Happy (?) New (?) Year (?)
That's us, on the right, at the Afandim Uyghur Cuisine Restaurant for a New Years Day feast of roast goat. It was yummy, and decidedly not vegan, and the company was delightful and fun. It was, honestly, the perfect way to start this new year.
I'm not terribly optimistic right now. I'm still terrified by evil Trump, dismayed by banker Carney, and have accepted that global warming will continue until we're all likely dead. Or at least well done.
My resolutions for the coming year are pretty simple.
I will not waste time or effort reading anything posted by Donald Trump. Much less watch any recording of him. He's a liar, and a fool, and probably 65% of what he claims never amounts to anything real.
In Canada, I will not waste any time on any politician who has never worked a real job. By "real" I mean hourly wage, sweat, and hopefully with a trade union. Far too many MPs and provincial politicians have gone from high-school, to university Poli-Sci classes, directly into paid political work. That's why the Canadian governments continue to do more or less nothing to actually support ordinary working Canadians. If you've never dug a ditch or flipped burgers; have never sweated over the choice between repairing the car or paying the rent, then you have no right to be paid a big fat salary to sit in the legislature.
Next time you see your local MP, ask him or her to tell you how much is the maximum that CPP and OAS pensions pay each month? Then, assuming they know, ask them how anyone can live on that.
I'll say it again: millionaires and corporations should pay a lot more tax, and that money should go towards healthcare, education, housing, and food for poor people.
In the last year Canada - and a lot of other places - has seen droughts, fires, floods, and all manner of unprecedented weather. Poll after poll shows that most people understand that this is all tied to global warming, and that burning oil, gas, and other petrochemicals is the primary cause of this. Ask your politicians to explain why Canada isn't doing what other countries have done; why we aren't eliminating oil and gas, and moving everything to solar and wind power.
Now is the time to hold them to account, and ask the really, really hard questions. And then ask them a second and third time when they dodge and don't answer.
Still, despite my pessimism, I am managing to find some joy in the world. We left home very early on Christmas Day to line up at 9 am for a service at the chapel of Kings College Cambridge.
I'm not religious in the slightest. Aside from a few months of Sunday School as a kid I have no faith, no belief in any deity, and doubt that I'll wind up in either Heaven or Hell when I die.
The service on Christmas Day might just change my mind on that. Unlike the honestly pretty sad and grey services that I've sat through at various Catholic and United churches over the years, and the more entertaining but still not convincing Baptist ones in Kentucky, this was church with beauty, and majesty, and solemnity, and grace.
The setting of course is the beginning. The sheer size, beauty, and age of these chapels can't help but take your breath away, They fill you with awe. They make you understand that yes, there are forces bigger than us.
The choir was stunning and moving. The readings were old-school Anglican, not the modernized versions that you tend to hear in Canada. And even though much of the service was very familiar to me, as would be true of just about anyone of my generation, it felt new, and important, and stirring.
It wasn't "entertainment", it was Faith.
Perhaps it's the surroundings of Cambridge, with its many ancient churches and chapels. Perhaps it's a year of reading books that go beyond entertainment and force me to really think about life. And perhaps it's about being very conscious of living in a place where "history" is measured in centuries and millennia, not decades; and where successive governments have elected to maintain that history instead of bulldozing it to build skyscrapers and multi-lane highways.
Certainly some of this comes from watching the horrid people who are destroying America, and Canada, and Gaza, and so many other places, and the utterly base and greedy scum that make up the US government these days. It feels as if our elected leaders have utterly abandoned us, and that perhaps we need to look in new directions for solace and direction.
Whatever the cause, 2026 is going to be the year when I start to look deeply into my own past, my own psyche, and my likely future.
