An All Hallow’s Tale Retold

Truly a great and classic story for Halloween.

Willy Or Won't He

On this day for the past few years I’ve invited my readers in out of the cold stormy night, beckoned them to gather around the fire, perhaps have a drop of something to stop the blood running cold, and listen to a story.  To be sure it’s a simple story of an All Hallow’s Eve a hundred years ago or more.  Well yes a simple story but one that tells of a sinful man that to this very day wanders the earth paying his unholy pact with the Evil One himself.  A man so bad that even the Devil would have no truck with him when his time came. Though if legend is to be believed the Devil couldn‘t take the soul of Jack. Old Satan may be many things but he is a Devil of his word and where Jack was concerned he kept it.

Some say that…

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Decorations for Halloween

Tags

halloween, PEI, pumpkin

Here is my contribution for decorating your home for Halloween.

Simple and tasteful and your neighbours will love you for it. Because you help property values with such items instead of the trashy stuff the other neighbour gets at Walmart.

Happy Halloween!

A Trick or a Treat: The story of Canada’s Cursed Candy Kiss

A story about a very Canadian Candy made only for Halloween.

OTTAWA REWIND

It’s available only in Canada. It’s available only during Halloween. No one seems to ever like them, but it mysteriously sells-out of stores every year…Canada’s love-hate relationship with a 75 year old candy that is an endearing seasonal confection: The Kerr’s Molasses Candy Kiss.

Kerr’s is a Canadian candy company that first offered products in 1895. Their website states that the company was founded by Edward and Albert Kerr after they immigrated from Scotland to Canada.

The Scottish Molasses Candy that may have been the inspiration for Canada’s most contested candy. (Image: Ebay.com)

In Scotland, the molasses candy kiss was made by Stewart and Young in Glasgow under “The Steamship Brand”. Perhaps these sticky, tooth pulling candies were harvested from the depths of a Scottish bog.  Kerr’s would use their Scottish angle in their branding with their highly recognizable Scottish “tartan” packaging, a uniquely Canadian brand. But it would not be…

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The resurrection of a tired Friar

This is what I love about museum and the work they do to preserve art work. It takes a lot of time and meticulous efforts.

The Bowes Museum's Blog

Before and after conservation. The left image is before conservation, with a yellow discoloured varnish and overpaint partially hiding the paint(photo: Jason Hynes). The right image is after conservation, where the painting has been fully restored.

The conservation of the Spanish portrait of Fray José Sigüenza (B.M.17), which was mentioned in our Exposing of a Worn Painted Surface blog entry is now completed, and I can finally present the results of the restoration process.

The restoration can be divided in to three separate phases:

• Varnishing
• Filling of losses
• Retouching

In this blog post I will first present the different phases and then I will reveal an intriguing mystery regarding the Latin text painted on the picture.

Varnishing

For most historic art works that were made before the pre impressionistic era, varnishing is an obvious step in the conservation treatment. A picture varnish is traditionally a natural resin in a solvent solution applied…

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Climate change

Tags

Canada., Disney, immigration, PEI, Trump, US ambassador

Well we are almost at the end of October and the weather here on PEI is so warm we are busting all manner of records. Everyone is happy with the warm weather 22C today and 24C tomorrow and with the humidex around 30C. It should normally be no more than 12 to 15 C in day time. You see the problem, well most people don’t and I somewhat feel like the passengers on the Titanic, oh look more ice for the bar.

Talking of cruise ships, the Disney ship made its first inaugural visit to Charlottetown PEI yesterday. Hundreds of people lined up the shore to see it arrive at 07:30am. It is a beautiful ship and has the look of the old ocean liners. The two chimney stacks have the Mickey Mouse Logo on them. If was somewhat cloudy and foggy for the arrival but within an hour the sky cleared, blue with loads of sunshine.

It was quite the event here in town. We had some 50 + ships this past Summer but this one was special for many people.

The departure at 5pm was no less dramatic, the tradition is for the captain of the ship to blow the horn of the ship 3 times as they depart, in a way to say goodbye to the Port of call. The Disney ship horn plays If you wish upon a star, it could be heard all over the downtown area, it put a smile on the face of a lot of people.

This photo was taken as the ship exited the harbour before turning left and out unto the Strait.

Today I took the car in for servicing and had the winter tires put on, I felt silly about it, the weather being so warm. The forecast for the Maritimes is for an abnormally mild winter this year with next to no snow. In Central Canada heavier snow than normal and in the West extremely cold weather.

The new US Ambassador has arrived in Ottawa and she is a horse breeder from Kentucky, a personal friend of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, 3 times married gold digger who gave millions to Trump and also supported Marco Rubio. Her husband is into coal, her name Kelly Craft, I am not impressed with her at all. She is only here because she gave mucho dollars to Trump. Her speech when she presented her Credentials was full of idiotic statements, i.e. I believe both side of Science in the climate change theories, for and against. or this gem, Canada is the best country in the world, strange thing to say coming from a foreign ambassador. She also believes that both sides are right on NAFTA. She did not mention lollipops and unicorns but I am sure she loves them also.

The census is also out and it shows that most immigrants to Canada come from the Philippines, India and China. They now represent 22% of the make-up of the country. It is predicted that by 2030 immigrants would represent 33% of the total population. Toronto is no longer the magnet it once was, having been replaced by cities like Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta. A reflection of simple economics and changing job markets moving West.

What is interesting is that China use to be no. 1 just a few years ago now has fallen into third place and will probably continue to fall.

PEI has had an enormous population growth due to immigration and is leading all the Maritime provinces in this field. The population of the Island in the last 3 years has gone from 145,000 to 152,000 today. Quebec attracts mostly Africans and Muslims immigrants, interesting to note that Quebec unlike all other 9 Canadian provinces, chooses its own immigrants and selects French speaking candidates. Unfortunately the general population is not very open to immigration and is very poorly informed on how the process works, failing to understand that it’s own provincial government has set up this process now since 1962.

The rest of the week looks quiet, a visit to a friend in Belle River and a lunch on Sunday.

 

 

 

 

The last week

Tags

Canada., Charlottetown, cruise, Montreal, PEI, Ships

We are having a beautiful Fall Season with temperatures well above normal. I heard this week that Winter in the Maritimes this year should be warmer than normal  and snow levels well below normal. Given that we have an Atlantic weather pattern this may mean more rain and fog and temperatures like those of Continental Europe in the 0 to +5 C. range, which is easy to take.

The cruise season is coming to an end this week on Friday. The Disney Ship is coming into port for the very first time and its arrival had been expected for some time. With the end of the cruise season usually most tourist related businesses close and quite a few have already closed. Some restaurants who cater usually to tourists will try remaining open until Xmas time. The whole idea now for some years has been to extend the tourism season to 9 months instead of the usual 4 months. In the long run many business owners would like to have a year round season with activities etc. But for this to happen we will need more direct flights to Charlottetown airport all year round. At the moment Halifax which is only 20 minutes away by air or 3 hours by car is an international hub, Montreal and Toronto are the other two major airports but in Winter flights to those two cities are cut down severely which creates a problem for our growing population and our link to the rest of the planet.

The cruise liner leaving as seen from the park behind our house.

Talking of which, PEI has now reached a total population of 152,000 people, with 49% of the entire population of the Island living in the greater Metropolitan area of Charlottetown, this according to statistics recently published. I had no idea I lived in what can be described as a Metro City area. Our population is still a majority of over +55 years old and growing. But then again in Canada the population is aging rapidly despite high level of immigration, which it turns out is not the solution to the aging demographic.

No 2 West street is for sale at $1.2 million, it is a Georgian style house and property on the water.

View from West street, Fanningbank the Official Residence of the Lieutenant Governor since 1834.

The City last night was very quiet, no cars in the street and almost no one about. It is a luxury to have this sort of quiet. The cold I had all last week is finally over, a lot of coughing, lack of sleep and discomfort.

I am also attending this Fall, courses at the Seniors College which is a program offered by Holland College. One course is on French painting in the period of 1830 to 1871, a troubled period in France and in Europe marked by emerging social movements due to the transformation of society in general with the industrial revolution. France is going through one Royalist regime to another and finally a return of the imperial regime with Napoleon III the nephew of the great Napoleon. How does painting and painters express themselves in this age.

Here the cruise ship turns to exit the harbour and enter the Strait before turning Westward.

The other course is given by the Head of the History dept at the University of PEI. Dr Ed MacDonald gives superb lectures and they are highly informative and entertaining. There is a lot of history to PEI and its Capital Charlottetown founded in 1765 by the British.  The old city is drawn like a Roman Military Camp and it has kept to this day the original plan. There is a lot of history in Charlottetown, a lot more than I suspected, it is complex and there are many actors. If Charlottetown at one time in the history of Canada occupied the 11th rank in terms of large cities in our country with Confederation it has been pushed to the margins and is now around 130th in the ranking. In 1867 with Ottawa as the new Capital of the Dominion everything shifts from the Atlantic to central Canada and Montreal becomes the Metropolis and big shipping port some 1000 km away.

This week our new Lieutenant Governor took Office, she was sworn in at Tignish which is an old Acadian settlement dating back to 1799. This is a first on the Island, since all Governors have always been sworn in at Charlottetown.  She is from Tighish which is on the Western tip of PEI about 2 hours by car from Charlottetown. The PEI Regiment also has a new Commander, Colonel Moriarty. Someone pointed out to me that when Antoinette Perry was named Lieutenant Governor, the first thing that came to mind was the person who gave her name to the Tony Awards, but that Antoinette Perry died in 1946 in NYC.

This week is also busy, we are having a visitor who is coming to look at houses as she is moving to PEI from Toronto. I also made an appointment to have the car serviced for the Winter, I always like to have this done before the rush.

 

 

 

The 5 Fallacies about Art

Tags

art., fallacies, MBAC, NGC, Ottawa

Here we have Marc Mayer, Director of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa presenting his arguments to debunk fallacies about art. I find it very helpful in my conversations with the public at the Art Gallery.

 

Love this book

Tags

autobiography, Cold war, John LeCarré, MI5 MI6, The pigeon tunnel, UK, USSR

I am just finishing The Pigeon tunnel; stories from my life by John LeCarré, published in 2016.

The Pigeon tunnel is LeCarré’s autobiography, he was being interviewed on the CBC, Writers and Company by Eleanor Wachtel last week and spoke about it. She reminded him that in 2013 he had said this was is last interview and here he was giving another one to her.

LeCarré is his nom de plume, his real name is David John Moore Cornwell, he was born in 1931 in Poole, Dorset, UK. He served in the Security Service MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 between 1958-1964. He has published numerous books, many have been made into movies, etc. In 1964 LeCarré left the service to work full-time as a novelist, his intelligence-officer career at an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents’ covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent (one of the Cambridge Five).

Kim Philby, now that was a name I heard repeatedly during my time in the Canadian Foreign Service. We were made aware of the deviousness of the USSR during the Cold War and how we always had to be on our guard. Philby died some years ago, he did a lot of harm to the intelligence community and is seen in Russia today as a National Hero for his service to the USSR.

I come late to the books of LeCarré during my career everyone was reading them. I only read one book of his some 15 years ago and nothing since, not because his books are not good, no they are very good read. I was just reading other authors and not in the intelligence novel genre.

I love The Pigeon tunnel, a real page turner of an autobiography about his life from childhood to adulthood, about his father Ronnie who was quite the charmer and con artist always one step ahead of the Law, his mother Olive and his brother Tony. LeCarré also has step-siblings. He was married twice and has four sons all did very well for themselves.

I think I love this book, because for me it brought back a lot of memories of events and people, some of whom I met and knew. It was a fascinating world. His novels on the other hand are works of fiction, his characters are modelled on real people but the rest is all made up, of course his previous career in MI6 helped with the inspiration, though it is fiction sometimes it is close to the truth. LeCarré in his autobiography does explain that in his novels he is to this day bound by his Oath of Secrecy, as we all are not to reveal what we saw or know, let the politicians blab.

I now want to read his latest novel A legacy of Spies published recently. It tells the story of retired spies who 30 years after the events are called back by a new generation to explain why they did this or that, the young generation does not understand nor know what happened then. We do live in the PC age, Canada is a good example not a month goes by now that the Trudeau government thinks it has to apologize for the past, sometime very distant.

 

 

A Bear of Very Little Brain

Without comments a wonderful blog entry by Will.

Willy Or Won't He

He first appeared in one of the forty-five poems in A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young in 1924, but on October 13, 1926 one of the most beloved bears of childhood – and for some of us adulthood – came into his own when Winnie-the-Pooh was published.  The Bear of Little Brain was to appear again two years later in The House at Pooh Corner (1928)  and in eleven of the poems in Now We Are Six (1927).

Christopher Robin’s toys that were eventually to become Tigger, Kanga, Winnie, Eeyore, and Piglet.  Roo has been lost and the characters of Owl and Rabbit were created by Milne and the Disney Studios added another when they gained control of the stories.  They currently reside at the New York Public Library.

Much has been written about the origins of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends – how he got his name, the…

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Staatsoper Berlin

Tags

1742, Berlin, opera, renovations, Staatsoper, Unter den Linden

The State Opera House, Unter den Linden in Berlin re-opened last week after many years of reconstruction.

Since autumn 2010, the most lavish renovation measures in the history of the Berliner Staatsoper – the Berlin State Opera – have been taking place at a cost of roughly € 296 million (gross). Contributing to the general renovation are the German federal government with about € 200 million as well as friends and patrons of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden with € 3 million.

Following public debates about the redesign of the auditorium, the architect HG Merz was commissioned to renovate the historic monument. The ensemble of buildings comprising the Staatsoper was very much in need of a general overhaul. While complying with listed building requirements, structural defects are therefore being remedied and the antiquated building equipment updated in line with modern safety requirements. The accessibility, air-conditioning and fire protection have been improved. The outer appearance of the opera house will, however, remain the same when viewed from a pedestrian perspective. The volume of the auditorium is being enlarged so as to improve the acoustics. To achieve this, the hall is being expanded upwards within the existing building structure by raising the historic ceiling some 16 feet or 5 meters.

The opera house was opened in 1742 as a court opera house, and experienced its first premiere in the still uncompleted building. This thus saw the start of the more than 250-year successful collaboration between the Berliner Staatsoper and the current Berliner Staatskapelle.

The architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff was commissioned to design the building. He conceived the opera in the Palladian style. The King Frederick II selected a fortress site near the Kronprinzenpalais where he lived. By placing it on the city’s main axis – the Unter den Linden boulevard – and not as would be usual within the palace complex, this created Europe’s first independent theatre building as a cultural expression of the Enlightenment.

The building, which was conceived as a nave, comprises the Apollo Hall (banqueting hall, foyer), the Theatre Hall (auditorium, ballroom) and the Corinthian Hall (stage and concert hall). Together with the Kronprinzenpalais, the Prinzessinnenpalais and the Zeughaus, the court opera house was the fourth prestigious building on Unter den Linden.

Just a few steps away on the Museum Island the re-construction of the City Palace is nearing completion and will open in 2019. Thus the ensemble of all the buildings built by Frederick II the Great will be complete once more on Unter den Linden reflecting the Age of Enlightenment. Berlin once again is an elegant capital full of history and culture a pleasure to visit.