had taken of the newspaper last year for a different project. Back then I seem to remember, I was unaware of what would soon show itself to be a close similarity between our current news media of today and the headlines in the old newspapers from 1925 when the political campaign for the provincial government elections in Nova Scotia was in full steam.

The Cansobreeze andGuysboro County Advocate

With 43 years of Liberal government in Nova Scotia, the Liberal party under pressure from the Conservatives was warning the Guysborough electorate in June 1925 not to be carried away with the catchwords, “Time for a change.” So while the Conservative party was citing misappropriation of public funds for the need for an independent audit of Provincial finances in its party manifesto, the headlines in The Cansobreeze and Guysboro County Advocate (June 20th 1925), read, “Justice for Nova Scotia: Are YOU satisfied with the present state of affairs in Nova Scotia?” The Liberal party, on the other hand, were citing their achievements over 43 continuous years of provincial government. 

None of this would have made quite such an impact on me had I not glanced at the 1925 article on “Some of the political Issues,” from The Cansobreeze and Guysboro County Advocate which provides some of the numbers for the then Liberal Armstrong government spending: “The Armstrong government has gone wild with extravagancies, have paid piles of money to Road Contractors which cannot be accounted for, have added more to Nova Scotia’s debt in the last seven years than her total debt had amounted to in her whole lifetime up to then…have increased our burden of debt for approximately $13,000,000 in 1917 to nearly $55,000,000 today…and yet they refuse to grant the ratepayer and electors an independent audit of their accounts.”

As one of the major proposals for spending ourselves out of this current recession, infrastructure spending, it would seem, has become the mantra for all political parties. The Nova Scotia Provincial Conservative Party is now planning massive road construction spending as is the Provincial Labour government of Ontario. Unfortunately the coffers in both provinces are already bare. Now trying to get some fix on the historical context, I spoke to my mother on the issue. For her, the year 1926 was noteworthy. Two years before she was born, the year 1926 was etched in the collective consciousness of her father’s generation as the year of The 1926 General Strike in the United Kingdom. The general strike was precipitated by the strife in the coal mining industry. As the British mineowners announced their intention to reduce miner’s wages and increase working hours based on a strategy of getting more for less, opposition united under the Trades Union Congrss, TUC. Led by the coal miners and other TUC workers, the 1926 Great March united workers from John o’ Groats in the north of Scotland to Landsend in the south of England as the TUC workers converged on London. “Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day,” was the mantra in 1926 for the TUC workers.

The caricature of “the subsidized mineowner,” which appeared in Trade Union Unity Magazine (1925) is not unlike the effigies of bankers being portrayed in the  news, (CTV News April 1st 2009 ): G20 protesters were carrying a similar effigy dressed in top hat and a button hole, with the words, “Eat the Bankers” hung around his neck. While in 1926 the Mine owners wanted to normalisep rofits even though these were times of economic instability, today it appears that role is being taken up by the Banking industry.

The bailout of the banking industry by governments and the subsequent payout of large bonuses to banking executives despite the fact that these bailouts were made with tax payers’ money has given rise to an unprecedented outpouring of angry sentiment across the world. A move against the wealthy at the G20 Summit (April 1st
2009) is apparent as France and Germany crackdown against tax havens which allow the wealthy to avoid paying a fair share of tax particularly in a climate of economic hardship.
If we look at the sheer transfer of wealth in the current economic crisis from the middle classes to the wealthy it would appear to be unprecedented in our life time; while homeowner’s are facing the loss of their homes through foreclosure and the loss of their pensions through the collapse of their investment savings, the wealthy continue to be in a position of advantage to capitalize on the misfortunes of the many.

The deepening global financial crisis is expected to become the worst financial crisis since World War Two. It is the impact on the world’s poor which is building
into what is being described by aid agencies as a “humanitarian catastrophe,” which is most troubling.
“Ruined countries strike out,” says activist Bob Geldorf at the Excel Centre in London, during the G20 Summit, (BBC World News April 2nd 2009). The impending humanitarian crisis is beginning to sound the alarm bells of hunger and the potential for massive social unrest.

In English common law, if there are two people present it constitutes a “gathering” and if there are three, it is recognized as a “riot.”

That said, I would have to concede that the book club I belong to is now evolving from a “gathering” to a “riot.”

It is however, not quite what most people would categorize as a book club for several reasons, but notably because we appear to have absolutely no rules. The membership of this club is also loosely defined, and really it all started with my mother’s visit and a particular occasion when I happened to have two copies of the same magazine available. Sitting at the table and reading the same edition of a magazine over coffee, we would periodically look up and say, “Oh Look! Go to page such and such..” and we would both turn to the same page, review the article, exchange opinions and generate our ideas about the various unconnected projects that we each had. This was the precursor to our book club; a “gathering” for the purposes of reading, if you will.

The book club started later. It started with books that one of us had read. We did a sort of airmail exchange, posting the book that we had each selected independently; on finishing it we slipped it into an envelope and with a simple message on a card sent it off across the pond. It diminished the miles of the Atlantic ocean. And so I sent, “Out Stealing Horses,” and in the return package I received a copy of “The Tenderness of Wolves.”

The confusion started when I started ordering books, as gifts from Amazon to be delivered directly to my mother. These were books that appealed to me, though they were also selected on the basis that I too would like to read them. Because they were gifts, my mother did not return these books, or at least that was the reason I thought that she did not return them. It made sense after all. Why would you send someone a present only to expect them to return it! In turned out in fact that my mother thought I had chosen them because they were books I had already read!

If two people represent a gathering and three a riot, then we were very soon into having a riot with our book club: The introduction of the “new” gift books meant that there was something of a backlog to my mother’s reading. So now, I started thinking that perhaps my daughter would like the occasional book, especially the two fast and easy reads, (hardly serious literature I thought but ideal for commuting reading on the bus from London to Cheltenham). And so the copies of “Riding Lessons,” and the soon to be posted “Flying Changes,” when my daughter uttered the “Ooh a sequel!” were duly allocated to her on the proviso that they subsequently be sent to my sister, the other avid rider (and reader) in our family. Actually, my sister is the only one of us that belongs to a sensible book club where you all actually read the same book at the same time and meet to discuss it.

My last read, “Mr Pip,” excited me more than any of the books that I have read in a while. I was delighted by the unusual quality of the prose and on reaching the mid point of the book, I confided to my mother how much I was anticipating her response and that it should be wending its way across the pond in no time. The immediate response wasn’t what I expected; a pause and then a puzzled query, “but how have you got that book?” It transpires that my mother had the very same book selection already set aside for me!

It is always surprising to me what survives the passage of time…

Recently, I have been going through my own belongings accumulated over the last fifty or so years; slowly I have been sorting through possessions which spanned thirty years of having a family at home.

But how, I wonder, do we decide what to keep and what to part with?

Image of One cent stamps on postcards

In what must have been a desperate need by my maternal grandmother to keep what she thought of as precious but also intimately private from entering the public domain, she burnt almost all her family photographs. The cupboard in the oak sideboard of my grandmother’s house, full of papers and photographs, was a forbidden zone to me as a child. There was one exception; on one rare occasion my grandmother allowed me to “sort and tidy” the contents of that cupboard, an endeavor which I took great pride in, as it made me feel so grown up.

 There are, no doubt, many more gaps in our family history; if we were to measure that history by the family photographs that remain in circulation between us all we would discover the gaps that we ourselves had created- editing our family lives as we decide which photos to keep and which to throw out. What I have noticed though as I am sorting through my own personal belongings is not just how patchy the photographic record of my life is-bursts of photos taken in some years and then nothing at all in others, but also just how few letters and postcards I have kept over the years.

I remember that cupboard of my grandmother’s and the drawer to the right of the fireplace which brimmed over with envelopes; you had to push the papers down with one hand and push the drawer closed with the other before all the letters spilled out! There were definitely postcards in amongst those letters too; lots of them as I recall, though none have survived the passage of time.

image of old postcard of Canso harbour

 I do have a small collection of postcards though. But these postcards, with scenes of Canso and Guysborough are relics of other people’s lives. They were purchased by my family mainly through e-bay; no doubt having previously reached the public domain in auctions and estate sales, in exactly the way my own grandmother feared her own might be sifted and sorted through had she not first burnt them. My own interest was in the history of the Canso area, being a “come from away,” everything about the area intrigued and enchanted me. I loved looking at those pictures of Canso harbor, imagining it in the winter covered in ice or in the summer with the fishing fleet spread across the horizon. But now, it is the writing on the back of these postcards which intrigues me just as much.

image of old postcard of Hazell Hill, Nova Scotia

My all time favorite postcard though is a black and white photo of Hazel Hill, (the houses on Front St. for the Commercial Cable Company officers remain today as one of the most unchanged streetscapes in Nova Scotia).

 But it is what is written on the back of the postcard that makes it special to me. On the back of the postcard, “Ada” writes to Miss Louis Nicholas of Mahone Bay, and declares,
 

“I am having an elegant time.

Mr. A was here

to meet when I arrived, he

left yesterday for Banks

so its not quite as

pleasant for me. Hope

your all well.” 

This postcard charmed my own mother so much that we started using the phrases, “having an elegant time” or “so it’s not quite as pleasant for me,” when we wrote cards to each other!

We have often thought about Ada and wondered who she was. Who had Ada meant by “Mr. A?” Were they courting at the time this postcard was written? Was Ada writing to her sister or a close friend? And did Ada and Mr. A eventually marry or was “Mr. A” lost at sea as he set out on one of his treacherously dangerous fishing trips to the “Banks” ?