LONDON, ONTARIO – I’ve been reading books (and knocking back films) by and about the Brontes for most of my life now. What follows is a montage of commentaries and snippets about this fascinating family that I’ve made along the way.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Seventeen year-old Nigel Mawson was drifting his way through an unrealized summer; struggling to find ways to pass the time in the ghost town that his daily life had become. He’d never experienced so barren a summer. Where had everybody gone? He was the only kid left at home as his older brothers had landed jobs as a groundskeeper and a busboy at the same Northern Ontario lodge. And all of his friends who mattered the most – no longer content to just hang out at the pool or devote entire weeks to Monopoly tournaments or loafing and spinning records – had shrewdly planned ahead to acquire semi-serious seasonal jobs.

A SLIGHTLY amended version of this essay – with more pictures! – was featured at Quillette on July 2, 2022 with the title The Opposite of Junk.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Though I didn’t plan it this way, I have long enjoyed a rather handy numerical symmetry in my life. Whenever a birthday comes along which is distinguished by a zero or a five for its second digit – as will happen later this month when I achieve the full Biblical allotment of seventy – then I know that come November and December, I will also be marking significant anniversaries for occupancy in this home (our fortieth) and marriage to my favourite human being (our forty-fifth). Two of our three babies were born in this house, and all of them were raised to an approximation of adulthood here and shared precious space with a succession of four superb dogs and one so-so cat. (Not Una’s fault. She couldn’t help it if her species is dull.)

LONDON, ONTARIO – I was sickened to learn yesterday about the on-stage attack on author Salman Rushdie by a knife-wielding Muslim hothead at the Chautaugua Institute in upstate New York where, ironically enough, the Bombay-born author had just begun a presentation in which he was going to talk “about the United States as a sanctuary for exiled authors and a home for freedom of expression.” It was estimated that he received more than a dozen stab wounds in the horrific assault. A medical report late in the day said he was expected to live even though he was hooked up to a ventilator, his liver was badly damaged and it was pretty well certain that he would lose an eye.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Knowing that I live in used bookshops (and never more so than in the week when we host David Warren on his annual book-buying safari to southwestern Ontario) one of our friends asked us last month to keep an eye out for a good un-woke dictionary of the English language she could buy. We zapped her along some details about a 1973 edition of the two-volume Shorter Oxford Dictionary which we found at Cardinal Books for thirty-five bucks. My own edition of the Shorter hails from 1993 and has never struck me as particularly woke but the ’73 would be an even safer bet.

LONDON, ONTARIO – When my son bought his first drum set at the age of fourteen and learned how to navigate his way around that kit with pretty impressive finesse, it set off a lot of memories of my own percussive explorations at that very same age. The day we set up his drums in the darkest corner of the basement, I tuned them and showed him some of the rudiments and it was a golden father/son moment. Epiphanies between the male generations can come with considerable time lags. It can be twenty or thirty years until the kid realizes, “So that’s what Dad was talking about.” This was one of those wonderful occasions when I was able to give him the key to some arcane body of knowledge at the very moment he was burning to learn it.

LONDON, ONTARIO - My career as a freelance photographer may be about to take off, a most welcome surprise as I shake off my latest, mildly irritating (and, this time, medically confirmed) bout with the ‘Rona’ and try to figure out what to post here for yet another overdue Hermaneutics. (My goodness, 2022 has been a real bugger for productivity, hasn’t it?) Quite out of the blue I received an inquiry this afternoon from a picture editor at Britain’s The Daily Mail, requesting permission to reprint this photo I took exactly ten years ago on my wife’s phone.

LONDON, ONTARIO – About a half year ago our son outfitted his digitally-challenged parents with a remote control device that we can speak into and magically instruct our oh-so ‘smart’ television to retrieve some program from the outer ether and pop it up onto our screen. In January and February when I was flying low with some physical afflictions that I described a couple of Hermaneutics ago, I was spending a few hours most nights on the couch revisiting forty and fifty year-old dramatizations of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. While this snappy new remote spares us the aggro of all that sausage-fingered poking at a finicky little keyboard, you do have to enunciate your request quite clearly or else that wheel indicating that the interwebs are being scanned to no avail starts spinning away on your screen, just above the message: “No results for ‘Dorothy Ulcers’.”

LONDON, ONTARIO – In a recent email exchange with someone who finds me just a wee bit judgmental, I was asked why I refuse to discard my quaint allegiance to that primary doctrine of both theology and biology that there are only two sexes. You too may have noticed that this article of dogma which has enjoyed universal acceptance from time immemorial, began to encounter a coordinated squall of tetchy turbulence about ten minutes ago. My favourite formulation of what I still regard as one of the more foundational doctrines to live by – positing that which shapes and drives and bestows most of the charm and wonder which are to be found in human existence –  hails from the King James version of the Bible and goes like this: “Male and female created He them.”

LONDON, ONTARIO – I invite you to join me in a tearful salute to the great Gary Brooker – the main composer, lead singer and pianist for symphonic rock pioneers, Procol Harum – who died last Saturday in Britain of one boring form of cancer or another at the age of 76. Everyone, of course, remembers Procol Harum’s first and by far biggest hit which took the world and the barely-formed band themselves by storm, A Whiter Shade of Pale.