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Doctor, I said on my last trip to the shrink.  My wife has histrionic personality disorder.

What makes you think that?

Last night while stoned on camel dung hash she kept repeating, How do you get this damn thing to stop blinking?  She was trying to figure out how to make her Tamagotchi have sex.

Is she American? he asked.

No, I said.  As a matter of fact, she thinks she’s Queen Elizabeth, queen of fucking everything.  My wife whips me when I disobey, too. Imagine – she has me whipped bloody!

Maybe she’s the self you have to live with, he said with a sigh.

What do you mean? I asked.

Well, he said, shifting in his seat.  Look at Charlotte Roche, author of Wetlands.  She once wrote a book about Angela Merkel naked in the sauna.  Like some landscape artist on crack in London, it was a surreal collage of naked pictures of girls with tube breasts, American females totally shaved in German saunas, pictures of zoo animals with buggy eyes copulating while making screaming granny sounds, nude klingons, photos of naked ladies and girls from Squamish, sex in wheelchair pictures, photos of spanking all over Europe, ending with helpful tips on how to make your own shank out of a toothbrush and things to alleviate cramp.

Look, I said, I couldn’t care less about Charlotte Roche’s chaotic nightmare, saunas or Angela Merkel’s butt.   I’m worried about my wife!  Just the other day she came out with: I’m so British, I shit the queen!

Perhaps you should bring your wife’s cuddly butt into the office next time, he said.

I would, I said, but it might be easier to drag her to a cave dwelling in Capadoccia or skating on canals in Holland.

Hmmm… let’s deal with your wife when the time comes.  You aren’t thinking about quitting blogging are you? he suddenly asked.

What? What gives you that idea?

You, Canadian skier Ian, may be the author of more than 300 posts ranging from chess and Hitler to Dutch canal winter skating,  but you’re starting to look like a Canadian idiot.   An EasyJet crashing into Big Ben wouldn’t make half the mess this blog is turning into.  You’ve got everything from how to make a bike look crappy and the dangers of ipods in saunas all the way to 12-year-olds buying condoms and a nude olive run video clip.

Besides, you hardly ever post lately, and when you do, it’s some take on something that happened 30 years ago.

Don’t give me any of your putrid paranoia! I said. I never set out to write the definitive answer to everything like some Greenland girls’ nude blog.  Those are just search terms that landed here!  And it’s not just text searches, either.  Most of them cough up photos via google image searches.

Really? he said, perking up.   You mean if you post photos, and stick tags on them, they will show up in searches?

Sure, I said.  Everyone knows that, even Derbyshire nude grannies, Canada’s most toxic waste dump/flute player or a jobless bum.  Besides, the less often I post, the more hits I get.  Go figure!

Well, he said with a sigh.  The hour’s up.  Same time next week?

Why not? I said.  I hope by then you’ll have done something about the reading selection in your waiting room.  Monocle Magazine is shit, and the “little red book” of Mao, 1968 is really out of date, don’t you think?  You should subscribe to magazines that answer life’s imponderables, things like what if the world stops spinning, or is nine too young to have a baby?

No way, he said.  To pass the time in a waiting room, it’s much better to read all about camel penis and skunk families in Montreal while peeking at pictures of mausi naked.  Her oldest got sprayed by a skunk, you know.

Just in case you’ve never read my sidebar, every line in this post is drawn from a search that coughed up this blog – most often as an image search.

What is this crap?

Well, on second thought, never mind…

Are we raising our kids to be wimps?

The incoherent ramblings of a clearly disturbed individual aside, most parents would agree that defending a decision which resulted in sending a seven-year-old would-be airplane pilot plunging to her death is pretty stupid.

On the other hand, we don’t want our kids to grow up to be wimps, afraid to take risks, push themselves, put themselves in a little danger to see if they can come out of it OK.

See that cliff? The little red-haired girl climbed it as part of a five-day Extreme Adventures camp we booked her into before leaving on holiday in Canada.

It’s a good thing she had that day of rock climbing, one day where with good instruction and the right gear, she was tested to do her best in a risky situation.

Because the other four days of this camp were anything but Extreme Adventures.

On day one, the kids walked about 2km to the Squamish Adventure Centre, played some games, and watched a movie.

Day Two was for mountain biking, though it really wasn’t. They had them riding along crushed gravel trails.

Whoa.

Day Three was for wakeboarding, a sport like water skiing. They spent most of the day getting to a lake 50km away to bob about in a boat as each kid took turns pulling the one single wetsuit on and off, and then trying to wakeboard.

The last day they took them to a lake for swimming. Swimming! Not exactly Extreme Adventure, but at least it involves getting a little wet.

Ah, but before swimming in the lake, they had to put on life jackets.

What??? I know about lawyers and liability, but life jackets to go swimming?

I clearly remember having checked the box beside FISH on the form which asked Does Your Child Swim Like

a Rock

a Dog

a Fish

And if she swims like a FISH, she doesn’t need a bloody LIFE JACKET!

She’d been in a day camp with them before, so I knew the first few minutes of Day One I’d be filling out release forms. But this time? They handed me such a stack of papers to sign, paragraphs to initial and have witnessed to fully absolve the District of Squamish of any and all liability should harm come to my child, it took nearly 20 minutes to get through it.

“It’s because there are private companies teaching the rock climbing and the wakeboarding,” they said. “It’s for their protection.”

But even after virtually telling them they could dangle my kid by the ankles from a cliff before dropping her head-first into a bear pit and I wouldn’t sue – couldn’t sue, because I’d signed that right away – I still went away happy, eagerly anticipating great tales of Extreme Adventure.

Instead she got one good day of rock-climbing and four days of pissing around, topped off by five hours on the final day sitting on the beach for five hours because she refused – and rightly so – to swim with a life jacket.

Not that she minded pissing around. At the end of the five days there was an evaluation form to fill out, and she was generally positive about the atmosphere at the camp, the counsellor and the other kids, so what the hell.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that if this is the benchmark for what passes for adventure in a child’s life these days, we’re telling them it’s OK to be overly cautious in life, it’s OK to coast along without taking risks, it’s OK to be afraid of getting yourself in a little danger.

Life jackets.

I would start in on how hrrrmmmmfff when I was a kid before mountain biking, wakeboarding or bloody factor 45 sunblock was even heard of we’d tear out the back door without so much as a bottle of water, scamper up through the forest to find paths up through the rocks to the lake to go swimming and the only life vest was sitting miles away at the bottom of somebody’s boat under lock and key because who even bothered to wear one at all anyway?

Ah well. Even adults wear helmets skiing these days. Now that’s wimpy.

An open letter to British Airways

Dear Mr. Airways,

Thank you very much for supplying an airplane with enough fuel to get us from Hamburg to Vancouver and back via your splendid new launchpads at Terminal 5, Heathrow.

I know you have financial difficulties at the moment, but we really hope you will put the small fortune we paid to good use in fixing up your shabby planes, or perhaps leasing a few new ones?

I ask this because before we board, some of us really enjoy the sight of a bird that looks like it can actually fly, instead of some ancient 747 whose tail section looks like a marauding band of vandals attacked it with chains before setting it on fire.

I would also at this time like to thank you for the excellent care British Airways gave our five pieces of luggage as they sat at Heathrow for one full day on our return journey.   Instead of having to lug home from the airport 115 kg worth of new clothes, cycling gear, off-the-shelf pharmaceuticals, six litres of maple syrup, chocolate chips and other stuff either laughably expensive or impossible to find in Germany, your delivery service saw fit to deliver our bags not only to our front door, but through the walk-in closet to the centre of our bedroom carpet.   Will you please offer this service on a regular basis?  It made journey’s end a most pleasant experience indeed.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, would you please better publicise the many improvements in our flying experience offered at your award-winning website, ba.com?

I ask this only because when we arrived at Hamburg airport to check in, we were informed that, contrary to our wishes to sit together, the entire 747 from London to Vancouver had a grand total of six seats available, all in the middle section, and spaced a good 10 rows apart.

Your employee in charge with getting us all through the automated check-in machines informed us in a somewhat snide tone that BA now offers passengers the opportunity to check in online 24 hours before departure.  Ostrich that I am, this had never occured to me.  Only through the assistance of an actual human being behind the counter were we able to at least sit two of us together.  I was left to squeeze in the middle row between a flatulent Amazon and an obvious candidate for  stomach stapling surgery.

For the return journey ex Vancouver I acquired the assistance of my IT-expert brother, whose GPS gadget is synced with Coordinated Universal Time down to the last millisecond.  At precisely .01 seconds past 2035 the day before departure I hit send to check in.  We received three seats together at the very back of the plane.   Too bad for those who logged in .02 seconds late.   What do you say to your customers who have no net access?  They do exist, you know.     Now I know why people wish for the good-old days when all it took to get a decent seat was arrive at the airport a reasonable time before departure, smile a lot, and if necessary, budge the queue.

Yours most sincerely,

Ian in Hamburg