POSTING # 4

POSTING # 4: A Job in the Middle East; British Roundabouts; Here’s Looking at You!; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)



A Job in the Middle East

As we continue to settle into our new community, we are impressed with how civilized and comfortable it is.

A couple of examples.

We had some questions about the history of the area and enquired at the local library. The librarian said they had a resident local historian---imagine that, in a small town. Pat and I have since met with her and she’s amazing---knowledgeable, helpful and fun.

Then there is a fantastic Newcomers Club with an enormous scope of activities designed to help new arrivals find things they would like to do and friends to do them with.

As I say, very civilized and comfortable.

Unfortunately, not all the world is so fortunate.

A few weeks ago I was offered a part-time consulting job involving technical assistance to the government of Lebanon. Under the proposal, my part of the work would be carried out mainly in Canada but I would have to spend a couple of weeks each year in Lebanon.

The timing wasn’t great and there were some other problems with the offer, so I wasn’t all that keen on it.

But I liked the sound of the work and I like the people (and food) in the Middle East so I decided not to reject it out of hand.

As I mulled over the offer, I knew that Pat would worry about my travelling to Lebanon, given the attention the media has paid to tensions between Arabs and Christians, the influence of Syria, occasional bombings etc.

I wondered if it would help Pat if I suggested that she come with me on the first visit to the country so she could see that the country was safer than the media suggested. To sweeten the deal, I could also suggest that we stop over in Greece (a country we’ve always wanted to visit), see Athens and some of the Greek Islands.

I flew what you might call a trial balloon, mentioning a trip to the Middle East, and a side trip to Greece.

Pat was not impressed.

In the end, I decided not to take the job.

This week, as we watched television pictures of students rioting in Athens, Pat turned to me, “Right, and afterwards, we could have gone to Greece….”


British Roundabouts

Pat and I met in the basement of a boarding house in Toronto in the summer of 1959 (that will be a separate story). I was posted to the Canadian Immigration Office in Leeds, Yorkshire in October 1960. Pat came over at Christmas, we got engaged and then I flew home to get married, in Aurora, Ontario, in June 1961. After a trip to England on a Cunard Line ship, we set up housekeeping in a two-bedroom apartment on Spen Road in a pleasant area of Leeds, called Far Headingley.

One of the first things we did was buy our first car, a small but spritely Ford Anglia.

A day or so after we had taken delivery of the car and while we were still in the process of adjusting to driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, a personnel evaluation team arrived from Canada to assess the five officers in the Immigration Office. The team would recommend whether any of us should be promoted. I had my interview and it seemed to go well.

After my interview, the Officer-in-Charge said that he been hoping to take the team home for dinner but his wife was ill and he wondered if Pat and I could entertain them. I said I thought we could, called Pat and she responded wonderfully with a great meal.

After dinner, I offered to drive the two fellows back to the Queen’s Hotel in downtown Leeds.

I was feeling good as we set off---about the interview and the fine dinner. We were traveling along at a sedate clip on the ‘wrong’ side of Spen Road until we got to the roundabout at Otley Road.

I should break here for a discussion of the British roundabout. British traffic engineers claim, apparently, that intersections with roundabouts have fewer accidents than ones with stop signs or traffic lights (except for bicyclists, who tend to get mashed a bit at roundabouts). I wonder if anyone has calculated the accident rate of drivers from North America or the Continent encountering their first roundabout.

Anyway, I turned into the roundabout and almost instantly there was a loud scream from Ron, the more senior of the two evaluators, “John, you’re going around the wrong way!!!!”

Vehicles were coming right at us, with lights flashing and horns blowing. Looking back on it, I think the thing that saved us was my hockey training. You get three or four opposing players coming at you when you’re carrying the puck, and you learn to bob, weave and stickhandle.

Anyway, I managed to get around the intersection and onto the right (“wrong”) side of the road without damage to us or anyone else. I dropped the two fellows off at the hotel, safe and sound, if a bit shaken. I didn’t offer to pick them up in the morning to take them to the Immigration Office.

I figured that was it for any promotion but, no, a few weeks later word came that I was being promoted (must have been Pat’s cooking). The only lasting negative impact of my mistake came from Ron. Every time he and I met he would start off, “John, do you remember that roundabout in Leeds…..” and he would proceed to tell everyone within earshot about my faux pas.

After some thirty years of this, I told Ron that there had to be a sunset clause on dumb things (pieces of legislation sometimes have a sunset clause saying that if the act isn’t renewed after a set period of time, it expires). Ron just grinned---there was to be no sunset clause.


Here’s Looking at You!

Despite his joy in telling the story about me and the roundabout, Ron and I became good friends. He was an excellent Immigration official and a fine person.

Now, Ron had been badly wounded in World War II and wore a glass eye. Here is a story he liked to tell about the glass eye.

After the war, Ron joined Canadian Immigration and was posted to a number of Immigration offices in the UK. Often, he and his colleagues and friends would drop into a pub after work. Now, there was a custom in some British pubs at that time that if you had to go to the washroom but still had a good bit of beer left in your mug you would say that you had spat in the beer (some people went one step further and actually spat in the beer in front of their friends!) to deter anyone from poaching your beverage.

Ron had a different approach; he would quietly put his glass eye in the beer. His colleagues knew about this and no one touched his beer. One night, however, there was a newcomer at the table. He saw Ron take off for the washroom, saw a good bit of best bitter just sitting there and while the others were distracted by a disturbance at the door, downed Ron’s beer. As the glass eye went down, he gagged and shouted, “What the heck!” (or something similar).

As the saying goes, everything came out OK in the end. Ron wore an eye patch for a few days until nature took its course.

And the newcomer hopefully learned a lesson about how to behave in a pub.



Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

It was in the early 1990s at the start of the Personal Computer boom, before most of us appreciated the impact PCs were going to have on our lives. My brother Jim and his grandson, Brad, were baking some cookies---Jim was reading the recipe and Brad, about 5 at the time and very much into computers, was mixing the ingredients. Jim read out that they should add a half cup of milk. Brad was looking through the markings on his grandmother’s collection of measuring cups and said, “Is that one, forward slash, two, Granddad?”


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Years ago when even a penny was worth something, a young boy in Arthur was getting ready for Sunday school. His mother gave him two nickels, saying, “One is for God--- put it on the collection plate at the Sunday school---and the other is for you---get some candy on the way home”.

The little boy started off but he had to stop on the way to study water running down a grate in the road. Suddenly, one of the nickels slipped from his hand and fell down the grate. The boy started to cry.

A passerby asked what the trouble was.

The boy sobbed, “God’s nickel fell down the drain”.


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I better start this story with a bit of background for readers of this blog who weren’t around in the 1970s and 1980s. During that period, it was common to hang a round, blue disk in the toilet tank. When one flushed the tank, the toilet filled with blue water. The disk was supposed to disinfect and deodorize, but didn’t in fact do much of either.

Now the story.

Jean-Riel, the son of one of our Ottawa neighbours, was a bright lad but very quiet in class. When the teacher asked a question he left it to others to answer. Perhaps he was shy or bored, or just didn’t want to be tagged as a know-it-all---who knows.

His Grade One teacher was telling the class about colours and how they could be mixed to produce other colours.

“We haven’t studied this yet, but does anyone know what colours you mix to get green?’

There was silence, no hands came up.

Finally, Jean-Riel raised his hand.

The surprised teacher said, “You know the answer, Jean-Riel?”

“Blue and yellow”.

The even-more surprised teacher said, “That’s right, how do you know that?”

“Well, my Mom puts blue stuff in the toilet and when I pee the water turns green.”


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NEXT SUNDAY

Watch for some Christmas stories from our universe in next Sunday’s Letter from Virgil.