LONDON, ONTARIO – It was some time in the fall of 1980 when I met Bill McGrath for the first time as he poked his head through the office doorway while I was dropping off my latest essay to Norm Ibsen, the London Free Press’ editor in charge of the opinion/editorial and book review pages. “We seem to be running something by this guy every week,” Bill said to Norm, indicating me with a nod of his head. “Isn’t it time we had a picture?”

Norm agreed and Bill took me out to the less cramped hallway and set me up against a clear section of wall where a reasonable amount of natural light leaked through and took my photo with his Polaroid.

LONDON, ONTARIO – As a bookend to a piece we ran last December commemorating the death of my father - we publish this essay to mark the hundred and first birthday of my mother  - and, coincidentally enough, the eleventh anniversary of her funeral - this Wednesday.
 
LEAVING ST. JOSEPH'S HOSPITAL just after my father died in the early evening of December 13th, 2003, I couldn’t wait to pour memories, images and thoughts of our Dad down onto the page as a way of helping me come to terms with the grief of losing him. If Jack couldn’t be with us anymore, at least I could erect some sort of narrative monument to his memory and that would be something. With our mother’s death at 2:20 on Easter Saturday morning, 2009, the grieving process was not so sudden or straightforward.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Perhaps in this first week of Easter, you are casting about for some edifying literature; seeking out what Bertie Wooster used to call, “an improving book” or two or three. One of the best source books I know for picking up leads and cues about writers who are working in my favoured field of zealotry is Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief by Joseph Pearce (1999). Pearce accomplished something utterly new under the sun with this book which is nothing less than a running chronicle of twentieth century Christian conversion (mostly Catholic) among British literati. As interesting as the thumbnail sketches of everybody from Robert Hugh Benson and Ronald Knox to Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene, was Pearce’s meticulous tracing of the threads of inspiration and influence which connect them all.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Holy Week is upon us and the churches are blessedly open so I know where I’m putting my head and my heart for the next seven days as I drink in just as deep a draught as I can to make up for last year’s government-imposed drought. For your edification while I’m otherwise engaged, here are some journal selections from a near-silent religious retreat I underwent in late March of 1999.

LONDON, ONTARIO – As a writer who shuns distractions and a technophobe who shuns gadgets, I like nothing more than to be left to the non-manufactured devices I was born with. I’ve never wanted a cell phone and refuse to get one. My old school rotary phone is no smarter than my toaster or my coffee grinder and I am here to tell you that even in the year of our Lord 2021 (and so long as you know how to use a road map) it is still possible to live a blissfully app-free life. I remain one of the most constant readers of physical books that I know and subscribe to three physical newspapers (the London Free Press, The Catholic Register and Epoch Times) which are regularly delivered to my door. Yes, I use a computer but mostly as a glorified typewriter and e-mail server and – as you who are good enough to visit this site can attest – as a do-it-yourself publishing platform. 

LONDON, ONTARIO – London lawyer, Dan Mailer, is a generous-hearted soul with a marked love for his hometown that he is always trying to share with others. In furtherance of that fine impulse, last year he launched a bi-weekly program on Rogers TV called London Lights where he chats up various Forest City notables and milestones. Dan is a more than competent musician in his own right and heads up a band of lawyers who occasionally play gigs and release recordings in aid of charitable causes. So perhaps it isn’t so surprising that the preponderance of stories that have so far aired on London Lights have concerned London musicians.  

LONDON, ONTARIO – One of Hermaneutics’ Britain-based correspondents – the one who makes other readers ask, “If you disappoint him so much, why does he keep reading you?” – sent me a note this week inquiring whether I’d ever seen the 1987 film that was made of Helene Hanff’s  84 Charing Cross Road. I had indeed and his twigging made me watch it again.

LONDON, ONTARIO – In a spirit of defiance I rise to my feet and proclaim that for the last couple of months I have been poring through a half dozen samples of the prodigious literary remains of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914) and ... I’m afraid there’s no other way to put this ... I've been having a wonderful time. This wasn't supposed to be possible. If you're aware of him at all, perhaps you too have heard the discouraging reports spoken against this priestly powerhouse of an author who in the final ten years of his life following his Catholic ordination (and having published nothing in the thirty-two preceding years) produced a total of thirty-seven books including ten works of apologetics, sermons and religious biography, three devotional works, one volume of verse, two children’s books and twenty-one novels. 

LONDON, ONTARIO – Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I did the expected thing and applied for a learner’s driving permit. As part of that process, I attended one lecture/slide show at the old London Police Station at the western foot of King Street, and then passed a short, written exam in which I successfully identified road signs and answered some perfunctory questions about road safety. So far, so good. I was on my way. Trans-Canada Hell Drivers, here I come.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Here’s a lightly tweaked feature article that originally appeared in The London Free Press forty years ago this winter. It’s an up-close account of a hostage-taking incident that took place four years before that; a horrific home invasion which fatally blighted the young marriage of an old high school friend. In 1990, I added a whole lot of invention to the situation that is laid out in this story, to construct my third play, The Anniversary. In both this feature and that play, I find it fascinating to watch this crime play out in a way that would be quite impossible today with the ubiquity of cell phones and computer technology.