Would you like to swing on a star?

30 March 2020 (Day 12) – And so it continues.

We had a small amount of excitement yesterday when friends Pat and Ralph dropped by to deliver some toilet paper they’d kindly gone out and sourced for us. (Guess where they got it? Real Canadian Superstores – the retailer that didn’t have any to include in our grocery delivery of the other day.)

We, of course, couldn’t go down to meet them at the front door because of our building’s request that returning travellers in self-isolation not go into public areas. And they weren’t supposed to come in. So our poor put-upon neighbour, Christian, kindly agreed to go down and collect the TP for us.

We went out on the balcony, shivered in the wintery air and waved and shouted. “Hi, Ralph! Hi, Pat!” They were little ants down on the driveway, but the sight of their smiling faces looking up was very welcome. They had brought their dog, Pensy, who Pat says got quite excited when they went towards the door. She thought she was going to get to come up in the elevator again.

Thanks again Pat and Ralph. And Christian.

Other than that, one day blends into the next.

We keep busy. Karen has been watching video craft lessons on her computer and doing the exercises. For a class she’s either taken or was going to be taking here in town (probably not, now), she’s making an art book, a small hand-made book with collaged pages.

Each page is an interpretation of the lyrics of a different song about stars or the sky. So she’s been wandering around the apartment singing “Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar...or would you rather be a...mule?”

Work in progress - would you like to swing on a star

Why stars? They were one of Louis’s other early obsessions, along with owls. At one point we or his parents had to sing “Twinkle, twinkle little star” to him about 50 times a day. He still sings it to himself sometimes

She’s also still doing her Fitbit-inspired walking religiously: at least 250 steps every hour – 10,000 to 15,000 a day. Pretty good for a caged lioness. The Fitbit website, though, is apparently down, which means she can’t pore over her sleep results and other statistics the Fitbit app aggregates.

She reads as much as or more than ever. Reading the paper – and Karen reads three every day – is a deeply-ingrained habit, for both of us, We never got into the habit of watching TV news and almost never do. If we had to rely on getting hard-copy newspapers, we’d be feeling very out of touch at this point. But we’ve been using an online service called Pressreader for years.

Pressreader costs about $40 a month and gives you access to thousands of newspapers around the world, including The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, The London Free Press, The National Post, The Guardian, etc., etc. What you get is a digital facsimile of the print edition displayed in an app on a tablet, phone or computer. We use our 8-inch Android tablets. Works great.

For books, and Karen reads three or four a week, she had to make slight adjustments. When we’re at home, she goes to the library at least once a week to borrow hard-copy books. When we go away, we both rely on library copies of e-books, which we download and read on our Kobo readers. She’s simply continued with that since we got home. I switched almost exclusively to reading on my Kobo a couple of years ago, so there’s been no adjustment for me.

We can borrow e-books from our library anywhere we go, of course, as long as we have Internet.

Demand for e-books from our library here in London – as elsewhere – has sky-rocketed in the last five years or so. Publishers apparently charge libraries orders-of-magnitude more for each title than the same thing sells for at retail. They also put onerous restrictions on how libraries can use them. This limits how many titles libraries can afford to acquire, especially given that they’re often among the hardest hit by public spending cuts. Many of Britain’s library systems, for example, are in crisis.

All of this means that access to reading material for us could be limited. I often have trouble finding anything I want to read at our library. Luckily, we have access to a couple of other libraries to which we wangled memberships years ago, one in the U.S., one in the U.K. For whatever reason, they’ve never cancelled our memberships. Thank goodness (or carelessness.)

It can be argued that we, as avid, reasonably well-off readers, should be supporting a struggling publishing industry – and its authors – by buying our books. Fair comment. But given the number of books we read between us in a year, it would become a major line item in our expenses. And we’re not expecting to be as well-off post-COVID given the thrashing our investments are taking.

As for me, I spend an absurd amount of time on this blog, and trying to solve cryptic crossword puzzles – with only mixed results – and reading (but only one newspaper a day for me, and far fewer books than Karen). I’m still jogging around the apartment at least once a day for 20 or 25 minutes, listening to podcasts of the CBC’s The Current with Matt Galloway. (Highly recommended by the way.)

We now eat our big meal of the day at 3 pm to accommodate Karen’s anti-diabetes diet regime. It breaks up the day differently.

By 8:30, we’re ready for some TV. We don’t watch any more than we used to. It’s almost all from streaming services. We’re currently enjoying Valhalla Murders, a nordic-noir set in Iceland, and Unorthodox, based on the memoir of a woman who escaped her strict orthodox Jewish community and tried to become a musician. Both on Netflix.

We were watching PVR-recorded episodes of the latest season of Outlander, but we’re thinking the series might have reached its best-before date. It’s leadenly slow-moving and they’ve made the mistake of bringing attention to all the implausibilities of time travel.

 The weird thing is in all this, the days just whiz by.

*

Desert Island: Dave Brubeck was another of my early jazz heroes. I still listen to him regularly.

Time Out, the most famous of his albums, was the first I bought, very early on, probably in the 1970s. I remember years later going in to Tower Records when I was in Manhattan on a business trip and buying the CD version. This album, Brubeck Time, made in 1954, actually predates Time Out by five years, but isn’t nearly as well known. I didn’t hear it for the first time until about ten years ago, when I got this re-engineered CD edition. The music isn’t as out-there as Time Out in terms of its use of unusual time signatures, but the band is just as good, the sound is a little plusher than Time Out and Paul Desmond’s lyrical sax is wonderful. I don’t know why it isn’t more popular.

Dirty Hippy: This is another cheat, stretching the “dirty hippy period.” (Although, I notice our moderator – son-in-law Bobby Baines – approved my selection of a 1980 release yesterday.)

I allow this as a “dirty hippy” selection – even though it came out in 2014 – because the artist, Frazey Ford, former lead singer with the folk group The Be Good Tanyas, was apparently raised by hippies in BC. The music is pretty retro too – 1960s-style rhythm and blues. She made the album with backing from legendary soul star Al Green’s band, The High Rhythm Section. The songs and the inimitable drugged-out singing style are all Frazey, though. Very easy to listen to – although not always that easy to make out the lyrics.

The Cryptic Corner

Yesterday’s clue was “Support eastern Vikings with five hundred (7).”

Solution: ENDORSE.

Non-cryptic clue is “support.” You build the answer by arranging the abbreviation for eastern (E), the Roman numeral for 500 (D) and a synonym for “vikings” (NORSE).

I’m going to change it up a bit. As mentioned, I’m no whiz solver myself. I’m often frustrated by not being able to quite complete puzzles. Here’s a recent Globe & Mail puzzle, mostly filled in, but with three words unsolved. Can you get them for me? Pat?

The screen grabs are taken from The Globe’s cryptic crossword web applet – which you can fine here. If you want to see all the clues for this puzzle, scroll down and find the puzzle archive, select Sat Mar 28 from the drop-down menu and hit Go.

Living in a dream world

30 March 2020 (Day 11) – I was thinking about the dream I wrote about the other day, and about dreams in general. Dreams and their meanings is a subject that deeply interested me about half a century ago. (I’m entering my second early-adulthood apparently; second childhood not far behind.) I still have Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and a few other obscure texts about dreams, on my book shelf.

One fairly recent theory about dreams, if I understand correctly, is that they’re not weird, revelatory “movies” created in the “unconscious,” as Jung thought. They’re just random, sense impressions and memory fragments flashing around our brains while we sleep, part of sleep’s neuro-housecleaning work. Our re-awakening conscious minds cobble the remembered fragments together into a kind of narrative to try and make sense of them – just as our fully-awake minds do with real sense impressions.

I think this theory has been used to refute the idea that dreams have meaning. It doesn’t, it really just changes where the making of meaning happens – from a speculative “unconscious” to our half-awake brains. I think the narratives in our dreams do have meaning. Sometimes it may not be immediately clear – may be coded in a sense, relying on symbolism, allegory, etc. But that’s also true of narratives created by novelists, poets and playwrights. They often have “hidden” meanings too, sometimes hidden even from the authors.

Heavy, eh?

So what did my dream mean? No feckin’ clue.

Seriously: it can’t be coincidence at a time like this that the narrative juxtaposes wide open spaces with very cramped, claustrophobic spaces. Or that the risks of riding on elevators figures prominently. Also, there is anxiety about being in the wrong place and not being able to get to the right place, which is probably an expression of the anxiety I feel – that I’m sure many of us feel – about being separated from family,

My ruminations about dreams and dreaming also dredged up the memory of a book I read – half a century ago – about an anthropologist exploring remote parts of Malaysia in the 1930s. He comes into contact with a then little known indigenous group called the Senoi. An interesting aspect of their culture is that they claim to be able to control the outcomes of their dreams, control their “avatars” in the dream, to learn how to overcome obstacles, meet challenges and promote personal growth in waking life.

Sort of like playing a role-playing video game while sleeping.

It’s an idea that still has currency in the west. It’s referred to as “lucid dreaming” and has been studied fairly extensively. I had no difficulty finding information online about both the Senoi and lucid dreaming – and the book I had read. The book, published in 1954, was Pygmies and Dream Giants by Kilton Stewart. You can still buy it online.

Maybe if I master Senoi-like lucid dreaming, I can figure out how to operate that elevator.

Finally, I had forgotten that one of the reasons the Senoi use dream control is to enhance sexual pleasure. Cue music..."dream a little dream of me."

*

Desert Island: Every time I listen to Handel's Water Music, I wonder, why don’t I listen to it more often? It’s so great.

Handel, a Hanoverian living and working in England in the first half of the 18th century, was hugely prolific and hugely popular. He wrote orchestral pieces, operas, oratorios – and everything he did went gold. Water Music was written for King George I who wanted new music to be played while he was floating down the Thames on his opulent royal barge. I think I had this same performance of it by The Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields on LP back in the 1970s.

Dirty Hippy: I’m stretching the definition of “dirty hippy period” a bit with this one – but I was still a dirty hippy at heart when it came out in 1980.

I’m a huge Emmylou fan. I must have bought this when it was first released because I remember inflicting it on anybody who came into our house in Stratford, from which we moved in 1980. It’s from a period when Harris was doing traditional country and bluegrass, on this one with guitarist Ricky Skaggs. It includes cameos by Johnny Cash, Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson.

The Cryptic Corner

Nobody as far as I know got my last cryptic clue: “Fish with forthcoming marriage announcement get away in all the confusion (7)” No?

Non-cryptic clue is “get away” – I know, it’s not at the end or beginning of the clue text. “All the confusion” is a cue that it’s an anagram as well as a word-builder. The answer: “fish” (COD) “with” “forthcoming marriage announcement” (BANS), those letters “in confusion,” yielding: ABSCOND.

Getting a little more gnarly now, but still within rules.

In word-builder clues, setters often include words that need to be translated into their common abbreviation or short-form. For example, if “mother” or “father” appears in the clue, it usually means the letters M-A or P-A, or M-U-M or D-A-D appear somewhere in the answer. If “doctor” is in the clue, it could be D-R or M-O (apparently readily recognized as “medical officer” in the UK.)

When you’re stumped by a clue, one strategy is to assume it’s a word-builder and examine each clue word. Think if there’s an instantly recognizable short form for it. “Small,” “medium” or “large” in the clue could mean S, M or L in the answer; “hot” or “cold” could mean H or C. And so on. “That is” – I-E. “About or “regarding” – R-E. Etc. 

And then there are a couple of special cases. Sometimes the word “point” in a clue translates as “point of the compass” and you’re meant to use one of N, S, E or W to build the answer. “Number” could mean you have to use I, V, X, L, C, D or M (Roman numerals). Or the word representing the number or direction appears and you have to abbreviate – “north” or “ten.” “Note” could mean you’re supposed to include A, B, C, D, E, F or G (the primary notes of the western musical scale.)

Here’s another sample clue to chew on: “Support eastern Vikings with five hundred (7).” Hint: there are two abbreviation/substitution tricks in this one.

Photo of the day

One of Karen's projects, completed under quarantine - an embroidered owl in honour of our owl-obsessed grandson. Owl, which he initially pronounced "ah-yul," was one of Louis's first word. He knows I have owl pictures on my tablet and frequently demands to see them.

I have a drinking problem

29 March 2020 (Day 10) - Our groceries from Real Canadian Superstores finally came at 7 o’clock last night. Minus the loo roll. Our poor neighbour, Christian, was on call most of the day, waiting for us to tell him the shipment had arrived. Luckily, he and his partner are practicing self-isolation too – just to be safe – and weren’t wanting to go anywhere anyway.

Karen and I had seen a video, featuring a Michigan-based doc explaining and demonstrating how to adapt hospital sanitation practices to bringing purchased goods into the house in the middle of a pandemic. They seemed sensible precautions and eminently do-able. It was brought home to me just how sensible when I read a human-interest story in this morning’s Toronto Star about the death from C19 of a Real Canadian Superstores employee in Toronto.

The process was slightly hilarious, while being deadly serious. In preparation, Karen disinfected two of our kitchen counters with bleach. One would be the “dirty” space, one the “clean.” She filled one sink next to the “dirty” counter with a mix of 1/3 cup bleach to five gallons of water. Then she partially stripped down to save her top being damaged by the bleach, and put on an apron.

When Christian knocked on our door to let us know he’d put the groceries outside, I waited until he was safely back in his flat and went out and got them. They came in five plastic grocery bags tied together at the tops. (We had to pay for the bags, contrary to one thing we’d read.) I put all the bags on the “dirty” counter where Karen was waiting, then I went and washed my hands for two Happy Birthdays.

Karen took each item out and disinfected it. If it was in a hard plastic, glass or cardboard container, she wiped it with the bleach solution. If it was fresh produce, which a lot of it was, she took it out of any packaging and submerged each piece in the bleach solution, then rinsed it again thoroughly under the cold water tap. I was waiting with a clean tea towel and dried the fruit or vegetable and put it away in the fridge. Or if I was occupied, she put the item on the clean counter.

One of the RCS bags was used to contain the others and any discarded packaging. When we were finished, I took it out and put it down the garbage chute across the hall. Then we both washed our hands for two Happy Birthdays.

Job done! Ten minutes, fifteen tops. Do this. The video is here.

*

Except it didn’t solve the toilet paper problem. After the grocery washing, Karen got on to the world wide internet and emailed our two closest London friends. Could either spare us a few rolls until our quarantine was over and we could get out to find more? One has kindly offered to try and pick us up some when she next goes out on a shopping run. Thank you, thank you, Patsy!

Given that toilet paper manufacturers assured the public early on that they had adequate stocks on hand, it’s enraging that panic buying and TP hoarding continue. I hope some of these assholes were hoping they’d be able to sell on their surplus at exorbitant prices, because new anti-gouging measures in Ontario come with hefty fines and jail time for offenders.

May the bastards rot in jail! Preferably TP-less.

*

Meanwhile, as the old joke goes, I have a drinking problem...I can’t get enough. My usual evening tipple is a spritzed cider. I had two left when we got back. They’re long gone. The LCBO no longer delivers to homes, only to post offices. And their stocks of my favourite cider are so low, I can’t even order online for delivery at a nearby store or post office. So I’ll have to wait until Friday when I get out of the coop.

The purchase of two litres of Duty Free single malt on the way back from England now seems a very prescient decision. Trouble is, even at the very good price I paid for my Glenmorangie, it’s expensive stuff, and I’m going through it at an alarming rate.

*

Desert Island: Not for the faint of heart. Some find Beethoven’s so-called Late String Quartets, written in 1825 when he was in failing health – he died in 1827 at 56 – to be heavy going. I don’t. I find them thrilling.

This version, by Quartetto Italiano, a 1995 CD release from Philips of recordings made before 1980, is the only one I know. There may be better performances on disc out there, but this one does me fine. When I first started listening 20 or more years ago, I often listened while I was doing my morning exercises. It’s not...social music.

Dirty Hippy: A staple back in the day for dirty hippies and button-down college kids alike. The hits were huge, but Peter, Paul & Mary were more than the hits.

One of my most-played albums in the late 1960s and 1970s was a two-record best-of-PP&M set. It had all the early and middle-period hits, plus additional material, including some cool concert tracks. When I went looking for it last year to get music for a video I was making for my brother Steve’s memorial, it was nowhere to be found. But I did find this, which originally came out in 1970. The 1990 CD release must have been completely re-engineered; I was blown away by the sound quality, and how well the best songs stand up. The selection here also includes “Stewball,” a great song that wasn’t on my album.

*

The Cryptic Corner: Sister Pat gets the praise, again. The clue was, ““Cheese made in this backward place (4)” Pat solved it correctly as Edam, the clue word “made” spelled backwards.

The most common type of clue is the word-builder. The cryptic part of a clue becomes a recipe for building an answer from ingredients. The trick is to correctly interpret which are ingredients, which instructions, and which the non-cryptic clue.

Here’s a simple example: “A tailless dog causes a commotion (3).” The conventional clue is ‘a commotion,’ which is ‘caused’ by the cryptic part, ‘a tailless dog.’

Construct the answer by taking the ‘A’ from the first word in the clue – this is a common trick in word-builders, to use an easily overlooked element as a necessary ingredient – followed by ‘tailless D-O-G,’ i.e. the word ‘dog’ without its tail or last letter.

Answer: ADO. Much ado: a big commotion.

Here’s another, “Fish with forthcoming marriage announcement get away in all the confusion (7)”

Remember what I said about setters combining tricks in the same clue.

*

Photos of the Week: Official Cooped Portraits

And one for my boy Louis, who likes to see his Papa being silly...

I had a dream!

28 March 2020 (Day 9) - We expected our first grocery delivery today, from Real Canadian Superstores. It didn’t come, or hasn’t as of 4:30. It was supposed to arrive between 10 and noon this morning.

There is a website where you can supposedly follow progress of your order. And the delivery company’s system spits out periodic email updates, telling you what’s going on. Karen has been receiving emails all day that keep changing the time of delivery. The last she heard it was going to be between 2:45 and 3:15. No emails since then.

The website tells you really useful things like who is picking your order. Fred was doing ours for awhile, then somebody else took over, then it appeared that two of them were doing it. That went on for over an hour. How long does it take to pick a relatively few items from grocery shelves.

The last thing at the website was an alert saying the toilet paper we’d selected was out of stock and being removed from the order. Karen’s feeling was that we could have limped along until Thursday – the end of our 14-day self-isolation – with the food supplies we had. Not happily, but we could have manages. She agreed to place the order at my urging only because we were running critically low on toilet paper. Now it appears we won’t get any. We have two rolls left.

Keeping returning travellers in strict self-isolation is not going to work if we can’t get supplies delivered to our doors. I think it’s clear the grocery store’s systems and their delivery partner’s systems are overwhelmed by unplanned-for volumes. Who knows how much of the information we’ve been getting is accurate or up to date?

*

I had an absolutely brilliant dream last night. It’s been years since I was able to remember a dream in the morning. I woke from this one at about 6 and lay for the next 45 minutes going over it in detail, puzzling. It’s like a whole, slightly surreal short story.

Well, not that short...

Scene 1. Karen and I – or some woman and I – are on our way to visit her parents. I’m meeting them for the first time. They live in a high-rise apartment in a city. We arrive at the building and go in. There’s a cramped lobby with a single elevator. I’m vaguely aware the elevator controls on the wall are a little unusual, but the woman I’m with knows the place well and operates them. The parents live on the first floor – the first floor above ground level, as in Europe.

We go up in the tiny elevator and are greeted at the door of their apartment by her parents. They seem formal and nervous and not very warm. They remain shadowy figures for the rest of the dream. We go through into the living room. The apartment is very small, but quite nicely appointed, almost opulent, and “modern,” in a 1930s sort of way.

As we pass the kitchen – really just an alcove off the passageway – I notice some kind of cooking device, sitting on a low table. It’s a bit like a microwave in size and in the fact it has a glass door on the front. Inside, I can see a large roast, or ready-to-roast piece of meat, smothered in some kind of sauce. So we’re here for dinner.

Somehow, I’m the last to enter the living room which is sunken a few steps and small, claustrophobic. The others are already seated in chairs ranged at one end of the room. The only remaining chairs are at the other end and seem too far separated for comfortable conversation. So I pull one, a red leather tub chair, towards the others. But then it seems like I’m sitting before an examining committee or something.

Scene change. It was decided – possibly it was the plan all along – that we would go for a walk in the countryside before dinner, which is where we are now. No idea how we got here. We’re in a fairly wild, rocky area that the woman and I know and have walked in before, though apparently not recently. Her parents don’t know the area at all, and just follow along, saying nothing.

It seems there are several possible routes we could go, and we’re a little unsure at first how to get on the one we want. In the end, we think we’ve found it. I say to the woman, “Why can’t Mike find his way out here like we can?” We laugh at the hapless Mike. (This would be my hockey buddy Mike Haas, with whom I’ve never been on a country walk, and who is not in the least hapless. Hey, Mike! You’re in my dreams!)

We come to a place where we’re not so sure of our way. There’s a wide, tunnel-like pathway off to the right, lined with thick vines. We’re a little doubtful whether it’s wise to go this way because we think we remember it comes to a dead end where the tunnel gets impossibly low and narrow and rocky. We take it anyway – and end up exactly where we feared.

We’re about to turn back when I say, “Maybe they’ve fixed it up since we were last here.” I go a little way into the narrow part, and it turns out I'm right. The tunnel – it really is a tunnel now, not a shaded pathway – is wider than we remembered and it’s now roughly lined with unpainted drywall, and dimly lit. So we go forward. It does get progressively narrower, but it’s passable. Finally, we come to a door.

We go through the doorway and up a few steps into a strange little room – half bathroom, half kitchen, tile lined. There are shiny old-fashioned sinks, cubicle doors, mirrors, but also a small refrigerator. I open the fridge and see broken bottles inside, some still filled with liquid. One larger bottle with the neck broken off has a fizzy amber fluid in it. I say, jokingly, “Anyone want a drink?” and hold the bottle out. The woman I’m with rushes over to get some. I snatch the bottle away and say, “No, no. We have no idea what might be in it.” The others agree and I put the bottle back.

Then we notice the room has opened up to one side – though still cramped – and there’s a little shop there, selling a variety of things, including books. We’re bewildered by this. What is this place? Why is it here? I notice a shop attendant, a dour-faced young man, hovering. “What’s this place for?” I ask him. He looks at me as if it's a stupid question. “Well, you can buy things here,” he says, patiently. “Like fruit.” He gestures further back into the shop and, for the first time, I notice a pile of fresh fruit, possibly papaya.

Scene change. We’ve left the little shop and apparently passed back through the tunnels. We’re in wild, Canadian-shield-like country again. The parents have gone on ahead, leaving the woman and I alone. We’re enjoying the walk and the time alone together. It’s nearing sunset and we’re standing, cuddling and admiring a wide view with a long, low, rocky ridge in the distance. Then we’re startled by the sound of a train.

It sounds as loud as if we were standing right by the tracks. We can very clearly hear the metallic clanking of the wheels on the track and jingling sounds as the train trundles by. But we can’t see it. We look all around, bewildered, trying to figure out where the sound is coming from. “The tracks must be on the other side of that ridge,” I say finally. But that doesn’t explain how it sounds so loud and so close.

Scene change. I’m back in the city. The woman has gone on ahead. I’m to follow and meet her at the parents’ apartment for dinner. It’s alright, I know the way. I come to the apartment building and go in.

I press the call button on the elevator. I realize too late that I was supposed to select the floor I wanted first by turning the dial above the call button. I realize my mistake when I glance down as I’m entering the elevator and notice the floor selector set to five. No problem, I figure, I can select the correct floor once I get on. But the elevator is quickly past the first floor. I fumble with the floor selector and end up picking an even higher floor.

I get off somewhere near the top, into a cramped lobby with a passageway leading off it. Why have I gotten off? Don’t know. I figure I’ll just wait and call the elevator again and go down to the first floor. I use the dial to select floor one and press the call button – or I think I do. But apparently I haven’t, because I’m stuck in this lobby, waiting, for what seems like ages, growing more and more frustrated.

At one point, a drunk staggers out into the lobby and mutters unintelligibly. A little later, an official-looking guy comes out and opens a panel in the wall to reveal a hidden office. He’s evidently the security director for the building. The drunk appears again, but no longer appears drunk, and the two confer. I glean from their conversation that the drunk is not really drunk but an undercover agent for the security guy. (Well, don’t most apartment buildings have undercover agents?)

More time passes. The opening to the passageway fills with people, seemingly a party that has spilled into the lobby, or come to an end and is breaking up. Finally, another guy comes out into the lobby and looks at me, as if to ask why I’m standing there without having called the elevator. He spins the floor-selector dial to his own floor, and presses the call button. This time the elevator comes.

We get on. I can’t figure out how to select the floor I want without switching away from the floor he wants. For some reason, I end up following him off the elevator at his floor – and into his flat. (Hey, it’s a dream! It doesn’t have to make sense.)

I’m incredibly tired now and frustrated and worried about blowing off the dinner party. I look at my watch and see it’s 3 – I’m assuming a.m. How did it get so late!? We’re in the guy’s tiny bedroom. There’s a low Scandinavian-style platform bed. He’s getting ready for bed.

Scene change. I wake in a panic to discover I’m in the guy’s bed. I’ve been sleeping beside him and have no idea how this came about or what time it is. I scramble out and begin putting on my clothes, which are littered around the floor. The guy is awake now too, propped on one elbow, looking at me quizzically, but not saying anything. It doesn’t seem like anything has gone on between us. We just slept in the same bed together apparently.

“I’m in so much trouble,” I say. He doesn’t respond.

I’m almost finished dressing and ready to get out of there when I look down and notice I’ve accidentally put on one of the other guy’s bright yellow socks. I angrily start to take it off, but it’s really tight, so I’m hopping around on one foot, trying to yank this yellow sock off – when the dream ends and I wake up for real.

Any Jungians out there want to take a crack at this one?

*

Desert Island: Time for some jazz. This is my default mellow jazz selection, a live album, featuring the great tenor sax man Stan Getz and pianist Kenny Barron as soloists. It was recorded at the Cafe Montmartre in Copenhagen on July 6, 1987 and between March 3 and 6, 1991.

I first heard Stan Getz, on record, 50 years ago. I was working at Western University’s Weldon Library. I got to know an older guy – well, he was in his 30s. He was one of the professional librarians, guy named George Robinson. George was a big music fan. I told him about my recent move away from pop and folk to classical and he suggested I try jazz next. And he just happened to have a couple of jazz LPs he was tired of and would sell cheap. I agreed to buy them. They were in pristine condition. One of them was by Stan Getz. I can’t remember now which album it was, but it hooked me on jazz, and Getz.

Dirty Hippy: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was S&G’s third studio album, released in 1966. I bought it probably in 1967, and played it incessantly on the little portable record player I had in my bedroom. I was a recent “folk” music convert.

I particularly loved the first track, “Scarborough Fair/Canticle.” The album title quotes the lyrics to its chorus. Unlike most of the record, it was not a Simon original. It’s an arrangement of a traditional English ballad, “Scarborough Fair,” that goes back at least to the 18th century, possibly earlier. The song – to quote the oracle of our age (Wikipedia) – “lists a number of impossible tasks given to a former lover who lives in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.” Okay. I don’t think I knew that when I was listening to it as a teenager. Doesn’t matter, it’s a lovely piece, beautifully performed. Lots of other good stuff on this record as well.

*

The Cryptic Corner

Kudos to my clever sister, Pat, for solving the last two cryptic clues. (She has already received her fulsome praise.)

The last was, “The habits of actors (8).” It’s a kind of riddle that plays on an alternate definition of “habits,” usually given as “a long piece of clothing worn by a monk or nun.” But this sense of the word can be extended metaphorically to include the customary or defining clothing of any specialized group of people.

The answer? COSTUMES.

I warned you that cryptic puzzle setters were tricksters.

I probably haven’t said enough about cue words and phrases in clues. Not all setters give them in all clues, but there are some types of clues in which they are almost always given – really must be given, or you couldn’t solve them.

The hide-in-plain-sight clues I talked about are one example. Another is clues where you find the answer by reversing the order of the letters in one of the clue words. Cue words such as “up” – for when the answer runs down in the puzzle – or “back” when it goes across should appear, or some variation or fairly easy-to-spot alternative.

Here’s an example: “Kitty’s back to stay (4).”

This one is a bit gnarly. You’re supposed to think “kitty” refers to a cat. It doesn’t; it refers to the pot in a card game, which is also sometimes called a kitty. The non-cryptic clue is “stay.” The other gnarly thing is that the correct answer is in British English, a usage we don't share. It’s an unfortunate fact for Canadian puzzlers that most published setters speak British or Australian English.

It also relies on the fact that you can’t include punctuation in an answer. The rule is that the answer must be the same part of speech, same number or tense, as the the clue, or at least have that appearance. In this clue, if you substitute “pot” for “kitty,” you get “pot’s.” Drop the apostrophe, and you get the answer, STOP, spelled backwards. English people are as apt to say “stop at home” as “stay at home.”

Okay, here’s one to try, probably easier: “Cheese made in this backward place (4)”

The milkman cometh

27 March 2020 (Day 8) – Yesterday, the company that manages our building, Thorne Properties, sent out a notice asking residents, as part of our C19 response, to not let delivery people into the building but go to the lobby and receive the goods there. The notice also requested that people who were self-isolating because they’d just returned from abroad not frequent public areas of the building.

Catch 22.

We’re glad the community is taking this seriously, but we have an essential order of groceries coming tomorrow from Real Canadian Superstores. What are we to do?

This morning, I fired off an email to Thorne, copying our condo board president, and asked which they thought was the lesser of the two risks, letting the delivery person in or going down to the lobby ourselves. The response: could we ask a friend in the building to receive the delivery downstairs and bring it up to us?

It's a perfectly reasonable suggestion, except that, being anti-social, we don’t really have anyone who, under normal circumstances, we’d feel comfortable asking. The people we know best are even older than we are, and as or more vulnerable. Almost immediately, though, Jim, our condo board president, now in his 80s, volunteered. That didn’t sound like a great idea.

Another member of the board, a much younger guy, lives right across the hall from us. Jim sent me Christian’s email address and I, very apologetically, asked if he could do it. He responded immediately saying he’d be glad to.

Christian also mentioned that he and his partner have been self-isolating for two weeks now, almost as strictly as we are. And they’ve been sanitizing relentlessly. I found that heartening. They’re in their twenties, I think. We keep seeing enraging pictures in the media of people, young men especially, disregarding social distancing orders and congregating in public places. I shouldn’t be surprised at Christian’s and Jordan’s response, though. They seem really smart and level-headed. Thanks guys.

*

Karen and I have implemented a new meal schedule to support her diabetes-fighting dietary regime. It calls for overnight 16-hour fasts. If you eat late in the day – and our dinner time used to be about 7:30 pm – it means you can’t eat until almost noon the next day. Then you can eat as much as you want for eight hours.

If you’d like to find out what this crazy-sounding regime is about, it’s laid out in The Diabetes Code, a book by Toronto-based Dr. Jason Fung. He has a website here.

Waiting all morning before she can eat is pretty onerous for Karen, who sometimes gets up as early as 5 am. So we’ve adopted the Spanish custom of eating a big meal at “lunch time,” lunch time for Spaniards being 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Karen can now have her usual big breakfast in the morning, not as early as she once did or she’d like, but at a much more sensible time. She might have something very light later: fruit, yoghurt, nuts. I almost always have something too.

It definitely makes the rhythm of our days a little different. And I find I’m drinking less. (Karen is completely dry right now.) Thank goodness for my Duty Free single malt.

*

Late in the day yesterday – I think it was a little after five – I felt I just had to get some fresh air. We’d really enjoyed our time in the sun the day before. This was a cloudy, cool day, though, with a bit of a breeze. I bundled up and sat out on the balcony for 20 minutes anyway, reading. Karen, the outdoor fanatic, wouldn’t join me, and when I came in, she said, “That can’t have been pleasant.”

But you know what? It was. I’m looking forward to getting out today, maybe even with sunshine.

*

Desert Island: Back to Bach.

I discovered JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations 40 years ago. A co-worker’s weird, older psychiatrist husband played us Glenn Gould’s recently released and quite revolutionary version, at a dinner party. Nobody we knew played classical music at social functions. Gordon Lightfoot or Willie Nelson were more our speed. We felt quite adult. And weird. This version by another great Canadian pianist, Angela Hewitt, is my fave, better than Gould’s. A tiny sample...

Dirty Hippy: Unlike a lot of the old music, I’m never disappointed in this one. It holds up.

I had already started moving away from pop music by the time Moondance came out in January 1970, so I missed it. I knew the hits from radio, of course, but it was almost 20 years later that I first heard the entire album at a friend’s. “And it stoned me.” Moondance always lifts my spirits, as does the one he released the next year, Tupelo Honey.

*

4:00 pm. We’ve just finished a lovely Portal call with our English family, who are doing fine, able to get out for walks in a lovely part of the country, staying healthy – other than Louis who has a bout of pink eye right now. Hasn't slowed him down, though. Earlier in the day, they sent these videos of Louis. He's hilarious. If you watch, you might get an idea how much we miss these guys.

*

The Cryptic Corner

Nobody, apparently, is taking up my challenge, but I’m going to keep on with this primer on how to do cryptic crosswords. It’s something I do that I believe is helping keep my tired old brain sharp – well, sharper anyway. And it’s something I can lose myself in. Right now, it helps to have things you can lose yourself in so you don’t have to think about the dratted pandemic.

So. Yesterday’s clue: “Heroic tale in The Pickwick Papers (4).” This was in a recent Globe & Mail puzzle. As I said, it’s a hide-in-plain-sight type of clue. The answer: EPIC. The non-cryptic part is “heroic tale.” The answer is made up from the last letter of “the” and the first three of “Pickwick.”

A lot of cryptic clues are like riddles. A riddler tries to mystify you, often playing on double meanings, puns and sound-alikes. (Remember: “What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?”) Or it could be stretching the meaning of a word, using metaphors or just offering a quirky definition.

Here are a couple of examples, again from recent Globe & Mail puzzles: “Pea jackets? (4)” Answer: PODS. Because a pod is like a jacket for peas, you see. Or, “He can’t help helping himself (12).” Answer: KLEPTOMANIAC. Cryptic puzzles can actually be quite funny.

Here’s one to be carrying on with: “The habits of actors (8).”

*

It got sunny today. We sat out on the balcony when the sun came around to it and baked, and read. Very welcome.

Fun house mirror across the street

Passerby

Sun reflection

Downtown London: afternoon rush hour

We can do it

26 March 2020 (Day 7) - One week to go! Then we can at least get out in the fresh air to walk and run, and bike when the better weather comes.

In the meantime, our days are settling into something like routine. Karen sews, reads her newspapers, magazines and novels – all delivered online, of course – and gets in her Fitbit-mandated 250 steps every hour. I read, puzzle, run around the apartment, blog, tinker with photographs. We text and email with friends and family. In the evening, we watch Netflix, though no more than usual.

We can do this, folks. It’s not so terrible. Besides, the alternatives are worse.

Every other day or so we get on Portal with Caitlin, Louis and Bob. I’m not a huge fan of Facebook, but I have to admit that Portal, Facebook’s videophone platform, has been a huge help in bridging the distances in our family. We had always used Skype before, but this is a significant improvement.

You can find out more about Portal at this website, but in brief, it’s a $200 video camera with built-in computer smarts that you connect to your TV. It connects to the Net over Wi-Fi and presents an interface on the TV screen that lets you place and end Facebook Messenger video calls. It does a bunch of other extraneous stuff too.

So now, instead of a tablet or 11-inch laptop screen – or, in Caitlin’s case, often, an iPhone screen – we’re looking at an image that fills our TV screens. What I found astonishing when we started using Portal was how good the video was. Other than the rare time the connection goes a little sideways, it’s way better than we ever had with Skype. There is no or little pixilation. The audio and video are more or less synchronized – often not the case in our experience with Skype. The video quality, at its best, is better than pre-HD broadcast. I have no idea how they do it.

The camera will also automatically zoom and pan, following people around a room. Karen and I typically sit side by side on the couch so what Caitlin sees is us filling most of the frame. But Caitlin and Louis, especially Louis, are in constant motion. The camera follows them and zooms in and out to include everybody it can. It’s a bit gimicky, but it means we can talk to Caitlin and Bob while also watching Louis as he trundles around their sitting room.

End of ad.

*

Desert Island: I’ve been listening to Franz Schubert’s “Trout Quintet” for almost as long as I can remember. It never disappoints.

This version, with the French brothers Capuçon – violinist Renaud and cellist Gautier – and pianist Frank Braley, is one of a gazillion. I’ve never heard one I really hated, but this one is particularly pleasing. It’s the kind of music that can make converts to classical – very accessible, very tuneful, and cheerful.

Dirty Hippy: Seminal early work from the 2017 Nobel Laureate in Literature.

This was actually my brother Steve’s album when we were growing up. I hated Dylan back then – I was a Beatles/S&G kind of guy and thought Bob flat-out couldn’t sing. I came around to him years later. This one is raw, funny, simple. “Talkin’ World War III Blues” seems particularly appropriate for the times. By the way, if you want to read what Bob had to say when he won his Nobel prize, it’s here.

*

Photos of the Day

Getting to know our neighbours across the street - cool home office!

Running for her life

The building site across the street - this is not social distancing

Hello neighbour!

*

The Cryptic Corner

Gosh, I’m surprised that none of my legion of followers could solve the cryptic crossword clues I’ve been posting.

The last one was “Order a car (4).” It’s a double-meaning clue. “Fiat” is an admittedly little used English word meaning a decree or arbitrary order. Fiat is also, of course, an Italian brand of automobile.

So there ya go: double-meaning clues.

Another type, I think of as hiding in plain sight – the answer, that is – or the anti-anagram. Here’s an example: “Craft in which wives seldom excel (6).”

The cue here is the phrase “in which.” Sometimes setters use “some of” or variations. You find the answer in the letters of the words in the cryptic part of the clue, in the order they appear but spread over two or more words.

In this case, the non-cryptic clue is “craft” – but “craft” as in “water craft,” not “craft” as in macrame, as the setter wants you to think. The answer is VESSEL, made up from the last three letters of “wives” and the first three of “seldom.”  The word “excel” is pure diversion.

Here’s another one to chew on: “Heroic tale in The Pickwick Papers (4).”