Pre Coffee Rant

Great fun at art class last night.  Its an painting free-for-all - which means you paint what you want over 3 evenings.  We chat whilst we paint with our core subjects being the Blue Jays and the school strike.  I did divert the conversation to discussing how hot the PM is but apparently that's not a key asset for a leader.  Who knew?

Blue Jays won - yay!  So we talked school.  The teachers are on a work to rule, have been for months.  The Office staff the same.  Cleaners are on all out strike.  My friend recounted how she went to pick her kid up early for a dental appointment and the Principal had to open the door as the office staff can't press a buzzer under the terms of their industrial action.  It gets better.  When she asked the office worker to call the classroom to send her daughter up, she declined "work to rule!" so they had to wait for the Principal to return to have him call ahead.

Now here's my point, for I always have a point.  This is a great, free, democratic country.  Always a socialist at heart, with a very small S,  I respect people's right to take organized action to confront hardship and tyranny.  I support action like the UK General Strike of 1926 where pay was so low people in work were starving and those out of work, back for the war, were without prospects and starving.  That was a movement to say "enough inequality, enough starvation, enough!" 

Roll forward to the Miners Strikes, where the Government closed the mines without any regeneration plans for those communities.  Not cost effective to mine coal? - fair enough, I'm a capitalist too, again small C.  But to take away work without any plans for the survivors to find new work was shameful and inhuman.  Generation grew up without work.  IMO from that came "the choice to not work" as living on the state became an option for some, whilst many had no choice but to do that.

So the point in all of this - industrial action in the face of a future human and social catastrophe or as a challenge to current hardship - GOOD.  Industrial action because you aren't getting paid as much as you wish you were - NOT GOOD.

As we enter the flu season, with the schools being filthy, they are starting to ask us to donate antiseptic wipes to clean the kids desks...but they don't ask via a note home as photocopying is not allowed under the work to rule.  So, grumpy about all this for both sides - as what is the elected leader doing to resolve this?  As Maude always used to say in the Simpsons "won't somebody please think of the children"

Off to work
Namaste

Thanksgiving Weekend

That came around super fast. Getting ready to go apple picking later once small person returns from Saturday School.  That's so that he can keep up with his Peers, as youngest boy in his year, and not a faith activity at Temple. Small person is proving to be fabulous at math, outspoken and not keen to follow instructions.  No idea where that all comes from. ha!

It's been a long and enjoyable seven days for me. Last Saturday we played at the pumpkin festival which was essentially outdoor fun with orange blobs here and there. Then an overnight flight to UK and two days walking around well tended gardens and battling thorns and stings in my own back yard.  UK house is sold and we now have a paperwork mountain prior to completion. Great karma that we have sold it to a friend who asked us 5 years ago to let her buy it. Happy for us and for her. Many weeks of reading about tax and money transfers are in my future I reckon. Maybe we will be home owners again in 2016. Dunno, all too complicated with jet lag.

I spent 2 days at work in London, catching up with friends and not catching up with family. Travelling with work is full on, and meeting up with people who are 2 to 4 hours away is impossible. I imagine folks believe it's all nights out and plush hotels when infact its in bed by 8pm, laptop on, back to work. Not complaining, but increasing surprised by how little time I have away from work.

I enjoyed walking around in the drizzley rain, the silence, the beautiful manners and friendliness of people in shops and hotels. Love those Europeans with doctorates who sell coffee in Pret as that is better than being unemployed in Portugal. Everyone I spoke to had an aunt in Toronto but know one asked if I'd met them :-)

I didn't enjoy watching the news, with the party conferences.  Hours about the rights and wrongs of having to pay 5p for a carrier bag.  What the hell? Children are drowning in the Med.  Winters coming and 800k people are living in tents in Germany.  It's gonna get bloody cold for them very soon.  I wonder what their views are on 5p carrier bags?

The news was so negative, so "problem to solve", so "defending our borders from job stealing foreigners".  Maybe as a job stealing foreigner myself I am biased, but what I love about Canada is the " expand, evolve, grow" attitude that sits beneath the news stories.  There are problems here too, no one is perfect, but it feels like people solve problems to create opportunities, not to lock things down and preserve the now.

On the C4 news they had a writer who took issue with a women in a hijab winning the Great British Bake Off.  He felt that Britishness had been and was being diluted.  Less than 5% of Europeans are Muslim, and many of those in the UK are 3rd and 4th generation.

What is "Britishness" anyway?  A friend at work shared a Ted Talk video with us last week, about who you are.  The speaker proposed that you are not "from" a country. You are from a set of experiences. You are local to those experiences.  So whilst on paper I am a temporary British foreign worker in Ontario, Canada, I do not relate to the British people I saw on the news in UK. I am local to my community today and my community I had in England, local to artist friends across the world and to a Britain in the 1970s when my Grandparents told me stories of ww1 and ww2 and I wore flares and played outside and drank from hose pipes in the garden.  I am local to the islands off Scotland where I felt a spiritual connection to the past; and to a small town in Spain where I can order my breakfast in perfect Spanish.

With a blog your supposed to end on a note that shows a purpose in the writing...not too sure what that is on this one other than I feel at home with people and not places. A friend remarked that I had posted on Facebook that I was flying home to Canada...I explained that I was in fact flying home to my husband and small person as they are my home.

Off to the apple orchard...