Edinburgh: finally seeing the home town of a grandfather I never knew

Sometime back before the turn of the century we had the vague idea of visiting Scotland to see where a chunk of my family’s history played out.  I’m a Canadian with Scottish roots on both sides of the family.  My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a fishmonger in Edinburgh before he emigrated to Canada with his children, my grandfather among them.  He died not long after the photo with me on his lap was taken.

Then when we were mulling over the idea of visiting back then a distant cousin, whose hobby was geneology, sent me a hand-written letter full  of details about my great-grandfather and his times back in the late 1800s in Edinburgh.  She had visited Scotland in the early 1970s and had tracked down many details of our Scottish roots going back a few generations.

One thing interrupted another as life happened to us in the meantime while we were making other plans, so we never did make it to Scotland.

I’d bought a guidebook we never used, but because we’re now definitely going to be there in one month, the other day took it off the shelf where it’s been sitting for the past dozen years.  I was thinking there must be some interesting stuff about Scottish history in it even if the practical information must be hopelessly out of date.

As I took it off the shelf it opened to the page where I’d stuffed a letter my cousin had written me so long ago, and quickly forgotten.  It’s better than any guidebook is going to be.  It’s got a little wander all laid out for us.   Here’s an excerpt:

Your great-great grandparents John and Isabella lived on Leith Street near Register House.  Your great-great grandfather John was a lithographer.  Your great-grandfather was a fishmonger and had three fish shops before coming to Canada.  Your grandfather James was a bank manager in Saskatchewan.  Your grandparents were married in the Tron Kirk, High Street and South Bridges.  (hmmm. they must have gone back to get married?  Must check this.)

Your Granddad and my mother lived as children in a house on Warrender Place (or Park) Edinburgh near Marchmont Road.  She and your grandfather were pals.  Most of her childhood memories were with him.  It is a lovely street, wish I had known the address.  Your great-granddad James (their father) had a fish shop on the corner of Warrender and Marchmont.  Mother and your grand-dad played on the Meadows nearby, and spoke of the huge jawbone they played under.  I found it, not so huge, must be a whale bone, would appear very big to a child.

Your grand-dad and my mother walked the Royal Mile every day because James had two other fish shops. They used to ride under Canongate Tollbooth, driver had to pay.  They lived in Duddingston for a while and attended school.  I have since been told that the school might have group pictures with them in it.  My mother always wondered what she looked like as a child.

Suggest you walk the Royal Mile.  Your great grand-dad sang in choir at St. Giles Cathedral.  It is beautiful.  Sundays the Pipers are there for church service.

(…) My mother’s memories of her fourteen years in Scotland made my visit to the homeland memorable.  I felt as though I belonged.

Another family detail gleaned from a photocopied Scottish newspaper clipping was their war record.  My grandfather had six brothers.   All seven of them fought in France during World War I.  They each fought in a different unit and never met the other during the whole conflict.  Astoundingly, all seven survived that most murderous of wars, which the clipping mentions must be a record for the whole country.

A clipping of my great-grandfather’s obituary was also among the papers stuffed in that guidebook.  Apparently I have another place to pore through: Carisbrooke cemetery.  Would the gravestone still be there?  It will take a visit to the Isle of Wight to find out for sure.

For the love of a dog in a cold city

I’m not a dog-lover.  I avoid them whenever possible, a strategy developed over a late childhood spent delivering the Vancouver Sun newspaper six days a week.  The oversized canvas bag I used to stuff with about 28 papers every day had SUN in huge, black letters written on the side.  Dogs in my hometown read it as: BITE ME.

Eleven times in five years they sunk their fangs into my flesh by the time I turned 13 and passed the paper route on to a 10-year-old kid eager to be a moving canine chomping post in exchange for pocket money.

I was thinking of my attitude to dogs while strolling through the bitterly cold streets of Paris with my friend.  Paris is notorious for its dogs and the tonnes of crap they dump every day.  As he scraped a freshly laden smear off his heel one afternoon, I consoled my friend by telling him a visit to Paris wouldn’t be complete without glitching at least once through a fragrant pile of crotte de chien.

Then on our last day of serious walking my friend and I came across a white sheet of paper thumb-tacked to a tree.  We stopped and read the first few lines, and, because we realised how much of an honest cry from the heart we’d randomly stumbled upon, we read it to the very end.

The lines on that anonymously posted sheet of paper recall classic themes, and they won’t turn me into a dog-lover, but I think I’ll never forget how I came across them, and know I’ll look on dog owners in a different light from now on.

A dog creates bonds – hommage to Lumie and to dog-owners.

Lumie died at the age of 6, brutally ending a close, three-year relationship with the author of these lines.  Three years during which the novice I was in the subject discovered the special friendship which can bond a man to a dog.  Three years that allowed me to get to know other dog-owners, strollers of all ages with whom contact forms with an astounding spontaneity in a city such as Paris where a general distrust of strangers prevails.

I also often came across former dog owners who would not hesitate to crouch down and tell of their sorrow when their companion had left them – a great sadness that, quite often, they still felt a long time after.  Some had not yet “grieved” as the saying goes. They had tears in their eyes as they spoke of their vanished animal, especially if it resembled mine.

There was a time when everyone made fun of “these grannies and their little doggies.”  But in talking to those holding a leash you come to realise the irreplaceable role of a companion a dog can be to isolated men and women.   One day a woman said to me, “she’s my baby” when speaking of Pim, a beautiful German Shepherd that was said to have once been in a police squad sniffing out narcotics.

Often the owner would talk in glowing terms of the absolute loyalty their dog afforded them that a human companion would be incapable of showing.  They’ll also talk of their intelligence and ability to understand so many things without aid of a translator.  A lot is said through a certain look, by their impressive capacity to interpret the most trivial of your movements and gestures.

All this I was able to find in Loulou, a little white Pomeranian born five years ago in Pennsylvania and brought home from New York with my luggage in 2008.  His first owner, a Taiwanese lady who was learning French, had named him Loumi, a nickname from the French word for light: lumière.  My daughter wrote He’ll be an angel dog on learning of his death from an incurable disease.

These personal revelations might seem quite laughable at a time when the Syrian regime pursues its massacre of an insurgent populace fed up with decades of tyranny, where Tibetans set themselves on fire to protest Beijing’s colonial brutality, where Europe’s destitute are dying every day of cold and the people of Greece slowly sink into poverty.  You might tell me it’s a lot of sorrow for such a little dog, a silly little thing.  There are surely greater sorrows.  Nevertheless, they don’t erase this one.

A week in Paris: Day 1

I may be pining for the canals of Holland and hoping they freeze over again, but for now, a trip that’s been in the planning for quite a while before Europe turned hard and frosty is finally under way.

It’s great to be back in France.

Things have changed a lot since I was this blond kid of 22, faking a photo in front of a wall plastered with pissing forbidden.

I’ve come to Paris to meet up with an old, old friend, who’s so old he’s here because he just retired from 25 years of teaching and is on a celebratory tour of France and Morocco.

By the end of this week, we won’t have spent this much time together since we tramped through forests and across beaches far beyond the last reaches of Tofino, BC more than 10 years ago.

We met 26 years ago at university in a programme of professional teacher training.  My friend went on to have a fine, rewarding career in teaching for which over the years he won the respect of countless students and colleagues.  I found I hated teaching and failed the course miserably, starting what turned out to be a four-year downward spiral of failed attempts to get going in another direction that only really stopped when I left Vancouver for good.

We’ve remained good friends all this time, but don’t see each other that often.  In the last 10 years  I’d say we’ve hung out fewer than a half-dozen times.

But meeting him today at his short-term apartment in the 20th Arrondissement, it was like he – and the way we’ve always been hanging out together – had never changed.  We had breakfast together jabbering for what seemed like ages about our lives, wives, plans, and such before heading out in the cold.

Day 1.

We walked for miles through the streets of Paris, my friend as my guide.  We saw a few old men along the way, and I remarked that you don’t see many of them of that age in Germany.

We ended up inside Sacré Coeur at the summit of Montmontre after running the gauntlet of an extremely aggressive gang of Eastern European street thieves.  A tight pack of 20 or so girls between I’d say 16 and 22, they swarmed around us like hornets, thrusting petitions in front of our faces to get us to sign – and hopefully distract our attention – while accomplices threw their hands all over our clothes in a brazen attempt to figure out where our wallets were hidden.  Turning around and hissing DON’T TOUCH ME, GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME was the only thing I could do to get them to back off, but they only paused for a second or two before attacking a passing Japanese tourist with the same tactics.  As the poor woman tried to flee down the steps of Montmartre, we yelled at them to leave her alone or we’d call the police.

My friend said they’ve actually been hauled to Paris and are held in a type of slavery, forced to steal upward of €300 a day and if they fail to do so, they get the shit kicked out of them by their captors that evening.  Forget having police patrol the area so the tourists don’t get hassled, what about throwing in jail the mafia that organise it all?

With that happy thought in mind, we went down the hill to buy cinema tickets for a showing at 3pm.  It turned out to be one of the most horribly depressing movies I’ve seen in ages, highly inadvisable if you’re suicidal or have loose razor blades lying around.  It’s called Louise Wimmer and tells the story of a fiftyish woman who’s left her husband and is waiting endlessly for a place in social housing, sleeping in her car, working as a chambermaid and pawning off her few possessions in a slow, desperate attempt to stay afloat before she finally goes under.   I suppose if you’re in France anyway and haven’t had your daily dose of Albert Camus (everything is meaningless, the best thing you can say about any day is that you haven’t decided to kill yourself –  hah-hah, Gosh, don’t you just love the French…) Well, just go see this film.

After the film we parted.  He went home to bed, I went over to the Théâtre Antoine near to where I’m staying where I bought us two tickets to go see a play for tomorrow evening: Inconnu à cette Adresse.  (Address Unknown)

This time the choice was mine.  It’s a two-man play based on the book by Kressmann Taylor and tells the story of the relationship between a Jewish American and his German business partner during the early 30s as the Nazis were gaining power.  I’m sure it will be equally as uplifting.

1918 – 2011

I remember the first time I said a full sentence to her in the language she could understand.

Ich lade Euch herzlich ein, inviting my mother-in-law and wife to lunch, rolling my tongue seven times in my mouth to make sure I got it right the first time.

It was summer, 1997 and we’d just moved to Germany, still waiting for the shipping container to pass the Suez Canal.

Oma went on a lot of our trips back then.  She’d take care of the little red-haired girl while we went off to the sand dunes, or cook up for breakfast when we were still flaked out from overnight duty.

She had a long life.

Born when the First World War was still in its dying months, she became a young wife in the middle of the next, marrying a soldier on home from leave who left for the Russian campaign a week later.

Pushed out of her home in the East by the threat of advancing Russian forces, she carried her first daughter in the middle of winter over streams and borders to arrive in the west and give birth in the dying days of World War II nine months later.

Her soldier husband had no idea of her ordeal, nor did she of what had happened to him.  Nursing a baby girl to her first steps unable to know whether her love still saw the sunrise, flung between the limits of hope and despair without a word one way or another.

Until one day nearly a year-and-a-half later she opened an envelope from the Red Cross, knowing it was either from or about him, afraid to discover what was inside before reading in scratchy script:

My dear wife and daughter,

I now have the great pleasure to give you a sign of life.  I can tell you that I am doing well and am still healthy, and hope you are too.  I wish you all the best and send my most heartfelt greetings.  Yours ever,

It took still another year and a half for him to finally return from a prisoner of war camp on the Caspian Sea near Baku, in present-day Azerbaijan.  She said he’d become a brute in his years of fighting and imprisonment, couldn’t remember at first how to conduct himself in company or at table.

If, from then on, she led a quiet life in the countryside as a wife and mother, it must have been to make up for the way it began.

Her second daughter, my wife, came along a few years later.  At the time they were living with two other families in a house you’d swear wouldn’t fit a childless couple.  But her husband was a carpenter and builder, and they moved 51 years ago into the new house she lived until suffering a stroke and, two days later, passing away the day before Christmas.

Still on my way by train, I was told to take a taxi at the station and go straight to the hospital because there was no time for them to leave her bedside.

Arriving at the hospital I walked up the stairs to the first floor and opened the door to room 201.  She lay peacefully, a red rose placed below her folded hands.  The whole family was there.   I said little, but did what I could to console them one by one.

In this way it was a Christmas like no other for us.  The funeral was held on my wife’s birthday, Christmas dinner – for the first time, just the three of us – on New Year’s Eve.

It’s a time for looking back and looking ahead.

I was chatting the other day with an old friend from Montreal.  She said we’re all at that age when our parents are getting old and dying.

She said: I don’t want to get old.

Nor do I, I said.  But I don’t much like the alternative, either.

Time to confess an addiction

Before we set off for a long-awaited three-week trip back home to Canada, I’d like to confess something. I only confessed it to myself the other day, and after much contemplation, am now doing it here: I’ve started up a habit I’d thought I’d grown out of long ago and let go for good.

Back in my teens it was all so easy. By the time I was 15 I had pocket money from a few odd jobs, so I’d sneak away at lunchtime to buy some from one of only two sources in town, savouring the anticipation of school’s end when I could enjoy my purchase either by myself or with a couple of close friends. Because the subjects I took were so stimulating, I was always a good student, so the time spent on my habit didn’t affect my grades at all. That was a good thing, because my parents during one phase in Grade 11 became really worried I was spending far too much time alone in my bedroom.

Growing up in my little village perched on a mountain sliding into the sea, there was no chance of getting some closer to home unless friends were offering, so I’d go into Vancouver, where there was a lot of choice. Granville Street, seedy back then and not much better today, held good possibilities to score. I didn’t feel bad about it because I enjoyed it so much, and besides, a lot of my friends were into it way more than I was, and they were doing OK.

It didn’t end with High School though. When I started to earn some real money on summer break while going to university I’d buy even more, branching out into different varieties as the possibilities – and my wallet – broadened. I remember thinking each time I shouldn’t, but was unable to resist the urge.

Then all of a sudden in the early 80s – just when my enthusiasm for it was peaking – my addiction was no longer cool. Even though there was still tons of it going around out there, the world was moving on, and I figured that if I didn’t change, it would move along without me. Then, little by little, the supply started to dry up.   What had once been so easy to find was no longer on every streetcorner.  So, facing reality, I slowly let it go, relegating that period in my life to the musty reaches of the back shelf. I think the last time I bought some was in 1986.

But then a couple of years ago, I came across a dealer in downtown Hamburg, some guy in a back alley of the university quarter near where all the students hang out. I’d always known there were dealers in this city, and that it would be so easy just to go out and get some, but I thought: no. Leave it in the past. You’ve got a family now, a steady job you’d like to hang on to, and the money could be put to such better use, like one day putting your growing daughter through university, for example. When you get older, frivolity should be left behind, right?

But I can’t help myself. I go back every once in a while and pick up some more.  In Paris three weeks ago across the street from Gare St Lazare I spied a dealer and thought of an Oscar Wilde quote – the great man buried only a few dozen blocks east – that the best way to rid oneself of a temptation is to yield to it. So with what bit of cash I had  left over from my trip, for the first time in 25 years I bought three brand new slices of that lovely stuff I just can’t seem to get enough of.

Vinyl.

Is there any cure once you’re hooked?

Routers, rug doctors, and getting inside my head

Have you ever had your router die on you?   I spent hours and hours on the Netgear user forum last month just trying to get some help on how to get it working again, because it was running perfectly for two months when suddenly – nada.  After re-setting and reconfiguring and calling my own ISP and being told that no, they can’t help me because I don’t have the router that THEY sell – I just gave up on them and ordered up a new ISP.

That’s the prelude to the apple story.

Midst that hassle I at least had two weeks off work, time enough to drag some dusty power tools out of the basement for a thorough sweep through the apartment taking care of various odd jobs that I’d neglected and were long overdue – a laundry list of sanding, varnishing, hole-drilling, screwdriving, stuccoing the ceiling, sawing, hammering, spackeling, painting – even rug shampooing.

Anyway, March 9 I took K. to the airport because she had a flight to Nice.  Little holiday by herself with a retired friend who goes there every year around this time.

She loves France and French culture as do I, and it would have been nice to be there with her, but as I said I had all these jobs to do and quite frankly all I wanted to do was stay in Hamburg and do some stuff with the little red-haired girl.  We ate at Mickey-D’s twice, made pizza, spareribs, popcorn and french fries, went to the zoo, the world’s largest model railway – yes, it’s right here in Hamburg -  watched a few movies, listened to music and generally hung out.

After taking K. to the airport I went home, turned around and biked off to a clinic for an MRT scan – I don’t know if that’s a CAT scan in real English but you’ve probably seen photos or even had one yourself.  They’re trying to find out why the smell of metal – more like copper – keeps wafting through my head since we got back from New York.

They put you on a narrow bed on a sliding tray, coo soothing words into your ear that it’s going to be a wee bit noisy, but not to worry dear, you get some ear protection and are shown a button to push should you find you just can’t stand one more second of its screaming, scraping, throbbing, grinding, pulsating bursts of pure aggravation.  It goes on for 20 minutes and my head was ringing even more than usual afterward.

Biked home from the scan with printouts showing bizarre slices of my head for the Ear Nose and Throat guy to hum and haw over some time later, plopped them down on the desk long enough to go to the router forum and get some more info, try it out only to bang my head on the chair in frustration.  Routers!  Why are they such a hassle?

But by then it was near closing time at the hardware store where I’d reserved a rug shampooing machine, so I dashed off to the car and fought rush-hour traffic to pick it up.

Paid for the rug doctor, packed it in the car, drove back through the narrow streets into our building’s underground parking lot so I could unload the thing right close to the lift instead of hauling it from a parking spot several streets away.  We don’t rent a space, you see.

Anyway, I took it upstairs, went online to the router help forum because something I thought of asking on my way home I didn’t want to just forget, had some dinner, kissed the little red-haired girl and headed out that evening to meet a friend from the writers’ group who’d invited me to join her weekly improv theater workshop.  I had a lot of fun, even participated in a couple of sketches, then went out for beers.

During the improv the little red-haired girl phoned three times, a little annoying but she said she was afraid, being all alone in the house and having someone first ring the doorbell and then knock on the door 10 minutes later.  I told her that because we weren’t expecting anyone, not to open the door.

Got home after midnight, hit the sack, and woke up around 5:30am for some strange reason asking myself how far I’d have to go to pick up the car again when I brought the rug shampooer back, because I could just carry it to the… OH FUCK!

Suddenly it dawned on me though a late lingering beer buzz that I had absolutely no memory of driving the car out of the underground parking garage after unloading that damn rug doctor.  Pulling on some clothes I threw myself downstairs, flung open the door to the garage – and the car’s gone!   At least it’s not in the spot it should have been.  Oh man…

I head around a corner and to my enormous relief it’s only been pushed a few yards down the way a bit.  Must have left it unlocked.

I get in, turn the key and it doesn’t turn over, because – cue Simpsons’ HA-HA -  I’d left the hazard lights on.  So I go upstairs and haul the little red-haired girl out of bed – it’s before 6 am – because she’s got to help me push it into an empty parking bay.  We struggle to edge the car through the crowded garage without scraping any BMWs,  I lift up the hood, disconnect the battery and pull it out.  I’ve got a charger and want to get it hooked up right away, because who knows how long it’s going to take to get the thing juiced up again?

So I’m downstairs carrying this heavy car battery with my daughter beside me and we’re waiting for the elevator to take us back up to our plac when my downstairs neighbour – a big, beefy guy with 3 kids who’s kind of the unofficial Hausmeister – comes lumbering down the stairs followed closely by two Hamburg cops – a police man and woman – who all look down at me from the stairway above.

My neighbour stops and, looking straight into me while taking a deep breath to pause for effect, slowly says: Huge problems in this house yesterday evening, Herr InHamburg.

Uh, yeah, well, you know I was just, uh, well…. you see it’s…. God, I wanted to melt to a puddle and trickle through some crack in the floor, never to be found again.  I apologised the best I could and he accepted it very well, adding that beyond the immediate problem of moving the car away so that neighbours could park theirs for the night, they were all worried about what it could all mean.

Was I somehow injured?  Had I suffered a sudden heart attack or stroke and for that reason could not answer the door?   You don’t just park a car in the middle of the garage and then leave it – it doesn’t make sense!  It could have been really serious, so that’s why he called the cops.  It also explains my daughter’s hearing the doorbell ring and the knocks late the night before.

I consider myself lucky nobody had the beast towed away, the router works perfectly with the new ISP, and that I’ve had a chance to take my own little holiday in the meantime.

A couple of reasons why German healthcare is in such a mess

From some of the highest drug prices in Europe to bloated bureaucracies, there must be a dozen reasons why healthcare in Germany is an expensive mess – about 8% of gross wages for those on the public plan, and rising.

A few years ago, during what turned out to be the longest stretch I’ve ever had to endure in a hospital, I got a good look at two of those reasons.

It started out as a routine blood test at my family doctor.

“This doesn’t look good” he says when showing me the results.  “You’ve got to see a specialist about this as soon as possible.”

So I get an appointment at a specialist who performs an ultrasound, along with another blood test.   When the tests come back he hums and haws, says it could be this or that, but to find out for sure, we have to take a tissue sample.  Jab a hollow tube through my liver and rummage through what they pull out.

“Just a couple of nights in the hospital,” he tells me.

I get sent to a third doctor, the one who’s going to be taking care of the hospital visit, who performs the third blood test in about three weeks, which comes back with the very same results.

Upon admission to hospital a couple of weeks later, they take another two blood tests, one on admission, another the next day.

“Look,” I tell them.  “I don’t understand.  I’ve got an arm like a junkie’s with all these needles.  Why do I have to get a new blood test every time I’m sent to a new doctor?”

“Because that’s the way we do it here,” they tell me. “You may be referred to another doctor, but they have to take a new test each time.  They can’t take the results of the former doctor at face value.”

I wondered how many billions each year are wasted that way, but it was the hospital visit itself that really opened my eyes to the way the system is set up to rip us all off.

Not only did they only perform the tissue sample the morning of my third day after admission, already forcing me to stay one more night than I’d planned for, but they also arranged to have me undergo a colonoscopy a few days later, because the tissue sample showed nothing abnormal, and they wanted to “make sure we aren’t missing anything.”

That was on a Friday, and they told me I’d have to spend the entire weekend in the hospital waiting for the colonoscopy to get underway the following Tuesday.

What?  Wait f0ur full days in hospital when I feel perfectly healthy just to prepare for another procedure that might not even be necessary?

“Screw you,” I told them.  “I am not spending five minutes in this dump more than I have to.”

Dump?  More like an asylum.  My time until then had been spent enduring the ravings of an attention-starved recovering alcoholic in the bed beside me, who, completely oblivious to the impact his constant ramblings and interruptions had on the rest of us, actually woke me up the night before the tissue sample, because he couldn’t sleep and so was watching his personal TV at 3 in the morning.  Mostly to get away from him, I packed up and left that Friday afternoon, signing a waiver on my way out saying that whatever happened to me that weekend was my own doing.

After a beautiful weekend hiking the storm-swept mid-winter beaches of St-Peter-Ording with K and the little red-haired girl, I showed up Monday morning at the hospital, spent a day drinking gallons of some vile solution turning my backside into a storm drain, submitted myself to an invasion by a 12-foot black plastic snake, and spent a day and a half recovering.  The only thing I was grateful for was their generous application of Demerol.  I liked it so much, I’d have let them do it again just to get more of the stuff.

I told my family doctor all this and he replied with what I’d been thinking all along.  “I’m really sorry you had to go through all that, but hospitals do that all the time..  Every night you stay there is worth a lot of money to them.  They maximise the time you have to stay so they can turn around and bill the health funds.  There’s really nobody checking to see if what they do is really necessary.”

To top it all off, I received a bill from the hospital for the daily user fee we all have to pay.  They completely disregarded the two nights over the weekend I had left the hospital, billing me for the full nine days.

I paid for seven with a note and a letter explaining why, with proof I wasn’t there and all the rest, but the bureaucrats ignored it.  Instead I received a nasty notice threatening me with legal action and all associated additional costs if I didn’t buck up for the two days I did not stay in their comfortable surroundings.

So I paid for those two days just to get them out of my hair, only to find out a few weeks later from my healthcare people that I shouldn’t have, and that I could get the money back if I applied for it.

But by then I was so glad to have the whole sorry mess behind me I didn’t bother.

International Day to Bite Me

I don’t know whether it’s because I stopped drinking coffee a few months ago, or passed the half-century mark a few months earlier, but nothing seems to bother me much anymore.   Not that I just let everything slide, but in dealing with obnoxious people or situations I’ve become a lot more mellow.  What’s the point of getting all in a lather anyway?  In most cases where you get all pissed off at someone or something, there two things at work: the situation and your reaction to it.   Only one of those is entirely in your control.

Nevertheless, there is something to be said about venting, in real life or right here.  So here goes.  Thank you, Deutschland über Elvis, he of the carefully worded, well-researched and always entertaining  posts on matters personal and cultural: may the third annual International Day to Bite Me be the success it deserves to be.

Ahem.

To the driver who honked and brayed at me from his rolled-down window because I was cycling with the traffic on the road instead of dodging pedestrians, spaced-out shoppers, dogshit and various obstructions found all too often on Hamburg’s laughably inadequate cycling path “network” – BITE ME!  Where the hell did you get your license, anyway?  It’s legal to ride on the road unless there’s a circular blue sign with a bike on it telling you otherwise.

To the pedestrian who yelled at me because I wasn’t on the cycling path but on the sidewalk because the cycling path is covered in tons of slippery grit left over from Hamburg’s spectacular failure to remove the December snows, not to mention the piles of filth left over from New Year’s Eve fireworks mayhem: BITE ME!

To the millions of brain-addled Germans who in an annual three-day orgy of mindless, wasteful consumerism spend upwards of 120 million frickin’ euros on fireworks for New Year’s leaving a heaving mess behind for weeks, months and years afterward – they NEVER clean it all up: BITE ME!

To the driver who assumed I was a jobless bum simply because I was cycling at noontime on a weekday: don’t you know some of us work shifts, full-time?  BITE ME!

To the grocery store nitwit who feels it’s his duty to tell me to put the items back in an orderly fashion on the shelf because “es gehört dazu” – BITE ME!  Do you have a cellphone?  Next time you see a federal crime in process, call a cop!

To the awful, pinched-faced cow supervising security at Gatwick Airport: lose the psycho bullshit!  Yes, your minions discovered a battery-powered iPod charger in my hand luggage and they -  in their ignorance of modern consumer technology – have every right to take every soiled piece of underwear out to inspect, rifle through every book, test every cranny for explosives and take apart and run the charger through a scanner a third time, but please: don’t stare at me for minutes on end while assuming some sort of accusatory tone when you ask me the routine questions.  Oh, and I almost forgot: BITE ME!

Why we said no to Google Street View

Call it Blurmany if you will, call us uncool and throw eggs at our apartment building if you love Google so much, but I’m very happy to say I live here.

It didn’t take long for us to decide to say no to Street View.  After all, we already have an unlisted telephone number that’s kept our place reasonably quiet since we applied for it about four years ago.  We no longer get crank calls from drunk jerks in the middle of the night – usually students my wife teaches or once taught – bored out of their minds and playing around with their cellphones.  We also never get telemarketing calls.  I remember in Hong Kong we used to have to rip off five or 10 feet of paper every day from all the junk faxes until we made HongKong Telecom change our number.

With Google Street view, the angle was more subtle.  It’s very unlikely you’ll get hassles just because you’re visible online, and even less likely you’ll be burgled, the politician’s scare tactic of choice when this whole thing blew up in the German media a few months ago.  And as for getting caught sunbathing on the balcony – well, that’s obviously an argument put forth by those who don’t know how Street View works.

Sure it’s great for businesses, but what possible benefit could we, as private individuals living in a private household, obtain by letting Google put up a photo of the place where we spend the greater part of our lives for the whole world to see?   What have we to gain by it?

I could understand it if we were the owners of some boutique called snotty and desperate for a little free on-line publicity, we’d even pay for the right to have our store burst onto the screen with arrows, flashing  lights and pop-ups.

But here I am, some duff who was always taught to be wary of those on the sell side.  Since Google is basically a multi-billion dollar advertising company with the world’s most powerful search engine attached, why on earth would I want to help them?  What’s in it for me?

Even if we were to  ignore the accusations of WiFi network data theft and other questionable goals as their octopus-camera cruised the streets, the ONLY benefit to Street View that we could think if – and the only argument I found online in favour of not opting out – was that perhaps friends and relatives living far away could look you up.

Well, whoop-de-fucking-do.  One photo from the ground floor and a blanket email and that’s taken care of.

Google Street View is merely one more brick in the infrastructure for a much wider array of capabilities not even invented yet that could further erode what few avenues of privacy we have left.   Maybe it’s like trying to turn back the tide, but if we can spit back at it a little, maybe some good will come out of it.

Brooklyn Heights Promenade then and now

Then:

September, 1991

Five-day trip to New York with brother Gordon

Drove down from Montreal

Fast driving

Not much sleep

Times Square a warren of crooks

Walk along the Brooklyn Promenade with stunning view of New York skyline

Probably a detour from one bar to the next

Random ladies sitting on the benches in the circle at north end

Did not walk across Brooklyn Bridge

Olympus OM-10 camera

Kodak T-Max 100 black and white film

Developed and printed in the Sherbrooke Record darkroom

Now:

October, 2010

Ten days in New York, 4 in Washington, with family

Flight from Hamburg via Heathrow to Newark, NJ

Headwinds

Slept well

Times Square Disneyland East

Walk along Brooklyn Promenade with jet lag on first day

New York skyline view still stunning, though something’s missing

My two special ladies in the circle at north end, placed according to what I recall of that photo nearly 20 years ago.

Walked along Brooklyn Bridge after

Two weeks, four beer

Kodak Z712 IS

No film, no darkroom