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.