For years I thought that was a quote from Lassie, not Shakespeare’s tombstone.

The rhyming quatrain that contains the line is said to have been written by the man himself in the hope that it would deter grave robbers.

Was it effective? Hard to say.

A decade ago, archeologists took ground-penetrating radar to the Holy Trinity churchyard in Stratford-upon-Avon so they could have a look without doing any digging.

(Lawnmower at a different churchyard)

They found what has been described as “evidence of disturbance” around where Shakespeare’s head would have been, leading a number of researchers to believe some miscreant may have made off with the Bardic skull.

Thus adding credence to a story published in 1879 — in a British magazine, The Argosy, under the less-than-satisfactory byline “A Warwickshire Man” — making the claim that it had indeed been stolen in 1794.

There the matter rests. To settle the question one or way the other would mean getting out the shovels and… moving his bones.

And who wants to risk that?

A Shakespearean curse would surely be no laughing matter.

We all know — or should if we’d been paying attention in school — how “a plague o’ both your houses” worked out for Romeo and Juliet.

From this, you’ll gather that I don’t have much to do today, other than laundry.

Rather than daydreaming, I prefer to think of myself as free-associating. And, of course, the classics are always the first things that spring to mind.

By which I mean Lassie.

I don’t have an image of an actual collie, or sheepdog, whatever. This is as close as I could come:

Incidentally — and you may know this if you hadn’t been paying attention in school — the title character from the Lassie movies and TV series was played by several Rough Collies (that’s the breed, not a description), most notably a male dog named Pal.

One wonders what his friends called him…

And if you were also wondering, no, Timmy never ever did fall down a well.

He fell off cliffs, down mineshafts and into rivers and quicksands, but the only character who actually did fall down a well was…

Lassie.

I kid you not, Pal.

No word on whether it was Timmy who ran through the woods for help and then had trouble making the family understand him.

“What is it you’re trying to tell us, boy? And what have you done with the dog?”

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Right now, I have a washing machine to unload.

Cursed be he who moves my fabric softener.

IS IT POSSIBLE to have a dear friend whom you’ve never met?

Of course it is. I know because I’ve just lost someone who, albeit an ocean away, I felt very close to.

And that hurts.

Early in our snail-mail and then email relationship, which stretches back beyond the century, David Rhodes wrote:

“I feel that we understand each other.”

Yes, I think we did.

Enough that when a flat package arrived from him out of the blue and it proved to be an old “Bus Stop” sign from United, the company that ran in my hometown, he knew I’d be delighted.

I was thrilled.

It was buses that brought us into one another’s sphere.

To backtrack, one of my kinks has always been old buses. I used to own a part-share in a restored single-decker in England — gave it up because I never saw the damned thing — and I have a couple of hundred die-cast models, mostly of buses that ran in northeast England when I was young. This is some but by no means all of them:

David was an artist. As his wife Liz reminds me, he was at Bradford College of Art some time behind David Hockney, who has also just died, though with a far greater fanfare.

David Rhodes painted pub signs and was a professional model builder. Good enough that he had pieces on display at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden.

(Museum image)

His specialty was buses and trams, which he built from scratch. Not from kits, but raw materials that he’d gathered together, working to plans that he drew up himself. He’d send me pictures of works in progress. I had no idea how he did it.

The finished models look absolutely realistic. The trams even have motors in them so they can be run on a layout.

(David Rhodes image)

Decades ago, I saw an ad in a British bus magazine to which I subscribed (as one does), offering his services. I asked if he would take on what, for a man of his skills, would seem like a trifling job.

I had a small model that I wanted to look like a different version of the same bus. David said he would be happy to do it.

At left is what he started with; at right what he turned it into:

And thus our friendship began.

Money was never mentioned. As he took on other projects for me, I’d pay him what I thought was appropriate and he always seemed satisfied.

We spoke the same abstruse language. We both knew what an ECW L5G was. (That’s the two buses in the picture).

We found we had a lot of other things in common, too.

David was a year or so older than me and a Yorkshireman, though he and Liz lived in a village in Devon. I was born and raised in County Durham.

Our backgrounds were quite similar. We both loved Paris. We both had a rather jaundiced view of the world around us.

As Christmas approached, I’d send him and Liz a calendar of my landscape photography and they’d send cat toys.

We talked about our lives, our families, our trials and tribulations. And, of course, his work.

One day, another flat package arrived: A “stained-glass window” — a simple but beguiling painting on plexiglass.

“I thought you and Lesley might like this,” David wrote.

We did. We do. It’s prominent in our dining room.

Then David developed Parkinson’s disease which slowly, cruelly, robbed him of the ability to do the things he loved.

We still kept in touch but sometimes now it was Liz who did the writing.

David died this week, peacefully and with Liz at his side.

He wanted, she says, to have his ashes scattered in Paris, so that’s the plan.

Liz, who is a remarkable person in her own right, included something from David Hockney:

“He said that the main thing was joie de vivre — that’ll do.”

Yes, that’ll do nicely as an epitaph.

She wants me to have one of David’s hand-built model buses — a 1969 AEC Bridgemaster Park Royal.

I can picture it. I know exactly what it is.

David Rhodes and I understood each other.

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death… I can assure you it is much, much more important than that

~ Bill Shankly

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind

~ John Donne

AS I WROTE in September 1980, when I was a news columnist at the Philadelphia Journal, when a police officer dies in the line of duty, somehow we are diminished even more.

This was after one cop had been killed and another critically wounded in a shootout with a suspect.

It was made doubly poignant by the fact that they were abiding by a newly instituted mayoral decree which said — in a great many more and fancier words — that officers could not open fire until they were shot at first.

Seeing someone pointing a gun at them was not justification enough. And so Gary Farrell died. He was 26.

The constable shot dead in Toronto this morning has been identified as 43-year-old Marc Pinizzotto. A police officer for 18 years, serving the last five on the Emergency Task Force. A family man, with a wife and two children.

He was taking part in a search-warrant raid at an apartment high-rise in the northwest of the city. It came as part of an investigation into several incidents involving firearms, including one in March where two men, in a pre-dawn attack, fired “multiple shots” at the U.S. consulate downtown. The building was empty at the time.

Pinizzotto reportedly was gunned down as he entered the apartment.

“No words can capture the impact on Marc’s family, who expected him to come home today,” Police Chief Myron Demkiw said. “We are doing everything we can to support them at this difficult time.”

No words. And a difficult time, to put it mildly. We are diminished, all of us.

So not many pictures here for once. Just four showing Toronto police officers in a more relaxed mode. Memories of happier times.

Meanwhile, the World Cup, as if anyone could forget, began today. Pinizzotto’s death is a ghastly reminder that, for all the obscene amounts of money involved, it’s only a game.

Bill Shankly, who ran Liverpool FC from 1959 to 1974, is remembered as one of the greatest football managers ever.

He was a showman, who loved being in the public eye. He built a massive, passionate fanbase at Liverpool that endures to this day. His flamboyance and theatrical personality enabled him to turn himself into a cult figure, a position he relished.

But there were times when he was just a hollow drum, a bag of wind, a blowhard.

Not that I’m a swimmer, or even much of a paddler in the shallow end, but simply to see water back in our local community pool…

It won’t open until the schools are out for the summer and lifeguards can be hired. But it’s yet another sign that whatever it is rules our fate has proved benevolent enough to let our survival continue.

For a while, at least.

Its bright turquoise colour is so much more inviting than the mad king’s self-styled “American flag blue” on the newly refurbished/desecrated Reflecting Pool in Washington.

That turquoise, though, is an optical illusion. The swimming pool walls and floor are white and the water, if you were to scoop up a handful, is colourless.

But half a million litres of water (give or take) in a pool apparently — physics is one of the many subjects I flunked at school so I’m taking someone’s word for this — absorb red and yellow light but “scatter back” brilliant cyan and blue wavelengths.

And that’s what we see.

I really don’t care about the whys and wherefores, I’m just glad to be seeing it once again.

Other signs of the season. Good…

And not so good…

Lesley dismantled the barbecue for cleaning and discovered one of the burner tubes was rotted through and the other two, along with the connecting tube, weren’t looking any too happy.

We don’t use it all that often, which is probably why in this picture the shelves appear to be semaphoring for help.

The rest of it looks to be in decent shape, and I certainly didn’t want to spring for a new one. Instead, I wrestled the rusty bits off this morning and ordered new ones.

I could’ve paid for same-day delivery. But these things, I find, are better given time. When they arrive, possibly on Thursday, I can walk around them suspiciously for a while and try to stare them into submission before I attempt reassembly.

I remember when I bought the barbecue at a big-box store. The big box wouldn’t fit in my car so I took all the parts out, hoping I wasn’t mislaying anything, and spread them about the trunk and backseat.

Put it together myself at home (after walking suspiciously around the pile of components for a while). It was a bit like doing a big Airfix kit, except the parts fit together better. And no fiddly decals to mess up.

Still, no one was more surprised than I when I connected the propane tank, gingerly pressed the ignition button and it sprang to satisfyingly fiery life.

If I can do that once, I tell myself, I can do it again.

The other not-so-good thing is the neighbour’s tree, which is leaning across the fence

and providing a convenient stairway for raccoons to access our roof.

That’s the last place we want them to be. They may be as cute as all get-out but “trash pandas” can also be very destructive. And incontinent.

The neighbour’s house is rented as two apartments. The owners live elsewhere and have proved unresponsive, so we’re awaiting the arrival of an arborist tomorrow to help us out.

The tree is a Manitoba maple, an invasive species generally considered a wooden weed. It’ll grow anywhere, even through cracks in the sidewalk — lord knows what the roots are doing to their foundations. Grows quickly, too, and is structurally weak so branches can be ripped off by any kind of strong wind.

The law says we can prune anything that’s overhanging our side of the property line, as long as the tree isn’t killed in the process. Though given what it is, no one would be likely to shed many tears.

Except, perhaps, the raccoons.

Ah well. They can go and console themselves with a dip in the pool. Lifeguards or no lifeguards.

I didn’t thumb through it to see what “official” puzzles entail. And I certainly wasn’t going to fork out $19.99 — in keeping with FIFA’s “think of a number, then double it” pricing policy — to buy the wretched thing.

This World Cup is enough of a puzzle already, without shovelling even more cash into the gaping maw of international football’s governing oligarchy.

Unofficial motto: “Corruption Я Us”

Toronto is hosting six matches, starting Friday with the less-than-electrifying Bosnia/Herzegovina vs Canada, and the city is in a bit of a turmoil.

Any and every business you can think of seems to be trying to link itself to the tournament and there are ads everywhere, large and small.

Sizeable chunks of the subway keep being shut down for hours at a time for track maintenance to be completed (which should, of course, also be the case when there isn’t a World Cup…) and bus, train and streetcar routes and schedules have been altered — to hell with the regular, everyday commuters — to accommodate the expected hordes of people.

Hordes? The stadium where “our” six games will be played has been expanded, with two temporary grandstands, from its regular 30,000 capacity to 47,000.

That many fans and more regularly show up to watch the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team at home. Their stadium has a capacity of about 50,000 and sell-out crowds are not uncommon.

The Toronto Raptors basketball team regularly pulls in 30,000 fans. The public space outside the arena, nicknamed “Jurassic Park,” attracts thousands more people to watch the game on a giant screen.

When the Raptors won the National Basketball Association championship in 2019, so many people came out for their victory parade and celebration rally outside City Hall that an accurate head-count proved impossible.

But it was somewhere between 2 million and 3 million. The biggest the city has ever seen.

And we coped. We do cope. Crowds don’t phase us.

But the World Cup has Toronto spooked. It’s as if we were about to have an invading army taking over the streets.

It ain’t necessarily so.

The World Cup may be coming to Toronto, but I don’t think the world will follow it. Certainly not in numbers large enough to cause much of a wrinkle in the social fabric.

Six matches, none of them exactly out of the top drawer. Yes, the bars and patios will do well enough with their big-screen TVs, but not as well as when the likes of France and Spain and England and Brazil are playing. That’s when things will get good and crazy.

No one’s going to much care that the game they’re watching on TV is happening in real life on the other side of town.

And will there be 47,000 spectators at those games?

I wouldn’t bet on it.

There reportedly are hundreds of unsold tickets for Friday’s opening match. People are balking at having to pay $1,000 and up for 90 minutes of possibly less than stellar football.

FIFA’s spin-doctors have been making much of the supposed $60 tickets that are theoretically available for every game.

The truth is that there are theoretically between 400 and 750 tickets per team per game at that price. Not a significant percentage. Nor are they to be had by the general populace.

If you belong to an officially sanctioned fan club, you might — that “th” word again —strike lucky. But I haven’t seen any news stories about anyone being tapped by the golden claw.

Anyway, that’s Toronto. The calm before the… calm, I greatly fear.

I can’t speak for Vancouver, but I suspect the situation is not dissimilar.

Mexico? One can only hope for the best for them.

And the US, where most of the games will take place? I may be wrong but it might well feel as if they’re playing in a lunatic asylum. I’m sure the arch-kook will show up at the final and attempt to steal one of the cup-winners’ medals.

All of this said, I’m still — as always — taking an interest in the tournament. I’ll watch at least some of the games, probably including Canada’s opener (I am Canadian, after all).

For my next-door neighbours’ sake, I hope Portugal make it into the final. And that the team they face is France, who clobber them.

I fear Spain, though their squad is getting a bit long in the tooth, and the Netherlands’ pragmatic, whatever-it-takes-to-win style of playing has proved effective in the past.

Nevertheless, my faith resides with les Bleues.

But finally, and sadly, I saw this taped to a light-pole downtown today:

Another puzzle. Whatever the answer is, alas, it’s immaterial.

The money is already spent.

We have built it. But will they come?

WITHOUT GOING INTO the morality of foie gras, which I love, I simply regret that I can no longer eat it. Unless I’m prepared for a painful sleepless night.

It’s not my conscience keeping me awake.

My digestive tract has aged faster than my taste buds and redrawn its boundaries. Which I occasionally overstep. Sometimes the price is worth paying, sometimes not. I never know until the bill comes due, usually at around 3 in the morning.

Foie gras really beats up on me. The restless ghosts of geese gone by.

(ChatGPT-enhanced)

Lesley and I still eat very well. But back when we were both working, making a decent buck and travelling more, there were times when we ate extravagantly. That is to say, expensively.

This was also before Michelin-starred restaurants began to concentrate on “tasting menus” — multiple small courses, usually of their own choosing, that in my book don’t constitute a proper meal.

Especially when they get into so-called molecular gastronomy, applying physics and chemistry to make foodstuffs look, feel and taste like what they are not.

All in the interest, I read, of “creating unique, surprising sensory experiences.”

No, thanks. I just want dinner.

Or lunch, which is often the best way to get into a really good restaurant without having to book weeks ahead.

One July day in northern France, in 2004, after seeking out my grandfather’s cousin’s grave in a tiny World War I cemetery

we drove to Lille and ventured into a Michelin 2-star restaurant with the mud of the Somme literally dropping off us.

Lunchtime was almost past, we knew, but…

“Bien sûr!”

I forget exactly what we ate. I do remember it had truffles. They did not stint the truffles.

Which I can to this day still eat without repercussions. Though my Visa card sometimes hiccups.

We’ve eaten notable-and-then-some meals in any number of places. New York City, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Rome, Brussels…

But mostly in France. From Paris to Bordeaux to Lyon to Marseilles to Dijon. Lille, of course. And occasionally places so minuscule they barely warranted names.

One village in the Languedoc had a handful of houses, no shops and a single tiny restaurant, Vieux Four — Old Oven — in a former boulangerie.

The owner was chef, sommelier and maître d', and if he didn’t like the look of you he wouldn’t seat you, even if the handful of tables were mostly free. He did all the cooking, including ethereal meringues, in that single, very basic bakery oven. Culinary magic.

It was also our introduction to the region’s Fitou wine which, as I recall, was the only red he served. Fine by me.

So a book passed on to us recently by a very dear friend — who is herself in southern France right now — really resonated. She knows us well, does Vicki.

Provence, 1970, by Luke Barr looks, as the jacket blurb puts it, at

“a singular historic moment. In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, six iconic culinary figures, including Julia Child, James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher, found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate and talked late into the night about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery.”

It’s a wonderful read. Barr is the great-nephew of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher and had access to a just-discovered diary she kept of those months.

I’ve always loved Fisher’s writing — ostensibly about food but incorporating social mores, politics, even erotica. Humour, too. In her first book, Serve it Forth, she wrote of Napoleon Bonaparte:

“Napoleon himself was a bad eater. He gobbled. He had little patience with the long silences and deliberate smackings of his gourmand friends, though he tried at times to imitate them.

“Once, in a sorry effort to pretend that he really cared a tinker’s damn about such things as eggs, he insisted that he could flip an omelette better than his lady ever could. It landed on the floor.

“For days he was morose, hearing in his head the muffled snickers of Josephine and his agile courtiers. He really preferred scrambling treaties, anyway, and men, and boundary lines.”

Having devoured Barr’s book, I’ve dug out my omnibus edition of Fisher’s work. A feast that will last me for a while and not give me heartburn.

In 1994, the Toronto Star sent me to Cyprus to do some travel reporting.

The easiest way to see a lot in not a lot of time was to join an organized group of American freelancers with a guide. Far from my preferred way of working, but it got the job done.

They included an elderly — I guess about as old as I am now — New York couple who were food writers. They seemed to have come from another era, more genteel, more elegant.

The Cypriot cuisine that was put in front of us was seldom the best, so the three of us would break away from the others whenever we could in search of something more promising. We didn’t always find it, but it was a good “us against them” bonding exercise.

The woman had known M.F.K. Fisher quite well and remembered her fondly. She upbraided me gently once for irreverently referring to her as “Mary Frances.”

But I was quickly forgiven. On the last night of the trip, a stopover in Athens, at a truly terrible restaurant, she said,

“You know, I don’t suppose it will ever come about, but I’d like to cook for you.”

I took that as an immense compliment. Even now, how I wish we could have made it come about.

And I wouldn’t have had to say “no” to the foie gras.

I’m sure there would’ve been foie gras.

And the early signs are that — allowing for its ad-hoc, power-to-the-people nature — PS Kensington is once more under a semblance of control.

From its beginnings in 2004, the market-wide street festival was becoming a victim of its own success. So many opportunists were flooding in to peddle — not to put too fine a point on it— crap, local vendors for whom the revenue was paramount were being forced out.

For a while PS Kensington was suspended, its future hanging in the balance. It returned rather falteringly.

Today, though, the old vibe was back. The market felt like the market once again. As always, every picture tells a story:

(Instead, back to immediate post-Covid days when I’d just had my hair attended to professionally for the first time in a year.

(Masks were still very much the order of the day.)

Suffice to say that in the space of an hour, my hair has been transformed from rather shaggy to rather chic. Beard trimmed to match. My stylist even clips off any odd flyaway bits (I’m at that flyaway age) on my eyebrows.

That’s because he’s old-school full service. Vidal Sassoon-trained, not cheap but worth every dime.

Also — and this worries me — old-school in that he’s getting on in years. He turns 70 at the end of this month. For a while at least, we’ll be sharing our eighth decade.

It shouldn’t make me happy but it does always give me a frisson of relief to hear him say he can’t afford to retire. The thought of finding a replacement at my time of life — when the hair is about all I have going for me anymore — fills me with dread.

More and more, the days seemed filled with maintenance. Human and otherwise.

I’m not, by any stretch, a horny-handed son of toil, much less an artisan, but in the past few days I’ve undertaken carpentry, which involved perilously cutting 45-degree angles on quarter-round lumber, and gotten started on a small (I hope) masonry repair.

Minor surgery, but surgery nonetheless. However ham-fisted. The woodwork went well enough, better than I expected, but the brickwork I fear will be more akin to butchery.

On a personal level, I’ve taken — as already reported here — the first halting step towards knee-replacement surgery; had the latest in a long series of Covid shots; a six-monthly PSA blood-test to keep tabs on my prostate; my eyes tested; and my teeth checked over and cleaned. Not all present (I have British dentistry to thank for that) but at least relatively correct. And, for a while at least, quite dazzling.

The end of next month will see me in for a physical workover, with emphasis on blood pressure. And whatever else crops up in the meantime. You just never know.

Meanwhile, in less than 24 hours from now, June will be busting out all over.

(Coincidentally, the lede I wrote years ago on a Northern Echo story about a club offering lunchtime strip shows for shift workers.)

A bittersweet month — absolutely to be savoured but accelerating steadily until suddenly, before you know it, September is upon us. And then Halloween, which haunts me.

Can’t be helped. For now, Lesley and I are back where we belong, drinking rosé on our Friday evening street patio.

And as I walked to the dentist on Thursday, there were urban geese foraging in the sun across the street from the provincial parliament building.

A bit redundant, really. There are already more than enough geese in the legislature, led by our revolting right-wing premier, whom no one seems able to unseat.

Down to the lake yesterday. Sidetracked a little, so we didn’t see much of the water. But there were squirrels

and red-winged blackbirds — aggressively territorial; this one dive-bombed me for having the temerity to stop under his tree.

and people stretching themselves.

All, for once, seemed right with the world. Even my knee was behaving itself.

But to end as I began… my hairdresser is a devout (I use the word advisedly) Rolling Stones fan, with a collection of memorabilia going back to their early club gigs in London. Which accounts for his mask in the pictures.

Back in 1981, when I was a newspaperman in Philadelphia and did occasional music reviews, I wrote one about the Stones. A quote from it was picked up by timeisonourside.com, described as

“a non-commercial, highly detailed encyclopedia and database dedicated entirely to the Rolling Stones… widely respected by the music community — and even cited by the New York Times — for its exhaustive tracking of the band’s massive history.”

An honour to be in it, especially flanked by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And who cares that they disagree with me? They’re allowed to be wrong…

My hairdresser was impressed.

Me? I’m just hoping he never sells his Stones collection. It might be worth enough to finance his retirement.

What really counts is the first roof-down muscle car.

Cruising by the house in 25-feels-like-30 sunshine as we came home from a patio lunch, a ragtop ’69 Chevelle Malibu. Fresher than a daisy, for all its 57 years.

A mere 350 cubic inches (5.7 litres in this day and age), as opposed to the 396 or 454 versions, but still with the deep-throated growl, as is only right and proper, of a hungry pitbull. That rumble and the non-standard twin-bulge hood would indicate that whatever’s under there has been tinkered with.

We’ve been through a long hard winter and a rather iffy month of May. But the winter duvet became history today and I just turned off the central heating and unearthed the air-conditioning remote.

In the immortal words of Bruce Springsteen (who was also writing about a ’69 Chevy, almost certainly a Chevelle):

Summer’s here and the time is right

For racin’ in the street

Though that, of course, would be wrong…

But it sure as hell beats robins and ice cream.

Well, no, it’s hardly worth that.

But it’s coming up — after all this time, I can’t pinpoint the exact date — on 60 years since I inveigled my way into journalism.

A three-month tryout at the Evening Gazette on Teesside turned into the adventure of a lifetime. I came out of it a very different person than I went in.

“You’ve been given a front seat on life,” is how one of my first bureau chiefs put it.

My first managing editor, Bill Heeps — who had himself started in the business at 14 as a messenger and rose to be chairman of Thomson Regional Newspapers — ended our interview with:

“There’s an old saying in this business that the worse an education a man has, the better a journalist he will make. If that holds true, you should do rather well.”

A back-handed compliment if ever I heard one. But who cared about that? I had a newspaper job, or at least a tenuous hold on one, with 12 weeks to get it firmly into my grasp.

I put in my week’s notice at the department store where I’d been vegetating since I’d left school two years earlier, with butterflies in my stomach but joy in my heart.

(My first — and last — Gazette front-page lede. Unbylined, alas)

Forty-two years later — that anniversary is approaching, too — I walked out of the Toronto Star newsroom for the last time, after 23 years on staff.

No fanfare, I simply sent out an “all” message saying

“Bill Taylor has left the building”

and went out by the back door.

The only commemoration was the DVD Lesley had given me in the morning, that she’d put together with a tech-savvy friend: A recap of my “greatest hits,” such as they were, as a journalist, accompanied by my all-time favourite song, the Beach Boys’ Don’t Worry, Baby.

That made me cry. But they were the only tears I shed.

(Les carpentered her career more neatly, leaving her last newspaper, the Star, 40 years to the day after she started at her first, the Pottstown Mercury in Pennsylvania. She didn’t count the summer job which, in 1973 as a journalism student in Connecticut, she’d landed — illegally — at the Northern Echo in Darlington. That was where were met.)

For the next few years, I freelanced as hard as I could. Old habits die hard and for a while, at least, I was still in demand. Made some decent money and got out of the country a few times too, on someone else’s dime.

But the joy was going out of the job. Budgets were drying up and there wasn’t nearly as much travel as there used to be.

It wasn’t so very long after that reporters and photographers, both of which I’d been, started being referred to as “content providers.”

Like: “Here’s a space. Fill it with… something.”

The world I’d known had changed. I no longer belonged or wanted to belong.

With the first quarter of the 21st century behind us, the job has morphed almost beyond recognition. But I still sometimes look at the paper, or the website, and think,

“Jeez, I could do better than that.”

Even now. Even though I don’t really know how it’s done in this day and age.

Ah well. To loosely translate the civic motto of my hometown, Bishop Auckland:

Tempori parendum… We must move with the times.

However unseemly those times may seem.

No complaints, though, not from me.

As a former Toronto Star editor and political columnist, the late Jim Travers, used to say whenever anyone in the newsroom was voicing their discontent:

“But look at the life we’ve had.”

Really can’t argue with that.

Only that we’ve had it and don’t have it anymore.

And I, I never took much

I never asked for your crutch

Now don’t ask for mine

~ Bob Dylan

AS AN OLD PERSON with an intermittently painful limp, I can say this without too much prejudice… a theatre-festival afternoon matinee on a holiday Monday resembles nothing so much as a gathering at Lourdes.

You begin to feel underdressed if you don’t have some kind of mobility aid to prop you up.

(Should’ve grabbed these when I had the chance)

All things being equal — and, I hope, only temporarily — I shall be one of them in the not-too-distant future. Waiting lists being what they are, that again is being hopeful.

Waiting? Not for Godot (which is what the matinee was), but for knee-replacement surgery which, it becomes more and more apparent, I stand (wonkily) in need of.

I’ve now been inserted, so to speak, into the pipeline.

The gym I go to has a doctor on its books, a sports-medicine specialist. Last month, when I had my latest injection of lubricating hyaluronic acid, he pointed out that these twice-a-year shots are subject to the law of diminishing returns and suggested I start thinking about a whole new knee.

So I’ve thought about it. And been back to see him to get the process started. He’s given me a requisition for x-rays, which I’ll have when I’m summoned for “triage.” An orthopaedic surgeon will decide if I really am a worthy candidate for the procedure and, if so, where into the waiting list my condition merits being inserted.

At best, it would be months rather than weeks. I’m just hoping it won’t be years.

I’m also hopeful (so much hoping going on here) that I’ll be dealt with at the hospital just around the corner from home, which the gym doctor says does very fine arthroplasty. He laughed off my suggestion that after the operation, I might be able to limp back to base, sort of like a World War II Wellington bomber with one engine out. Hope springing eternal, I wasn’t entirely kidding. Only myself, I guess.

Meanwhile, Lesley was about to give my old hiking poles to a charity drive. I’ve taken them back.

(Evangeline Moffat image)

Not that I’ll need them for backpacking — that Shanks’ pony long since left the barn, slamming the door behind it — but perhaps simply for walking.

For now, I remain reasonably mobile, albeit punctuated by the occasional wince or outright “ouch!”

I’m heartened by the fact that while I’ve always allowed 45 minutes for the walk from home to the gym, I’ve always done it in 40. And I still do. Gives me time to gossip with the manager until my trainer yells at me to get changed.

But back to matinees.

Southern Ontario has two major annual theatre festivals, in Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake. They’re both a pretty big deal — when we saw The Tempest at Stratford, Prospero was played by Christopher Plummer — and major money-spinners.

Weekend and Wednesday matinees are a big part of that. Both towns are an easy two-hour drive from Toronto so it’s nice to be able get there in time for a pleasant lunch (or a picnic now that the fun police have stopped ticketing people for drinking wine or beer outside), see a play and be home at a reasonable hour.

Tour-bus companies long since latched onto this and offer package deals. Very popular with baby-boomers who are no longer babies or booming.

Which is why you see a good many mobility devices.

At the intermission of a matinee last year of Macbeth at Stratford, I asked an attendant for directions to the washroom.

“Down that staircase,” she said. Pause. “Can you manage the stairs?”

Yeah, just about.

Niagara-on-the-Lake is a pretty little town, in a twee kind of way, and, being right on the border, attracts coach-loads of people from the American side for a look at the Falls

and a tour of the town, with a show thrown in. Without necessarily specifying what it will be.

In this case it was The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning absurdist comedy-drama. A complex, demanding work, both in plot and execution, full of surreal overtones.

There were a few minutes where the stage was blacked out. From around the auditorium, querulous voices with upstate New York accents:

“What is it?”

“Show us what’s going on!”

Without meaning to be snobbish (intake of breath while I wait to see if I’m struck by lightning), not the sort of crowd you’d want at Waiting for Godot, where no one knows what’s going on and never does. Fortunately, Stratford is a ways from the border.

This is one of the best productions I’ve seen of Godot, pulling out every ounce of the play’s considerable amount of humour.

The audience didn’t miss a morsel, rising at the end — some, like me, rather creakily — in an ovation.

And then we tottered out and went our several ways.

I can still manage the stairs. Unaided.

Sometimes, you strike unexpected gold. Sometimes you trip over a solidified chunk of…

Well, whatever it is, it sure ain’t precious metal. And it’s sticking to your shoe.

In this case, it was a group photograph of the teaching staff at Bishop Auckland Grammar School, which I attended from 1959 to 1964. At which point I escaped rejoicing into a world that, however cruel, could only be an improvement on five years of academic purgatory.

Ill-equipped for the future as I was, that’s when my education really began. I undertook to teach myself what I thought I needed to know. The process continues.

The picture was taken, I think, a year or two after I left, so I can only put names to 18 of the faces. But I do vaguely recognize a few others.

Enough to give me flashbacks.

Except, that is, for the guy second from the right in the front row. Mr. Adams — Keith, I believe his first name was, though I knew him only as “sir.”

His nickname was Batman. Many of the teachers wore academic gowns. His was a bit big and flapped around him as he walked, never less than briskly.

I had him for English for two years. Whatever I’ve achieved with it since, the credit is his for putting me on the right track.

Especially with reading.

I first picked up On the Road when I was 13. And then Mr. Love and Justice, the third of Colin MacInnes’s London Trilogy, about a crooked cop and a pimp with a conscience.

They were just the latest in a whole series of books that my mother — backed up my father, who really didn’t much care either way — told Mr. Adams at one of those dreadful parent-teacher evenings were “way beyond” my years. Could he perhaps put a stop to it?

“I know what he’s reading,” Mr. Adams replied. “We’ve talked about Mr. Love and Justice.

“They may be beyond his years. But he’s absorbing them, he’s thinking them out, so good for him.

“Let him read whatever he wants.”

All the same, I kept Lady Chatterley’s Lover out of sight. I wasn’t about to push my luck too far.

My next English teacher — he’s in the picture, too, but let him remain in the dark — was the direct opposite. A pedant who never strayed from the curriculum. And woe betide anyone who did.

That would be me.

Once, as homework for Mr. Adams, instead of an essay I wrote a narrative poem, in rhyming couplets, about a family of criminals. It was filled with over-the-top comedic violence.

He liked it enough to read it out to the class. Their laughter gave me a taste for public approbation that’s never quite gone away. When he handed back our exercise books, he’d written in mine:

“Your subject matter is deplorable! A+.”

For the new guy, I wrote what I thought was a decent pastiche of Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett/Mickey Spillane. When that came back…

“I don’t know which is more appalling — that this is the sort of thing you read, or that you let it influence you. C-.”

Mr. Adams would have loved it.

But he was just a face in a crowd, whose collective tendency was to shovel information at you, often read straight from a textbook. If you picked it up, well and good. If not, your loss. No one was about to go back and explain it again.

Report card after report card: “Must try harder.”

There was never space for a rebuttal: “Must teach better.”

The gym teacher who was a moralistic martinet and regarded anyone who wasn’t athletic — again, that would be me — as beneath contempt; the headmaster whose main interest was the school’s annual Gilbert & Sullivan production; the math teacher whose violent disposition earned him the nickname “Cosher;” the German teacher who delved into the roots of the language but never thought to make us use it in conversation.

The bullies, the braggarts, the snobs, the elitists. The timeservers waiting only for their pension.

The lack of flexibility. There was only the most perfunctory aptitude testing. You went where they put you.

I liked art but I couldn’t draw. So I was shut off from other subjects I might have thrived upon and shoved into the science stream, where I couldn’t do much of anything.

There was no appeal process.

Six decades later, I still have dreams that I’m back there.

The group shot was originally in black and white.

I used ChatGPT to put some colour in their cheeks. Still gave me cold shivers, even though most if not all of them are in their graves by now.

It’s no coincidence that I left school with only two basic GCE O-level passes. Both in English; language and literature. No surprise, either.

But I’ve done okay.

On Wednesday, February 12, 2014, Ireland was hit by its most intense and devastating storm in almost 70 years.

A hurricane by any other name, it was dubbed Storm Darwin (alternatively Cyclone Tini, though there was nothing teeny or tiny about it).

Lashing rain and winds reaching 177 km/h caused damage estimated at more than 286 million euros; left more than 215,000 homes — including the entire town of Dingle — without power; and destroyed between 5,000 and 7,000 (so let’s say 6,000) hectares of forestry, about 7.5 million trees.

It was at its worst in the southwestern part of the country, where it hit first and hardest.

Where I happened to be driving that day in a rented Skoda Octavia, 150 kilometres from Limerick to Dingle along winding two-lane roads. With the steering wheel, of course, on the “wrong” side. I hadn’t used a stick-shift in a long time, either.

Not, as several people in Limerick pointed out before I left, the best day to be doing this. But I was on a tight schedule and needed to get where I was going.

Besides, how many people can say they’ve been through something like that?

Edging past overturned transport trucks and downed trees (even at the height of the tempest, heroic crews were out with chainsaws trying to keep the roads clear. And stay on their feet), and seeing a corrugated-iron roof ripped from a barn and sent flying through the air.

Waves from the Shannon Estuary cascaded across the road like Atlantic breakers. I knew it would make one helluva story for the Toronto Star.

Bragging? Of course I am! Wouldn’t you?

The diesel-powered Skoda was new to me. We don’t have them in Canada. Amazingly economical, it sipped diesel as delicately as my maternal grandmother, who professed to be teetotal but was never without a little pewter flask (which I still have) of whisky.

“For my health,” she used to say. Cheers, Nana.

Curiously, when the Skoda was on the move, banged, bullied and buffeted as we were, the car felt as steady as a rock. Only when we were forced to stop, did it flinch under the onslaught.

The storm passed, with a final, vicious flurry of hail, almost as quickly as it came. By the time I reached Dingle, the sun was out and everything looked drenched but quite lovely.

I only realized there was a blackout when I tried to use a bank machine.

But it gave me a great line when I showed up at the candlelit front desk of my hotel.

“You managed to get here, then? From Limerick?” the receptionist said, surprised. “How was it, driving?”

“Oh, a little breezy,” I said. Breezily. I know… God forgive me. (Unlikely.)

All this was brought back to mind when I wrote the other day about small-town Ontario and its burgeoning locavore movement. To put it in a broader context, I quoted an innkeeper in Portmagee, a tiny County Kerry fishing village, as saying that offering an Irishman a sandwich used to be an insult but now they wanted to know where the meat in it came from.

I was on assignment for the Star, driving a segment of the Wild Atlantic Way a couple of weeks ahead of its official inauguration as one of the world’s most spectacular — and certainly longest — scenic coastal routes.

The most direct way from Malin Head in Donegal south to Kinsale in County Cork is just over 600km, an easy seven-hour drive.

The Wild Atlantic Way stretches that out to 2,500 gorgeous kilometres, following all the convolutions of the Irish west coast.

(By comparison, California’s vaunted Pacific Coast Highway is a mere 1,055km, while Australia’s Great Ocean Road and South Africa’s Garden Route are tiddlers at 245 and 200km, respectively.)

If you were really pushing it, you could complete the WAW in about 32 hours. Take it easy, the tourism websites say, give yourself between 10 and 14 days.

Deadlines being what they are, I only had time — three days — to cover about 500km in the southwest, including an overnighter in Portmagee.

“Breathtaking” is not only overused but also often inaccurately used as an adjective. That said, none other will do for the sights I saw.

From the ruins of a 19th Century “famine village” — where the people either starved to death or emigrated, under hellish conditions, on so-called “coffin ships” — to a well-fed bungalow with palm trees in the front garden and a few sheep on the lawn.

“But no pigs in the kitchen,” one of the locals wryly pointed out.

The Gulf Stream provides a micro-climate where you can have palms in the foreground and snow on the hills. You might experience all four seasons in a single day.

And such vistas. A photographer’s dream.

All this and then my last night was spent in a five-star hotel in Cork. You’re telling me I didn’t have the best job in the world?

Well… maybe not always. But it certainly had its moments.

Wild ones.

I do not like green eggs and ham

~ Theodor Seuss Geisel

More for the rest of us

~ Me

ODDLY-COLOURED EGGS, and it’s not even Easter?

That’s when you know you’re getting into the Ontario hinterlands, where even the hens lay according to their lights.

This is an untouched photo of a box of eggs we just brought home from Walters Falls, a dot on the map 170 kilometres northwest of Toronto, up towards Georgian Bay on Lake Huron.

The middle of the middle of nowhere? Close enough.

A place where the poultry clearly is left to its own devices.

Lesley and I have been driving out to that neck of the woods for years now. We have a great friend (and former workmate) up there who used to run a B&B and is now restoring an old farmhouse

(Lesley Ciarula Taylor image)

cheered on by his two splendid Scottish deerhounds, Garrett (left) and Marcus.

The area, while still remote, has changed. Fifteen years ago, you might have been hard-pressed to find someone who could spell “locavore,” let alone define it.

Now? They’re living the dream.

Flesherton, Markdale, Meaford — the little towns rejoice in artisanal cheesemongers, butchers, bakers and probably candlestick-makers if you look hard enough. Almost no one bothers saying “organic.” You just take that for granted.

The farms have hand-lettered signs out by the road, offering their produce for sale. Though, this being Mennonite country,

don’t show up on a Sunday, expecting to go home with a loaded car.

Six days shalt thou labour… They stick to that. No Sunday sales.

Even the supermarkets, alongside all the brightly-boxed brand-name stuff that we’re accustomed to and forgive for overdosing us on salt and sugar, give prominent display to food produced locally.

Labelling tends to be a bit perfunctory

and no one bothers sorting the eggs into sizes. Or colours.

Fact check: All chicken eggs start out white. The colours, from commonplace brown to the more exotic blues, oranges and greens, depend on the breed and genetic makeup of the hen. The pigments show up on the shell as the eggs pass through the bird’s oviduct (poultry equivalent of a fallopian tube). The colour doesn’t affect the taste.

And before you ask: Of course I looked all that up! I’m not, by any means, an aviculturalist. (Yeah, I looked that up, too.)

Twas ever thus, though. The world over. Some years ago, I was in County Kerry, southwestern Ireland, on a freelance travel assignment for the Toronto Star.

I spent one night at a bar and guesthouse in the tiny fishing village of Portmagee (population 180).

The owner, Gerard Kennedy, as he stoked the peat fire (the first I’d ever seen) in the dining room,

told me how once upon a time…

“…it was an insult to offer an Irishman a sandwich in a bar. You were telling him he was drunk. Now they want to know which farm the meat in it came from.”

Eggs, of whichever hue, didn’t enter the conversation.

But now, I can’t help wondering…

THE BAD NEWS is that when Toronto FC hosted Inter Miami over the weekend, Lionel Messi much to the fore, they lost 4-2.

The good news is that the stadium didn’t collapse.

This was the first match at BMO Field since 15,000 extra seats were added, on two precarious-looking (to this untutored eye, at least) temporary wings, for the six World Cup games that will be held there.

Messi’s presence was largely responsible for a record crowd of 44,828. Toronto fans being rowdily enthusiastic, they presumably did a lot of bouncing around and gave the new construction a decent workout.

(Excitement, but at a Messi-free game — Toronto beating the Vancouver Whitecaps)

There may not be quite so much enthusiasm at the June 12 opening match between Canada and Bosnia/Herzogovina.

That’s not just because Alphonso Davis, our captain and star player — we generally only have one at a time — has a hamstring injury and may well be sidelined.

Toronto has the world’s fourth-largest population of Italian descent outside of Italy. So we were hoping against hope that that’s who the opener would be against.

It would have been a barnburner. The whole city coming to a standstill.

Alas, Bosnia beat Italy in a crucial play-off game, the third time in a row Gli Azzurri have failed to qualify for the World Cup. That’s 12 long years.

Lesley and I were in Rome shortly afterwards. The papers all had screaming front-page headlines of the “Disgrazia Nazionale!” variety.

Toronto does have a fairly sizeable number of Bosnians/Herzogovinians. But, with all due deference to them, it won’t be the same.

Nor do most of the other games Toronto has been allocated exactly make the heart beat faster:

Ghana v Panama; Germany v Côte d’Ivoire (okay, that could be a good one); Panama v Croatia; Senegal v Iraq…

July 2, we have a game in the Round of 32 elimination stages. Depending on who’s playing whom that could be a winner, whatever the result. Let’s hope for two of the very top teams.

For my money, England v France…

Allez les Bleus!

To be honest, we can count ourselves winners if the World Cup comes and goes without disaster striking.

With most of the games being played in the US, anything could happen. Especially when fans from overseas are going on tippy-toes and hoping not to wind up in Alligator Alcatraz.

The price-gouging knows no bounds. Starting, but by no means stopping, with match tickets costing into four figures. And that’s from official sources, not scalpers.

Even the mad king has said he wouldn’t pay that.

NJ Transit, for what is normally a $13 round-trip train ride from Manhattan to a stadium across the river in New Jersey, wanted to charge $150.

They’ve since dialed it back. To $105.

Some European fans have reacted:

“Screw that, we’ll walk. We’re used to walking. We’re good at it.”

You can’t walk. There are highways.

“Oh yeah? Just watch us.”

Sounds like a surefire recipe for tears before bedtime. Whose tears they will be, remains to be seen.

With only four weeks to go, there’s no great feeling here yet of anticipation in the air. Lesley and I were out for a saunter and passed a repurposed school bus festooned with flags for sale.

“World Cup?” I said.

“No, I think he’s just selling flags,” she replied. “One of them’s a skull and crossbones.”

Still, that could be FIFA’s new symbol.

Piracy will out. May as well fly it from the masthead.

Next to the NJ Transit pennant.

I started off writing about them for a British auto magazine, then went on to road-test them for a magazine in Australia and later for the Toronto Star.

From high-end Porsches

(Frank Lennon image)

to classic Jaguars (at edgily high speeds through the French Alps)

(Hubert Andeol image)

to the lowliest Hyundai Accent, at the time the cheapest car you could buy in Canada, without a single bell or whistle.

I drove it from Toronto to Los Angeles and back, and through the Mojave Desert, putting about 9,000 klicks on the odometer that was one of its few instruments. It was also my introduction to blogging, which was one of the points of the trip.

I’ve come to grief, too, piling up a pre-production Holden station wagon in the Australian Outback.

(First image, Lesley Ciarula Taylor)

What I’m saying is that I’ve been around cars a lot. Not just the 19 (if my addition and memory are correct) that I’ve owned, but the dozens of others that I’ve driven.

I always used to say that I could get into any vehicle this side of a semi-trailer transport and very quickly be up to speed. So to speak.

I’d taken advanced and high-speed driving courses and been to skid-control schools.

I’ve driven trucks and buses.

I knew my way around a cockpit.

Now? Not so much.

I’ve had limited experience of electric vehicles and, though I love the way some of them can accelerate, I wasn’t very comfortable in something that I’ve heard described as an iPad on wheels.

But even conventional gasoline-powered cars have entered a realm that is no longer within my comfort zone.

This started with the 2017 Mercedes I leased for four years.

(Lesley Ciarula Taylor image)

That’s nine years ago, but even then the damned thing was capable of inserting itself into a parking space, taking over the steering and braking. All I had to do was pull up next to the car in front of the space, push a button and sit there.

“You’ll use this a couple of times to show your friends,” the guy at the dealership told me as he demonstrated it, “and then go back to doing your own parallel-parking.”

He was right.

The Mercedes was a worrier.

It would beep at me if it thought I was edging too close to adjacent traffic or the vehicle in front. If it didn’t think I was braking hard enough in heavy stop-go traffic, it would add a little pressure to the pedal.

When Lesley, who is quite short, was in the front passenger seat, she would have to sit up straight otherwise the Merc would assume she was a child and want her to sit in the back.

I never did figure out all the things that it was capable of.

It was fun to drive, especially in “sport” mode (you had a choice), when it would sort of gather itself in and then go like a bat out of hell. But I wasn’t altogether sorry when I dropped it back at the dealership and went looking for a well-used Subaru to buy.

It’s so much worse now. And I’m not talking about the rapidly approaching onset of fully autonomous cars, where you entrust your life to an invisible chauffeur.

But a friend just bought a new Mini, which has a computer screen rather than a conventional dashboard. The only way she can start it is with her phone. No phone, no go.

Another friend and her husband have a new Audi. The dash, so-called, is a strip of black glass which turns into a series of touch-screens.

Buttons and knobs? What would they be?

“Hi!” it says, greeting her by name. “Please enter your PIN.”

Forget your PIN? Forget your ride.

Not only that, but both cars take an active role in braking and steering. It’s worse than being with my mother, who was a chronic backseat-driver but at least never touched the controls.

I got rid of the Subaru a couple of years ago and haven’t owned a car since. I doubt if I will again.

When I need one, I use a car-sharing service, either finding one parked in the neighbourhood that’s available for however many hours I need it, or booking one in advance for longer road trips.

I have a Toyota Corolla earmarked for a two-day outing next week. I’m confident I’ll quickly be at home behind the wheel.

The company uses basic, bread-and-butter models, mostly Kias. But, I ask myself, how long will it be before even they turn into complex “leave some of the driving to me” mobile computers?

Technology and I are not the closest of friends. I don’t want to find myself getting into a Communauto car and then thinking,

“Now what the hell do I do?”

A day when progress will mean no progress at all.

Sigh. Where’s my transit pass?

The resemblance to a certain someone, with the crown as a crowning touch, was too good to miss. And he uses artificial aids, too.

Someone else in our vicinity has a life-size white elephant in their front yard (file this under “no accounting for taste” or, to be more charitable, “art for art’s sake.”)

I tried making that orange, too:

Not as good as the frog. All the same, it has a certain… something.

Here, just for the record, are the originals:

It’s been a good week for urban fauna.

We came upon this little guy as we were walking to dinner Friday evening.

I swear, when I pulled out my camera, he started posing and playing peekaboo around the twigs.

Channeling his inner raven (my bête noire, or perhaps oiseau noir). Until he got bored and flew away.

Then on my way to the gym Monday, I was passed by a police horse:

You know you’re walking slowly when that happens because those things really plod along.

Police horses always strike me as a bit incongruous in a big-city setting. But they fit right in. I’ve seen a mounted cop (and this must’ve shocked the hell out of the driver) pulling over and ticketing a car

and a line of them at a fast-food drive-thru window

“And three McNosebags, please…”

Years ago, we were in Santiago, Chile, and saw a ceremonial police mounted detail have its dignity shredded by a pack of playful dogs. Note the two at the back, anxious to get in on the action:

It was on that same trip, possibly even the same day, that we came upon a well-dressed llama, with a smart little hat, in a pedestrian mall. We were the only ones who bothered to look twice.

Back in Toronto this morning, we had one of our regular visits from a neighbour’s cat. He likes to keep an eye on what our two are doing. Not that they appreciate his attention.

A natural redhead, so no need for artificial colouring.

Speaking of which, this is an old image but I’ve always loved it. Kinda gives the lie to the theory that dogs are colourblind:

I never did figure out which of them the yellow duck belonged to.

I knew so much about America. Conversely, I knew damn all.

I certainly had no inkling, as Lesley and her dad met me at Philadelphia airport and we drove to their small hometown in a gargantuan (gloriously so) Chrysler, that in a neighbourhood not far off the Schuylkill Expressway out of the city there was a house that would one day have my name on the mortgage.

(Schuylkill… pronounced “skookle,” nicknamed “sure-kill”)

(Street View image)

5019 Copley Road, in the Germantown section. We bought it for $30,000, which seemed like a financial burden we’d never climb out from under.

In fact, when we moved to Canada three years later, we sold it for six grand more. All the while, each time we’d visited friends in Toronto with nary a thought of living here, there was another house in our future, built in 1887, two years before my paternal grandfather was born. Like the place in Philly, which dated back to 1930, it had been waiting for us all our lives…

A curious corollary: Lesley researched the house we rented for eight years when we moved to Toronto, and learned that it had been built by a Newfoundlander named Frederick Phillips.

After we bought the house we’re in now, about two kilometres away in a completely different neighbourhood, Les went back to the city archives and discovered that it, too —and the house on either side — was the work of Frederick Phillips. He built no others in Toronto.

We’ve lived here for 36 years. It seems to have been ordained. I don’t believe in coincidence. We’ve had ghosts here, though never in residence, only visiting.

But all that was in the future, and I’m talking about the past.

I knew it wouldn’t be easy to establish myself in the US. I had no idea how hard it would be. It almost broke me, forced me back to the UK briefly to regroup, but I was raised stubborn.

I’d read so many books, seen so many movies, dreamed so many dreams. I recognized so much, could rhyme off chapter and verse, and tried to feel at home with it.

Realizing that as I dangled on a fraying thread, all around me, everywhere, were people who were at home, who were established. Who knew no life but this.

Americans. I wasn’t one of them.

Until one day, I was. In everything but passport and accent.

Though even that…

Settled and finally financially secure enough to be comfortable taking a trip back to north-east England for a couple of weeks, I was chatting with my sister when she suddenly pointed accusingly at me:

“‘Gotten?’ You said, ‘gotten!’” And to my parents, “He said, ‘gotten!’”

Well, hush my mouth…

It struck me then that I was in a foreign country. It was no longer where I belonged. Where I really wanted to be was New York City.

Home.

I’d learned to function there, in the toughest of tough schools. Just as I would learn to function in Philadelphia. In the equally tough school of tabloid journalism in what was, at the time, the only city in North America with four dailies.

Four years later, two of those papers, mine included, folded within a month of one another. As a take-no-prisoners columnist, I’d burned too many bridges with the remaining pair to have any hopes of being hired.

America was wearing off at last.

Lesley had a job waiting in Toronto.

For me, it was back to square one. But at least now I knew the drill.

It didn’t come near as close this time to breaking me.

The dog, seen en route, was just to get your attention. This was the main attraction of the day:

And perhaps a good deal longer than that. Old wounds don’t heal overnight.

So I’m unlikely to be visiting any time soon. But, as I’ve also written here, I do miss Buffalo.

It’s only 160 kilometres from Toronto; less than a two-hour drive, depending on traffic and how hard a time the US customs and immigration goons give you.

The city is a little gem, with a reputation for down-at-heel grittiness that it doesn’t deserve. It has a great restaurant scene, terrific galleries, all the culture you could wish for, and some amazing architecture.

Its broad, park-like streets, lined with bravura 19th century mansions — at one time, Buffalo had more millionaires per capita than any other American city — were laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, mastermind of New York City’s Central Park.

Buffalo makes for an ideal weekend getaway or a manageable day trip for Torontonians. Lesley and I have done both, several times.

Canadian sports fans do that a great deal less these days. But it used to be commonplace. They’d go either to watch the Buffalo Bills, who compete in the US National Football League

(Toronto has the Argonauts, who play in the Canadian Football League. Leagues apart, in more ways than one.)

or to see the Toronto Maple Leafs play the Buffalo Sabres in the National Hockey League. That’s ice-hockey to non-North Americans. The NHL is as good as it gets.

We get a good many American football and hockey teams playing here. Games invariably are preceded by the two national anthems, often sung by a local celebrity.

After Trump began trying to bully us into some kind of submission, Canadian fans took to booing The Star-Spangled Banner. Not particularly edifying, but understandable. I’d do it myself.

In return, of course, American fans started booing O Canada.

Because of Buffalo’s close proximity to the border, the Sabres, unlike other US NHL teams, play both anthems no matter who they’re playing.

Last night, they were at home to the Boston Bruins.

Buffalo-born singer/songwriter Cami Clune was only a few bars into O Canada when her microphone started cutting out. What happened next goes a long way to renewing your faith in humanity as a whole, if not its leaders.

Unprompted, the Sabres crowd burst into song and finished our anthem, belting it out pretty much word-perfect.

I think we can guarantee that when the team next has a game in Toronto against the Maples Leafs, The Star-Spangled Banner will be received respectfully. And quite possibly sung by everyone.

Watching the video sends shivers up my spine.

Makes me want to go back to Buffalo.

Makes me hate even more the oligarchy that makes it a moral impossibility.

One of these days, I tell myself. One of these days.