LONDON, ONTARIO – The first time Donald D'Haene registered on my consciousness was around 1993 when I was editor of Scene and trying to work up some enthusiasm for that magazine's annual cover model contest. Like a lot of fellows, I've always been indifferent to what strikes me as the higher neurosis of high fashion. Hemlines could go up or down or straight to Hell for all I cared. I shouldn't have been on the committee to choose that year's winner, because, frankly, I didn't understand the underlying premise of the contest. The big prize was a makeover, followed by a professional photo shoot. This struck me as a kind of madness. Having just chosen the best-looking girl out of a pile of photos and CVs, we'd then pass her off to a small army of beauticians, stylists and consultants, who'd work her over until she looked like someone else. Where was the sense in that?

"Maybe we should be choosing the homeliest girl," I helpfully suggested. "Someone who could actually use a few pointers in improving her appearance." This was met with stony silence.

LONDON, ONTARIO – In addition to some of its more routinely trumpeted pleasures and solaces, as you get older Christmas becomes an annual opportunity to spend time communing with the ghosts of the beloved dead. One old friend who’s taking up more pronounced residence in my thoughts this week is Jane Loptson, who died ten years ago in the hallway outside of her apartment at the Mary Campbell Co-op in the early afternoon of December 27th. She had been venturing out to buy some groceries following a rough Christmas when she’d had more than her usual difficulty breathing.

LONDON, ONTARIO – The celebration of Christmas is about the personal intervention of the Divine in human affairs. In the first book of the Old Testament, God creates man and woman and invests them with free will which, a mere five pages later, has so completely caused things to run amok that this temperamental Deity sets out to destroy everybody but Noah and his family and those lucky beasts and birds which have male and female representation on board the ark. In the New Testament, disorder and chaos have returned to mankind (actually they’ve been pretty constant through both Testaments and continue to this day) and this time God elects to send His only Son to instruct people how to live and to win us salvation.