Saturday, September 8, 2018
I heard two funny stories this week, one at a liquor store, the other at the Share Shed, a building beside the dump where people put things too good for the dump.
The liquor store had an armed robbery this week, CBC Radio news said. I was in there a couple days later and asked the clerk if he was on duty during the robbery.
"Yeah, I was here. The guy didn't get anything. He came in, showed me this little knife,and said, 'Give me all your shit!''
"I said, 'No.'"
"He said, 'What?'"
"'No,' I said again. 'Get out.' And he left."
The Share shed was busy when I was there looking for small bowls for our building's Social Room, actually called that, its door sign says. I therefore locked my bike to a bed frame leaning on an outside wall of the Share Shed, lest I unintentionally donate it to someone who mistook it for a giveaway item.
I found some bowls and started talking to a guy there. He said he had looked at my bike but that people wouldn't take such a bike unlocked.
Yeah, right, I thought.
I then told him about the bike lying in a field that my Ottawa landlord, a transport truck driver, repeatedly drove past, just after I had rented a room in his house in 1987. One day he put the bike on board his truck and gave it to me. I had no bike, having moved 4 000 kilometres by shared car from Western Canada that summer for graduate school.
"That was my bike," the man at the Share Shed joked.
Rising to his humor, I offered to contact that landlord, who is probably dead, to ask about the bike, which I left with him when I moved out of that Ottawa house in the spring of 1988.
So ends Funny Talk 1. The next time I hear something funny enough to recount, watch this blog for Funny Talk 2.
Saturday, September 8, 2018
Monday, July 9, 2018
Edmonton Trip 2018
Monday, July 9, 2018
Is a blog a brag? This one is, about a car, driving, and relationships.
"The Mighty Echo," Doug in Edmonton calls it. Our 2003 Toyota was loaded to Prince George,
lighter to Grande Prairie, and loaded more heavily from there to Edmonton and from Edmonton back home to Williams Lake. It returned from the 2500 kilometre trip with more than 397 000 kilometres on the odometer. It got between 16 and 19 kilometres per litre of gas. It did not fail us, once again; but I won't ask such a long trip of it again.
Two Edmonton days featured driving challenged by deadlines and traffic. On Thursday, July 5, I navigated rush-hour traffic from our hotel near Whitemud Drive and Calgary Trail across the new Walterdale Bridge to my friend Tom's downtown hotel. We then went back through that traffic to the house of his aunt, 97, near 79 Street and 97Avenue, north of Bonnie Doon mall. We got there at 5:10 and I left at 5:25, via 79 Street south, 90 Avenue east, and 75 Street south to Whitemud Drive, then west to the hotel to fetch Carla and Chelsea in time to meet Doug and Lavonne at the Southgate Italian Centre for pizza at 6 on the dot. Lavonne and Doug generously paid for pizza and we paid for dessert.
The second driving day, Friday, July 6 had longer distances, tighter deadlines, and the intervention of an angelic helper. Starting at 10 AM, Carla and I drove from the hotel, out the Whitemud to 170 Street, up to 137 Avenue, and east to Old Navy at 132 Street, then to Giant Tiger on 127 Street and 132 Avenue.
We then drove back south on 127 Street, west on 118 Avenue, down 149 Street back to Whitemud, back to the hotel, picked up Chelsea, and got to the Mill Woods Town Centre mall at 28 Avenue and 58 Street for them and the nearby seniors' centre for me and Doug to play pool, with Maryanne. She got there a few minutes after our 2 PM meeting time, also navigating construction hither and yon.
Maryanne's angelic intervention helped me meet Tom at the downtown MacEwan University campus briefly from 4:05-4:20, again through rush hour traffic. She had to prepare our fabulous Friday night dinner at her friends' house where she was staying, near 106 Street and 34 Avenue. I drove to tell Tom at 4 PM that she could not meet him, we having no other way to tell him. Maryanne helpfully agreed to fetch Carla and Chelsea at the nearby mall and drop them off at the hotel on her way to the house.
I drove out of darkest Mill Woods on 28 Avenue west to 91 Street, a venerable, arrow-straight road of few lights, like 127 Street across the river. I went left at the t-intersection at 63 Avenue, to 99 Street, north on it to Scona Road, across the Low Level Bridge, and to Tom at the university on 104 Avenue and 107 Street in about 35 minutes. After our brief chat before his city bus to visit his Stony Plain cousin who would drive him back to Edmonton for his 11:30 PM bus to Grande Prairie, I drove west toward 109 Street, wondering how slow it would be at 4:30 on a Friday.
109 Street was pretty slow from 104 to 97 Avenue, the High Level Bridge was faster, 104 Street south was slow from 85 to 80 Avenue, and it was faster after that, so I reached our hotel a bit after 5. Before our 6 PM supper date at the house where Maryanne stayed, I even had time for a quick float in the hotel pool, a relief on that 30+ degree day.
Supper was wonderful, as was the company of Harold and Joan. For the first time ever, I played guitars with Harold. He had brought his newer 12-string and 1966 6-string guitars, the latter for me to play. We left around midnight, 38 years to the hour after Mom died in the Mewburn Pavilion of the University of Alberta Hospital. I'd not thought about it until Maryanne told me the next day, an easier driving day before the July 8 930-km drive from Edmonton to Williams Lake.
On Saturday, July 7, Carla wanted to go to the Strathcona Farmers' Market, a very hard place to drive to in the thick traffic that surrounds it; but I'm glad Carla got there. We then returned to the hotel for Chelsea, and went downtown via Whitemud, 113 Street, and the Groat Bridge. "I won't go near the place," Harold later said of the market. We saw his and Joan's Jasper Avenue and 123 Street condo, which has views across Jasper Avenue and the North Saskatchewan River. I stayed there with Harold and Joan, Maryanne came soon, and Harold picked up Carla and Chelsea from the Taro Card reading that Joan generously paid for, before we left them and went back across the river to Royal Pizza for a last Edmonton meal with Maryanne.
Yesterday, we drove back to Williams Lake. Today, Maryanne drove her hosts' crew cab to Penticton, where they are in their place on Skaha Lake. In three days, she'll fly from Penticton to Calgary and from Calgary to London, England. Today, Carla drove to Anaham, with two large plastic bags of clothes Maryanne gave me while we sorted and reduced the volume of her stuff in her Strathcona storage locker. She grew too small for many clothes now bound for Carla's kin and friends in Anaham.
I know some thoughtful, generous, and organized people.
Is a blog a brag? This one is, about a car, driving, and relationships.
"The Mighty Echo," Doug in Edmonton calls it. Our 2003 Toyota was loaded to Prince George,
lighter to Grande Prairie, and loaded more heavily from there to Edmonton and from Edmonton back home to Williams Lake. It returned from the 2500 kilometre trip with more than 397 000 kilometres on the odometer. It got between 16 and 19 kilometres per litre of gas. It did not fail us, once again; but I won't ask such a long trip of it again.
Two Edmonton days featured driving challenged by deadlines and traffic. On Thursday, July 5, I navigated rush-hour traffic from our hotel near Whitemud Drive and Calgary Trail across the new Walterdale Bridge to my friend Tom's downtown hotel. We then went back through that traffic to the house of his aunt, 97, near 79 Street and 97Avenue, north of Bonnie Doon mall. We got there at 5:10 and I left at 5:25, via 79 Street south, 90 Avenue east, and 75 Street south to Whitemud Drive, then west to the hotel to fetch Carla and Chelsea in time to meet Doug and Lavonne at the Southgate Italian Centre for pizza at 6 on the dot. Lavonne and Doug generously paid for pizza and we paid for dessert.
The second driving day, Friday, July 6 had longer distances, tighter deadlines, and the intervention of an angelic helper. Starting at 10 AM, Carla and I drove from the hotel, out the Whitemud to 170 Street, up to 137 Avenue, and east to Old Navy at 132 Street, then to Giant Tiger on 127 Street and 132 Avenue.
We then drove back south on 127 Street, west on 118 Avenue, down 149 Street back to Whitemud, back to the hotel, picked up Chelsea, and got to the Mill Woods Town Centre mall at 28 Avenue and 58 Street for them and the nearby seniors' centre for me and Doug to play pool, with Maryanne. She got there a few minutes after our 2 PM meeting time, also navigating construction hither and yon.
Maryanne's angelic intervention helped me meet Tom at the downtown MacEwan University campus briefly from 4:05-4:20, again through rush hour traffic. She had to prepare our fabulous Friday night dinner at her friends' house where she was staying, near 106 Street and 34 Avenue. I drove to tell Tom at 4 PM that she could not meet him, we having no other way to tell him. Maryanne helpfully agreed to fetch Carla and Chelsea at the nearby mall and drop them off at the hotel on her way to the house.
I drove out of darkest Mill Woods on 28 Avenue west to 91 Street, a venerable, arrow-straight road of few lights, like 127 Street across the river. I went left at the t-intersection at 63 Avenue, to 99 Street, north on it to Scona Road, across the Low Level Bridge, and to Tom at the university on 104 Avenue and 107 Street in about 35 minutes. After our brief chat before his city bus to visit his Stony Plain cousin who would drive him back to Edmonton for his 11:30 PM bus to Grande Prairie, I drove west toward 109 Street, wondering how slow it would be at 4:30 on a Friday.
109 Street was pretty slow from 104 to 97 Avenue, the High Level Bridge was faster, 104 Street south was slow from 85 to 80 Avenue, and it was faster after that, so I reached our hotel a bit after 5. Before our 6 PM supper date at the house where Maryanne stayed, I even had time for a quick float in the hotel pool, a relief on that 30+ degree day.
Supper was wonderful, as was the company of Harold and Joan. For the first time ever, I played guitars with Harold. He had brought his newer 12-string and 1966 6-string guitars, the latter for me to play. We left around midnight, 38 years to the hour after Mom died in the Mewburn Pavilion of the University of Alberta Hospital. I'd not thought about it until Maryanne told me the next day, an easier driving day before the July 8 930-km drive from Edmonton to Williams Lake.
On Saturday, July 7, Carla wanted to go to the Strathcona Farmers' Market, a very hard place to drive to in the thick traffic that surrounds it; but I'm glad Carla got there. We then returned to the hotel for Chelsea, and went downtown via Whitemud, 113 Street, and the Groat Bridge. "I won't go near the place," Harold later said of the market. We saw his and Joan's Jasper Avenue and 123 Street condo, which has views across Jasper Avenue and the North Saskatchewan River. I stayed there with Harold and Joan, Maryanne came soon, and Harold picked up Carla and Chelsea from the Taro Card reading that Joan generously paid for, before we left them and went back across the river to Royal Pizza for a last Edmonton meal with Maryanne.
Yesterday, we drove back to Williams Lake. Today, Maryanne drove her hosts' crew cab to Penticton, where they are in their place on Skaha Lake. In three days, she'll fly from Penticton to Calgary and from Calgary to London, England. Today, Carla drove to Anaham, with two large plastic bags of clothes Maryanne gave me while we sorted and reduced the volume of her stuff in her Strathcona storage locker. She grew too small for many clothes now bound for Carla's kin and friends in Anaham.
I know some thoughtful, generous, and organized people.
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Bike 65 km, Soak, and Rejoice
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
On May 21 I bicycled 65 kilometres. I thank my 56-year-old body. It says, "You're welcome."
A local ecologist organized a bicycle-themed weekend that included this ride, a shorter ride, and rhubarb juice: sour, but thirst-quenching.
Born here, she lived in Vancouver and participated in many "Critical Mass" bike rides, designed to remind society that roads are for people and bicycles, not only automobiles. Critical Mass rides helped produce a bike lane on the Burrard Bridge, whose remaining automobile commuters go faster now that so many got out of their cars and onto their bikes, feet, or city buses.
The Critical Mass ride I participated in here in Williams Lake on May 19 featured only ten or so riders, stayed on the shoulder of the highway, and went from the tourist centre at the city's south end to the Potato House, downtown, four kilometres away. The Potato House, an 80-year-old house whose late Italian-born building family grew potatoes all around it, is a local hotbed of ecology. It has hot beds of community gardens outside, exhibits inside, and a rare, drive-through compost station along the alley behind. I dumped my bucket there this morning.
The rhubarb juice, still warm from fermenting, was one reward for us Critical Mass riders. It was sour but it quenched my thirst. I twitch remembering my cousin who used to eat rhubarb raw from our garden. I suppose rhubarb juice would produce alcohol in time, like the cherry juice my parents' friends made, and let us children drink. I had a tasty childhood indeed.
Only four of us rode the 45-km from 150 Mile House Elementary School on May 21. We rode up Horsefly Road to Likely Road, along Mountain House Road, the old Cariboo Gold Rush Trail of the 1860s, to Deep Creek, and back into Williams Lake on Highway 97. Two of us, the other one a man of 68, had ridden the 20-km from Williams Lake to the school before the ride. The other two riders were younger and women, one about 35 and the other 40, the latter the local ecological whirling dervish who organized the weekend. There was no rhubarb juice to end this ride, but there was apple cider from a highway store 10 km before the Williams Lake end of the ride. That was welcome in the 25-degree heat.
The first 10 km were largely uphill, from 2-6% grades. A few km of 3-7% downhill grades followed. A passing motorist photographed us using our organizer's cell phone. The road turned gravel a few km later, and the 20 km of Highway 97 back to Williams Lake was on a shoulder one metre wide, with transport trucks whizzing by. I preferred the earlier, wilderness ride. The last three km into Williams Lake were 1-3% downhill through road construction, as much of the 20 km 1-3% uphill from Williams Lake to the school starting place had been.
I wasn't stiff after the ride, or the next morning, but I treated my obliging body to a swim and hot tub soak in the local pool complex the next morning. A lifeguard told me that every month the lifeguards have a training session, and every two years they take tests to ensure they are still good lifeguards. I wish drivers had such requirements; my last driving test was 23 years ago and I'd gladly take another driving test, to be sure I'm still safe behind the wheel.
After my pool fun, I cycled three km to my tutoring job at the local university campus.
Rolling along on a bicycle is such joy, with or without the nectar of rhubarb, cherries, or apples!
On May 21 I bicycled 65 kilometres. I thank my 56-year-old body. It says, "You're welcome."
A local ecologist organized a bicycle-themed weekend that included this ride, a shorter ride, and rhubarb juice: sour, but thirst-quenching.
Born here, she lived in Vancouver and participated in many "Critical Mass" bike rides, designed to remind society that roads are for people and bicycles, not only automobiles. Critical Mass rides helped produce a bike lane on the Burrard Bridge, whose remaining automobile commuters go faster now that so many got out of their cars and onto their bikes, feet, or city buses.
The Critical Mass ride I participated in here in Williams Lake on May 19 featured only ten or so riders, stayed on the shoulder of the highway, and went from the tourist centre at the city's south end to the Potato House, downtown, four kilometres away. The Potato House, an 80-year-old house whose late Italian-born building family grew potatoes all around it, is a local hotbed of ecology. It has hot beds of community gardens outside, exhibits inside, and a rare, drive-through compost station along the alley behind. I dumped my bucket there this morning.
The rhubarb juice, still warm from fermenting, was one reward for us Critical Mass riders. It was sour but it quenched my thirst. I twitch remembering my cousin who used to eat rhubarb raw from our garden. I suppose rhubarb juice would produce alcohol in time, like the cherry juice my parents' friends made, and let us children drink. I had a tasty childhood indeed.
Only four of us rode the 45-km from 150 Mile House Elementary School on May 21. We rode up Horsefly Road to Likely Road, along Mountain House Road, the old Cariboo Gold Rush Trail of the 1860s, to Deep Creek, and back into Williams Lake on Highway 97. Two of us, the other one a man of 68, had ridden the 20-km from Williams Lake to the school before the ride. The other two riders were younger and women, one about 35 and the other 40, the latter the local ecological whirling dervish who organized the weekend. There was no rhubarb juice to end this ride, but there was apple cider from a highway store 10 km before the Williams Lake end of the ride. That was welcome in the 25-degree heat.
The first 10 km were largely uphill, from 2-6% grades. A few km of 3-7% downhill grades followed. A passing motorist photographed us using our organizer's cell phone. The road turned gravel a few km later, and the 20 km of Highway 97 back to Williams Lake was on a shoulder one metre wide, with transport trucks whizzing by. I preferred the earlier, wilderness ride. The last three km into Williams Lake were 1-3% downhill through road construction, as much of the 20 km 1-3% uphill from Williams Lake to the school starting place had been.
I wasn't stiff after the ride, or the next morning, but I treated my obliging body to a swim and hot tub soak in the local pool complex the next morning. A lifeguard told me that every month the lifeguards have a training session, and every two years they take tests to ensure they are still good lifeguards. I wish drivers had such requirements; my last driving test was 23 years ago and I'd gladly take another driving test, to be sure I'm still safe behind the wheel.
After my pool fun, I cycled three km to my tutoring job at the local university campus.
Rolling along on a bicycle is such joy, with or without the nectar of rhubarb, cherries, or apples!
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Matilda Chantyman, Carla's Words
November 6, Monday, 2017
Family and friends,
I heard about Matilda's
(102) passing before lunch. We use to visit her at Kluskus. She had a
small house dog that she called 'Dlig'. The dog was a bit bigger a
squirrel. Hence the name of her dog.
She was a busy and tuff
ol' bird: she attended family funerals at Anaham, other Chilcotin
communities for funerals and celebrations. I have even seen her at a
diabetes conference at Penticton. When she was mobile, I use to see her
at the casino and asking
for five dollars. She use to sit at one of my favorite machines.
There was a time that I
saw her at the Quesnel rodeo activities at the park and listening to the
bands playing rock and roll tunes. She must have had the love of music
and dancing in her genes as did her nephews: late Patrick, late Raymond,
late Raphael,
and late Norman. Music was in their family as her nieces Celina and
late Clara were good at belting out a good tune. Family resemblance was
visible in looks, taste of traveling, meeting 'new' people, making
friends, and attending rodeos, dances, and pow-wows.
With the passing of this
fine elder, is a lost of knowledge, culture, from Tl'etinqox and Kluskus
sides. Just imagine that she lived and traveled The Grease Trial on
foot, with horse and wagon. I am sure that she lived with the seasons,
cattle roundup and
feeding, haying time, and moving from Anaham, Anaham Meadows and Rocky
Point.
Not to mention that she
provided for her family with traditional ways of living. She spoke
fluently in Chilcotin and Carrier language. In her day, school was not a
priority but living of the land was the way of life. The way to survive
was to hunt wildlife,
big and small, fish, deer and moose were packaged and dried, berries,
wild tea, wild potatoes, soapberries were picked and stored for winter
food. There was none of shopping and buying of food at Safeway for this
grand Tsilhqot'in.
This elder has many
great-nieces and great-nephews at Tl'etinqox Government, Tl'etinqox
School, Tsilhqot'in National Government, Negotiations & External
Affairs Office, Punky Lake Wilderness Camp Society, Stone Band and
Alkali Lake Band office: Sharmon
Alphonse, Lorna Elkins, Bella Alphonse, Jodie Jim, Paul Grinder, Randy
Billyboy, Carla Alphonse, Karen Jim, Samantha Jo Dick, Chief Joe
Alphonse, Cecil Grinder, Pamela Alphonse, Janel Alphonse, Justin
Bambrick, Dorothy Alphonse, Darlene Alphonse, Wanda Petal-Dick,
Rhoda Petal, Janet Petal, Erika Petal, and Faye Chelsea, I am sorry if I
missed anyone. It is important to know our family connections. We come
from a strong and remarkable deni.
Matilda Alphonse Chantyman may you greet the good Lord with a smile and open arms. RIP.
Carla Alphonse, CSSC, HSD
Chief's Assistant, Tl'etinqox
Tsilhqot'in National Government
250-394-4212 Extension 206
888-224-3322 Extension 206
250-302-1109 (Cell)
Monday, November 6, 2017
Matilda Chantyman
Hello,
Matilda
Chantyman (b June 3, 1916), Carla's dad's aunt on his dad's side, died. Matilda was living in Quesnel, where Dad was born
in 1919, three years after Matilda, who I think was born in Anaham.
In
2004 and 2006, when I taught in her village of Kluskus, off the road in
the bush about 100 km west of Quesnel, Matilda still lived there, with
her daughter Bella, over 60 then. During winter trips, in a
high-clearance truck for the bush trail, toand from Quesnel, Matilda got
to sit in the front with the little children, but Bella, I, and the
bigger children rumbled along snuggled under blankets in the box. One
winter night, stuck in the bush, Bella had a fire going fast. We
gathered round, waiting for morning and someone to bring a U-joint to
fix the truck. The temperature was only about -10.
"When
I was younger, we used to walk to Ulkatcho," Bella told me. That's
about 140 km west of Kluskus, along the Dakelh-Nuxalt Grease Trail, the
route that Alexander Mackenzie followed westward to Pacific Ocean
tidewater at Bella Coola in 1793. A Bella Coola monument says so. At
Kluskus, I saw little metal signs on trees along the trail, a protected
historic route sometimes traveled still, by foot or horse. "An Indian
is pointing a white man in the wrong direction," Kluskus resident
George Jimmie, one of the high-clearance truck drivers, quipped.
I
met Matilda and Bella in February, 2004 in Bella's house at Kluskus,
which had a 3 x 8-foot table covered in dried moose meat.
In
2016, Carla, Chelsea, and I attended Matilda's 100th birthday party in
the Quesnel friendship centre. I shook a 100-year-old hand. Matilda
asked one of Carla's sisters for a chew of tobacco. Prime Minister
Trudeau's letter to Matilda for turning 100 was on he hall wall.
Perhaps her land, stolen by colonialism, is in the mail.
Williams Lake, The Land Called Canada
Hockey Helmet Pony Tails
Monday, November 6, 2017
Saturday, November 4, skating for the first time this winter season, I liked watching pony tails flying from under hockey helmets worn by several girls, age 9-12, skating in pairs or trios, wearing their hockey sweaters,
No girls played minor hockey when I did, in the 1970s. Girls figure skated. When our coach invited one to show us power skating techniques when I was 12 or so, nobody on my team could catch her.
The activism against fighting in hockey might yet civilize the sport among men and older boys, amateur and professional. "I was watching the fight, when a hockey game broke out."
Poetry in motion, that's what I thought when I watched a couple university women's hockey games in Edmonton a few years ago: finesse, not goonery.
Everybody skate, to "The Skaters' Waltz!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV4BxDcWus8
Saturday, November 4, skating for the first time this winter season, I liked watching pony tails flying from under hockey helmets worn by several girls, age 9-12, skating in pairs or trios, wearing their hockey sweaters,
No girls played minor hockey when I did, in the 1970s. Girls figure skated. When our coach invited one to show us power skating techniques when I was 12 or so, nobody on my team could catch her.
The activism against fighting in hockey might yet civilize the sport among men and older boys, amateur and professional. "I was watching the fight, when a hockey game broke out."
Poetry in motion, that's what I thought when I watched a couple university women's hockey games in Edmonton a few years ago: finesse, not goonery.
Everybody skate, to "The Skaters' Waltz!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV4BxDcWus8
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Ireland, by Leon and Jill Uris
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, its subtitle from the W.B. Yeats poem "Easter, 1916," which I read in my first year English course at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1979, is a 1978 edition of a 1975 book by Leon and Jill Uris. They wrote and published during the British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, and they like neither the army nor the province.
The Hill of Tara, ancient burial mounds, pre-Celtic migrants from Scandinavia and Scotland, perhaps via a land bridge 6000 years ago, Vikings, Normans, the Reformation, the government-induced famine of the 1840s, while cattle were exported, the 1916 events, Partition, Ulster "fascism" in the authors' words, and 1970s despair that peace will never come are in this book from this fall's used book sale in the mall in Williams Lake. Today, when I volunteer again at the sale, I'll return the book, so someone else can have it.
Here I'll write about the book, for my blog readers, especially my sister Maryanne, my 2015 and 2017 Ireland travel partner.
From "Ulster," the title of the last third of the book, here is the authors' view of one section of the police set up in Northern Ireland when Britain granted it province status around 1920:
"Of the auxiliaries, the B-specials, a civil militia of mostly Orangemen, were to gain a
well-deserved infamy for their brutal tactics."
"From the beginning, no protest ever failed to bring on a reaction of overkill. It was a
blunt instrument of totalitarianism. To back up those massive forces, a Special Powers
Act was legislated at the very start to enable this one-party government to arrest anyone
without warrant or reason and to hold him behind bars indefinitely without charges or
rights. It is small wonder this act would become a model law for later fascist regimes
in Europe." (176)
Later, describing Bloody Sunday, the January 30, 1972 British Army murder of 13 peaceful demonstrators among an unarmed crowd in Derry, and its aftermath British inquiry that condemned the army's behavior, the authors write, "if the British had given justice to Ulster's Catholics and had not invoked fascism through Internment, no protest would have been required." (220)
Here is the authors' third and last mention of fascism in Northern Ireland:
"[The British] know that the Ulster love of the Crown had the biggest Catch 22 of them all:
the proposition that Britain was going to be used to allow their quasi-fascist regime to
exist." (277)
Strong words.
Martin McGuinness is young in the book, whose authors would probably not "piss on his grave," unlike an old English man Maryanne met decades later said he would, upon hearing of McGuinness' peaceful death. "After the Battle of Bogside [1969], the I.R.A. Provos came under command of Martin McGuinness, a twenty-two-year-old butcher's apprentice." (215)
On the other side of the barricades, have one of several Orange chants the book quotes:
"A rope, a rope,
Tae hang the Pope!
A pennyworth o' cheese
Tae choke him!
A pint o' lamp oil
Tae wrench it down!
And a big hot give
Tae roast him!
When I was sick,
And very very sick,
And very near a-dying,
The only thing that raised me up
Was to see
The old whore frying!" (180-181)
A few paragraphs later, there's this amusing announcement from a pilot about to land at Belfast airport: "We are about the land in Ulster. Set your watches back 300 years." (181)
Page 214 is about John Hume, "A Voice in the Wilderness." Hume is "the best political brain on the island"and his Social Democratic Labor Party "the most illuminating lights in Ulster politics." The page ends, "it will fall to the John Humes to bring sanity" to Ulster. This later happened. I wonder if he's related to David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher from the 1700s.
A week before Bloody Sunday, in "COs Want Paras Restrained," Simon Hoggart writes in the January 25, 1972 Guardian of British Army units asking that the Parachute Regiment not enter Derry. One unit captain, unnamed, whose commander did not oppose the Paras in Derry, said the paras "seem to think they can get away with whatever they like." (221)
After Bloody Sunday, "the British Embassy was burned down by a Dublin mob." (278)
Father Edward Daly, whose statue we saw in 2017 in Derry, and I wonder if he's related to Sister Daly who taught me Catechism during my First Communion year, when I was 7, is in this book. On Bloody Sunday, he dodged British Army bullets to rescue shot teenagers. He told the authors, "it doesn't matter whether you have a Roman collar or a dog collar." Daly regularly evacuated old people before demonstrations and consequent army attacks. Daly's story, pages 222-24, ends by noting that a year after Bloody Sunday, the paratrooper commander was knighted.
Bloody Sunday gets much attention from the authors, writing only a couple years after it. The event still weighs on Ireland. We saw a demonstration about it outside Belfast City Hall in 2015.
Here are a couple pithy quotes:
"The British Army has performed with total consistency in Ireland since the
Reformation as an anti-Catholic force of conquest, occupation, and suppression."
(232)
"[Belfast] is the mongoloid child of British imperialism." (247)
Innocent Protestants in Ulster suffered, too. Stephan Parker, 14, whose Belfast liberal pastor father "sought Christian answers to the crushing events," died when a July, 1972 I.R.A. bomb blasted the grocery store where he worked. "There is something Godlike about Joe Parker and his wife [Dorothy] that keeps them from being consumed with bitterness." (262-263)
Belfast Protestant Malcolm Orr, 19, engaged to a Belfast Catholic woman, was shot dead for it. At his wake, "She was there with her family and many other Catholic families. Protestants were there and many many strangers and they prayed together." Malcolm's mother told the authors, "Revenge is empty." (265)
The authors conclude the book by saying that the I.R.A. can't win by force and lacks the support to win by votes, but "will never be able to leave its people to the 'tender mercy' of the jackals." (277)
The timeline in the Appendix says that Henry VIII's Catholic daughter Queen Mary, whose heritage centre we saw in 2015 in Ireland, started the first plantation, in 1556, "confiscating Counties Leix and Offaly." (281)
The Catholic-Protestant division is therefore newer, politically grafted onto the earlier English-Irish, colonial-independent conflicts. Perhaps unity won't come, Northern Ireland's colonial history conjoined to Scottish Presbyterianism being too different from the history of the rest of the island. Still, Ulster was the strongest anti-English part of Ireland before the Reformation and Plantations.
The authors note that the Republic of Ireland, which I have called Southern Ireland since Paul McGlinchey so named it in his I.R.A. memoir Truth Will Out, whose signing we attended in the Greyhound Pub in Duleek on September 23, does not want to welcome a million Protestants from Northern Ireland into a unified Ireland and island. "One island. One Ireland," McGlinchey's co-author Philomena Gallagher ended her McGlinchey introduction in the pub that night.
A personal ancestry note occurred to me as I read about the consequences of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, whose site we saw in 2017, in which Williams of Orange's Protestant army defeated James II's Catholic army and ensured that only Protestants would sit on the English throne. After the battle, Anglican English oppression of other religions in Ireland was hardest on Catholics, but also hurt Presbyterians.
Our mom's mom's mom was a Mahurin. Several generations earlier, Hugh Mahurin left Scotland or Ireland around 1690, the Hugh Mahurin website says. I put this lineage, which includes links to a Mayflower passenger, on my blog:
http://michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/2017/07/ancestry-of-wynnes-going-back-to.html
If you can't open that link, then search the blog using the keywords "Mayflower" or "Mahurin." The link mentions the Mahurin ancestry after the Mayflower ancestry.
Was Hugh Mahurin a Scottish Presbyterian oppressed by English colonial laws against Presbyterians, Catholics, and other non-Anglicans? Does it matter now? One could crack up obsessing about history. I just wanted to write about this interesting book because I was recently in Ireland, North and South.
Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, its subtitle from the W.B. Yeats poem "Easter, 1916," which I read in my first year English course at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1979, is a 1978 edition of a 1975 book by Leon and Jill Uris. They wrote and published during the British Army occupation of Northern Ireland, and they like neither the army nor the province.
The Hill of Tara, ancient burial mounds, pre-Celtic migrants from Scandinavia and Scotland, perhaps via a land bridge 6000 years ago, Vikings, Normans, the Reformation, the government-induced famine of the 1840s, while cattle were exported, the 1916 events, Partition, Ulster "fascism" in the authors' words, and 1970s despair that peace will never come are in this book from this fall's used book sale in the mall in Williams Lake. Today, when I volunteer again at the sale, I'll return the book, so someone else can have it.
Here I'll write about the book, for my blog readers, especially my sister Maryanne, my 2015 and 2017 Ireland travel partner.
From "Ulster," the title of the last third of the book, here is the authors' view of one section of the police set up in Northern Ireland when Britain granted it province status around 1920:
"Of the auxiliaries, the B-specials, a civil militia of mostly Orangemen, were to gain a
well-deserved infamy for their brutal tactics."
"From the beginning, no protest ever failed to bring on a reaction of overkill. It was a
blunt instrument of totalitarianism. To back up those massive forces, a Special Powers
Act was legislated at the very start to enable this one-party government to arrest anyone
without warrant or reason and to hold him behind bars indefinitely without charges or
rights. It is small wonder this act would become a model law for later fascist regimes
in Europe." (176)
Later, describing Bloody Sunday, the January 30, 1972 British Army murder of 13 peaceful demonstrators among an unarmed crowd in Derry, and its aftermath British inquiry that condemned the army's behavior, the authors write, "if the British had given justice to Ulster's Catholics and had not invoked fascism through Internment, no protest would have been required." (220)
Here is the authors' third and last mention of fascism in Northern Ireland:
"[The British] know that the Ulster love of the Crown had the biggest Catch 22 of them all:
the proposition that Britain was going to be used to allow their quasi-fascist regime to
exist." (277)
Strong words.
Martin McGuinness is young in the book, whose authors would probably not "piss on his grave," unlike an old English man Maryanne met decades later said he would, upon hearing of McGuinness' peaceful death. "After the Battle of Bogside [1969], the I.R.A. Provos came under command of Martin McGuinness, a twenty-two-year-old butcher's apprentice." (215)
On the other side of the barricades, have one of several Orange chants the book quotes:
"A rope, a rope,
Tae hang the Pope!
A pennyworth o' cheese
Tae choke him!
A pint o' lamp oil
Tae wrench it down!
And a big hot give
Tae roast him!
When I was sick,
And very very sick,
And very near a-dying,
The only thing that raised me up
Was to see
The old whore frying!" (180-181)
A few paragraphs later, there's this amusing announcement from a pilot about to land at Belfast airport: "We are about the land in Ulster. Set your watches back 300 years." (181)
Page 214 is about John Hume, "A Voice in the Wilderness." Hume is "the best political brain on the island"and his Social Democratic Labor Party "the most illuminating lights in Ulster politics." The page ends, "it will fall to the John Humes to bring sanity" to Ulster. This later happened. I wonder if he's related to David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher from the 1700s.
A week before Bloody Sunday, in "COs Want Paras Restrained," Simon Hoggart writes in the January 25, 1972 Guardian of British Army units asking that the Parachute Regiment not enter Derry. One unit captain, unnamed, whose commander did not oppose the Paras in Derry, said the paras "seem to think they can get away with whatever they like." (221)
After Bloody Sunday, "the British Embassy was burned down by a Dublin mob." (278)
Father Edward Daly, whose statue we saw in 2017 in Derry, and I wonder if he's related to Sister Daly who taught me Catechism during my First Communion year, when I was 7, is in this book. On Bloody Sunday, he dodged British Army bullets to rescue shot teenagers. He told the authors, "it doesn't matter whether you have a Roman collar or a dog collar." Daly regularly evacuated old people before demonstrations and consequent army attacks. Daly's story, pages 222-24, ends by noting that a year after Bloody Sunday, the paratrooper commander was knighted.
Bloody Sunday gets much attention from the authors, writing only a couple years after it. The event still weighs on Ireland. We saw a demonstration about it outside Belfast City Hall in 2015.
Here are a couple pithy quotes:
"The British Army has performed with total consistency in Ireland since the
Reformation as an anti-Catholic force of conquest, occupation, and suppression."
(232)
"[Belfast] is the mongoloid child of British imperialism." (247)
Innocent Protestants in Ulster suffered, too. Stephan Parker, 14, whose Belfast liberal pastor father "sought Christian answers to the crushing events," died when a July, 1972 I.R.A. bomb blasted the grocery store where he worked. "There is something Godlike about Joe Parker and his wife [Dorothy] that keeps them from being consumed with bitterness." (262-263)
Belfast Protestant Malcolm Orr, 19, engaged to a Belfast Catholic woman, was shot dead for it. At his wake, "She was there with her family and many other Catholic families. Protestants were there and many many strangers and they prayed together." Malcolm's mother told the authors, "Revenge is empty." (265)
The authors conclude the book by saying that the I.R.A. can't win by force and lacks the support to win by votes, but "will never be able to leave its people to the 'tender mercy' of the jackals." (277)
The timeline in the Appendix says that Henry VIII's Catholic daughter Queen Mary, whose heritage centre we saw in 2015 in Ireland, started the first plantation, in 1556, "confiscating Counties Leix and Offaly." (281)
The Catholic-Protestant division is therefore newer, politically grafted onto the earlier English-Irish, colonial-independent conflicts. Perhaps unity won't come, Northern Ireland's colonial history conjoined to Scottish Presbyterianism being too different from the history of the rest of the island. Still, Ulster was the strongest anti-English part of Ireland before the Reformation and Plantations.
The authors note that the Republic of Ireland, which I have called Southern Ireland since Paul McGlinchey so named it in his I.R.A. memoir Truth Will Out, whose signing we attended in the Greyhound Pub in Duleek on September 23, does not want to welcome a million Protestants from Northern Ireland into a unified Ireland and island. "One island. One Ireland," McGlinchey's co-author Philomena Gallagher ended her McGlinchey introduction in the pub that night.
A personal ancestry note occurred to me as I read about the consequences of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, whose site we saw in 2017, in which Williams of Orange's Protestant army defeated James II's Catholic army and ensured that only Protestants would sit on the English throne. After the battle, Anglican English oppression of other religions in Ireland was hardest on Catholics, but also hurt Presbyterians.
Our mom's mom's mom was a Mahurin. Several generations earlier, Hugh Mahurin left Scotland or Ireland around 1690, the Hugh Mahurin website says. I put this lineage, which includes links to a Mayflower passenger, on my blog:
http://michaeljosephwynne.blogspot.ca/2017/07/ancestry-of-wynnes-going-back-to.html
If you can't open that link, then search the blog using the keywords "Mayflower" or "Mahurin." The link mentions the Mahurin ancestry after the Mayflower ancestry.
Was Hugh Mahurin a Scottish Presbyterian oppressed by English colonial laws against Presbyterians, Catholics, and other non-Anglicans? Does it matter now? One could crack up obsessing about history. I just wanted to write about this interesting book because I was recently in Ireland, North and South.
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