The 200 year present

Today I was introduced to the concept of the '200 year present'. For any individual, this is the span encompassed by the birth of the oldest person they have known and the death of the youngest person they will ever know. It is an idea credited to Quaker sociologist Elise Boulding and there is something about it which immediately struck me as significant.

Coincidentally, today is exactly 100 years since the birth of the oldest person I can claim to have known well, my maternal grandmother, Edna, who was known to her friends as 'Tommy' and who moved in with my family when I was twelve, just after my grandfather died (that's them on the right in a photo taken at my uncle's wedding, when I think Tommy would have been 49, just a bit older than I am now). This anniversary, I judge, places me exactly in the middle of my own 200 year span of presence on this planet.

And it's ironic, because I've spent much of my time in recent months buried in research on the local impact of the First World War: writing blog post after blog post whose titles begin '100 years ago:...'. Those 100 year anniversaries of army enlistments and horrific deaths have become something of an obsession, so perhaps it was not surprising that I remembered this more personally-relevant anniversary today.

Not that I don't think about my grandmother often. I didn't really like her very much (it feels shocking to write that, but it's the truth) and she had a big impact on my life. She lived with us throughout my teenage years and affected our family dynamic in fairly major ways. I generally resented her, and I think the feeling was mutual. Possibly I was more like her than I would have ever admitted at the time, and I think having her in my life was in some ways like having a glimpse into my own future. I'm fairly sure I deliberately made myself less like her (more caring, more compassionate, less selfish) as a consequence of seeing the way she treated other people, and my mother in particular.

I've been thinking about that difficult relationship more often of late, because we're still hoping to bring Mike's mother (another Edna) over to Canada to live with us (she had her medical last weekend, so we're now waiting to hear the result of that). If that plan works, we'll be extending another family-of-four into a family-of-five and I can't help but worry about how that might change things for all of us.

But with a 200-year-perspective view, I think that having her here will bring benefits for all of us, as well as challenges. It will broaden our field of vision and show us our life here through another perspective, as well as remind us all that nothing ever stays the same for very long.

Glimpses of the distant past

Europeans in North America tend to focus on the history of the continent since Europeans arrived, glossing over the people and civilisations that were here beforehand. A blog post entitled 'What if people told European history like they told Native American history' sums up the problem rather neatly. I hope that particular tide is on the turn, now, but there is still a lot to learn about the people who used to live here.

Last night I went to a fascinating talk by George Reid, who is making valiant efforts to identify the sites of early settlements in Prince Edward County. He is building upon the work of the Reverend Bowen P. Squire, who lived on the north shore of Lake Consecon in the 1950s. An article written by Squire about his findings is available online [PDF] and makes for interesting reading. Squire postulates that this area would have been an easily defensible place to create settlements in and he describes (and illustrates) the site he excavated on his property (which was just a little to the west of ours, I believe). The dam which formed Lake Consecon was built in 1806 - before that, the lake would have been a creek about half the width it is now.

George described how he and his co-investigators are using a combination of Google Earth's satellite imagery and local knowledge of archaeological finds to identify the sites of such settlements around the County's shores. This is one of the images George showed last night:

The image is from 2009 and the paler field on the middle right of the picture is the hayfield at the rear of our farm (with a triangle of woodland just beneath it). In our neighbours' fields on the left and in the centre you can see dark cross-hatching in one of the fields and some dark shapes which George told us represent an old settlement.

The people who lived here were of the Wendat nation (the people dubbed the Huron by French explorers) and George explained that their longhouse settlements were surrounded by palisades and that the whole village would have been moved to a new site periodically once nearby sources of wood for fuel had been exhausted. These villages may have been home to 2,000 people - raising the possibility that the population of the County may have been almost as high then as it is now (around 25,000 people).

The Wendat people lived in this area in the period up to around 1525, according to George, and may have been here for 2,000 years. They would have lived on eels and fish from the creek and Weller's Bay, the wild animals they hunted and the food they grew: corn, beans and squash. I was sowing corn and squash on Monday in a small ploughed-up part of the hayfield in that satellite image. I now wonder if 500 or 1,000 years ago a Wendat woman might have been doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same place.

Spiderfly

One of the over-ripe tomatoes in the greenhouse had burst on the edge of the raised bed last night and was proving to be a magnet for flies and wasps. I was surprised to see a spider nibbling on some of the fragments of tomato: vegetarian spiders aren't exactly common (there is one, apparently, out of 40,000 species!).

A closer look reveals the truth of the matter: it's really a fly cleverly disguised as a spider.

After a bit of internet-delving I think it's a member of the family Tephritidae (fruit flies); a species with the rather unattractive name of Walnut Husk Maggot (Rhagoletis suavis). According to Wikipedia, the genus name is partially derived from Ancient Greek rhago "a kind of spider". The BugGuide site also notes that some members of this fruit fly family "mimic jumping spiders. The wing-waving apparently deters the approach of jumping spiders, important predators of the flies."

On swearing

I wanted to jot down a few unscientific observations on a linguistic area that I've been pondering for a while now: the differences I've observed in the use of swear words by citizens of the UK and by those of this part of Canada. I'm sure there are whole theses and many articles and other blog posts on the subject, but I've avoided reading about them so far.

I informally polled co-workers last week at the library (ranging in age from late teens to late 50s) to help me work out how they see some of these words. I also interrogated my children, as their language is actively being formed at school by listening to the usage of others. They also get corrected when they use words that their teachers or friends think are inappropriate; people don't tend to do that when you're a grown-up!

I'm breaking my discoveries down into three main types of swearing:

Regular swearing

Most of the swear-words in this section are used in both countries, although the teenager I spoke to said that she liked using the word 'bollocks', which she saw as a British swear word. Most of the usual swear words are the same, with the exception of 'pants' and 'bloody', which are much more specific to British, rather than Canadian English.*

Religious swearing

The first difference I noticed on moving here was the greater sensitivity to religious swearing. I didn't ask the women at the library about the use of the word 'God' (will have to do that next week!), but we did discuss 'damn' and 'Hell'. Neither of these last two words seems particularly taboo to me, but they are looked upon that way by my interviewees. I was fascinated to discover from my colleagues that 'Hell' is considered the worse word of the two. Which seems odd to me, as really it's just a place name. If I say "Bloody hell", then to me it's the 'bloody' bit that makes it more rude. It was interesting that the eldest of the women in the library managed to avoid saying 'Hell' even while we were discussing it, such was her aversion to the word. I guess teenagers here would not be given Paradise Lost to read, like we were.**

Swearing that isn't swearing

The day after my discussion with the library folk, I had a visit to the dentist's. There's a lovely hygienist there and we had a good chat while she was working on my teeth. Which isn't easy, as you know. One thing we talked about was the prevalence of fighting in hockey, which she described as 'stupid'.
"But I don't use that word to my son," she added.
This was a new one to me, but I asked my children about it and they confirmed that 'stupid' is another word that they are told not to use at school. My library informants told me that 'shut up' is also fairly taboo, which is interesting, given its recent change of use as an expression of incredulity in Valspeak. I'm now wondering how many other relatively inoffensive words I've been using turn out to be rude here.

Conclusion

I'm not someone who swears a lot.† Not in public anyway. But what I've come to realise over the last week or so is that I probably have been swearing (to other people's ears) without even knowing it. I'm sure my observations so far are only scratching the surface!

*'Bloody' may technically be a religious swear word, but I don't think that's common knowledge (and there seems to be some debate about whether it is or not).
**Well, only the first two books, if I'm honest.
†Except where tomato hornworms are concerned

Turkey trot*

A soothing mixture of colours at the almost-frozen pond yesterday.

The area was being visited by a group of wild turkeys when I turned up with the dog. When he arrived they took off into the trees, with much heavy beating of wings. I've never managed to get a close look at them, thanks to Toby, but did manage to grab a distant shot of one, before it flew further away.

They left behind ample evidence of their visit. The footprints made me feel as though I were following a treasure-trail created by someone who was determined that I shouldn't lose my way.

*I was interested to learn from Wikipedia that the original dance of this name gained its popularity after being denounced by the Vatican (a pre-Internet version of the Streisand effect?). According to the New York Times, the newly-elected US president, Woodrow Wilson, cancelled the traditional Inaugural Ball in 1913 because

he feared there would be indulgence in the "turkey trot," the "bunny hug," and other ragtime dances, and thus provoke what might amount to a National scandal.

A long gestation

One of the promises I made to myself on emigrating from England was that I would use some of the extra time I thought I'd have (hah!) to go back to the story I started writing on 17 November 1985. Which was a little while ago now. It had been knocking around in my mind for far too long and I needed to get rid of it and move on. I started writing it in pencil in a spiral-bound notebook all those years back, often while travelling to and from school on the bus. In later years, I used a computer to re-write the same scenes when the mood grabbed me. All of those early versions of the story are now lost, which is probably a good thing (although it doesn't reflect well upon my skills as an archivist, I do accept...).

At Christmas in 2007, the year we emigrated, I did manage to get going on it again, but got stuck after I'd written down all those original ideas I'd had. Luckily, before I'd left Manchester* I'd confided my ambition to finish the story to a friend. On a visit back to the city in May this year I had dinner with her and she asked about it. Her enthusiasm for the basic plot outline re-energised me and over this summer I was able to craft it into a (short) novel. I was so pleased to have finally got this thing out of my system. But what was I going to do with it next?

I read Chris Anderson's book Free the other week. Free of charge, online (though it's now only available in that way in the US). This method of accessing the book was inspiring, especially when combined with the book's subject matter. In the old days, you needed to have agents, publishers and printers involved in order to share a story with other people. Which meant that you had to tout the manuscript around until someone decided it was worth smearing dead trees into sheets for (to borrow one of Anderson's phrases). Nowadays, it is easy to publish things online and the whole middle-person thing is less necessary. OK, that also means that there are some terrible pieces of work around, but at least they can find their own market and writers are able to get on with writing and to share if they choose to.

Which is all a round-about way of saying that my story is now out there: set free, sitting on a server somewhere for its audience to find it. Which I fully expect is not going to be the same audience as the people who read this blog (as it's basically a school story aimed at young adults). Oh well, I had to pimp it somewhere and if you've got a teenager lurking around the house, they might like it! I had a lot of fun writing it and testing it out on my not-quite-teenage daughter. I'm pleased with the way that self-publishing this book fits into our general ethos of self-sufficiency. There's another blog out there too, which covers the background to the story and my observations on the whole experience of self-publishing.

*The picture, in case you're wondering, is of Manchester Cathedral, as seen through raindrops on the Big Wheel in Exchange Square. Old, new and raining. Everything Manchester means to me, summed up in one photograph.

Trust, identity and paranoia

This is a bit off-topic, but I had an email this week from a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. It read like this:

This is an invitation to participate in an online research study being conducted by Mr. Tal Yarkoni under the supervision of Dr. Simine Vazire at Washington University in St. Louis. The study investigates the relation between people's personality and the content and style of their writing, and has been approved by the Washington University Human Research Protection Office.

The study consists of a single personality questionnaire assessing your personality and background, as well as information about your blog (if you have one). You can choose to participate in either a short or a long version of the study, so your participation can take as little as 10 minutes or as long as 30-40 minutes.

The email address given in the text of the message was a Washington University one, but the email itself came from a gmail.com address. The website with the questionnaire wasn't an official Washington University one and, although the text on the questionnaire looked very legit, I wasn't entirely happy about taking part in the experiment, although it did sound interesting. I did a bit of Googling and found that there certainly was a real researcher by this name, so I sent an email to his 'official' email address, hoping to discover whether Tal was really behind this site and suggesting that the email was likely to put some people off taking part. Searching for the text of the email suggests that it has put off at least one blogger.

Anyway, the upshot is that I had an immediate reply from Tal, explaining that he used Gmail to send out the bulk emails and that Gmail would not allow anything other than a Gmail address to be used for this. He couldn't use a university server for the questionnaire because he needed particular software tools which weren't available on them. So if you're a blogger who has received this message, I feel honour-bound to let you know that it isn't some sort of confidence trick, but a genuine experiment. Tal told me that he's had a better response rate than he was expecting, so clearly not everyone is as paranoid as I am!

Making your vegetable patch pay

I'm starting to get excited about this year's vegetables. I already have some onion seeds in trays on the living room window sill and a tray of mixed lettuce seeds next to them. These will be transferred to the greenhouse once it warms up a bit. While browsing around trying to find out exactly how hardy onion seedlings are, Google took me to pages of the Vegetable Growing Handbook: Organic and Traditional Methods by Walter E. Splittstoesser. This book was published in 1990 and looks like an interesting read. For example, he shows a table of value ratings for particular vegetables, based on the space they occupy, their yields and their monetary value, on a scale of one to ten. This was developed by the US National Garden Bureau (no date given) from feedback given by expert home vegetable growers. I've reproduced the table here (click on it for a closer look):
So, to get the most value from your plot it's best to concentrate on the higher-rated vegetables, particularly if you're short of space. As long as you like them, that is. I also liked the mention of a study in Ohio which was published in the journal Horticultural Science in 1978 by Jim D. Utzinger and H. E. Connolly which calculated that...

...a garden of 150 sq ft produced enough vegetables to provide a return for labor of $1.08 per hr; and this value was calculated after all expenses, including depreciation on the garden tools, were deducted. Few leisure-time activities pay you for doing them.

I'd love to know what that $1.08 figure would be in today's money. I wonder whether vegetables more expensive, relatively speaking, now, than they were then, for example? Organically-grown ones certainly are.

Analysis of a headache

As a kid I always used to get a headache when my mother had served us sausages. I'm sure she didn't believe me and thought I was trying to get out of eating sausages, but it did happen. I've had occasional really bad headaches as an adult - maybe seven or eight a year, but I've never associated them with a particular cause.

Until yesterday, when the penny finally dropped. A headache slowly came on during the afternoon and I had no painkillers with me, so had to wait until I got home at 6.00pm. By which time the headache was a full-blown migraine and it was too late for the recommended dosage of ibuprofen to have an effect. I spent the evening in bed feeling utterly wretched, finally accepting that this was a migraine rather than a bad headache and trying to work out WHY it was happening.

Parmesan. I'd had rice with mushrooms and parmesan for lunch. Could it be parmesan that was causing this? So this morning, with a slightly tender skull but otherwise recovered, I researched 'parmesan headaches' and ended up discovering that yes, parmesan can be a trigger, but also (thanks to this brilliant article) that in women our menstrual cycles are a major contributory cause of migraines. When oestrogen levels are low (at menstruation and ovulation), migraines are more likely to happen.

So I feel greatly relieved at finally understanding these migraines and knowing that there are ways to avoid triggering them. The article also had some hope to offer: "Many women will experience an improvement in their migraine after menopause." So that's something to look forward to, then!

Image Migraine #2 by Arty Smokes on Flickr.

Leaf mould and Dan Tat

The leaves are falling so fast from the ash trees that it looks like a snowstorm. I really need to get out there and start raking them up. The leaves I put into the leaf store I made last year decomposed beautifully and have now been put around the asparagus plants as a mulch, freeing up the container for this year's supply.

First, however, I had to make Hallowe'en treats for the school bash tomorrow. This task has been complicated by the need to make the treats relevant to my daughter's recent project on Canada's trading partners (exciting, eh?). Her chosen (or allocated, not sure which) country was China, so we spent some time the other night doing internet research to try and work out whether there was a Chinese treat that we could easily make and that would keep for 24 hours.

To my surprise, it turns out that egg tarts ('custard tarts' in Britain) have become a traditional Chinese treat. In Chinese they are known as Dan Tat (蛋撻). I found a straight-forward-looking recipe and got baking. They are usually served hot, but I hope the children at the kids' school won't be aware of that!

Historical digression (with squash)

I mentioned the Quinte Exhibition yesterday. The word 'Quinte' is an interesting one; it seems to me to be a perfect microcosm of the recent human history of this part of the world. It's pronounced Kwintee and is an anglicisation of the French word Quinté, which itself is a frenchification of a Cayugan word which is usually written as Kente. French missionaries from Québec were invited to this area in 1668 by the Cayuga people who had some settlements here (though the main Cayuga territory was on the southern side of Lake Ontario), including the village of Kente. The blue plaque in Consecon tells part of the story.

(Click on the picture for a closer look.)

A report of the missionaries' arrival here was published in 1879 by Charles Hawley as Early Chapters of Cayuga History: Jesuit Missions in Goi-o-gouen, 1656-1684 ; Also an Account of the Sulpitian Mission Among the Emigrant Cayugas about Quinte Bay, in 1668. I don't think succinctness was one of Charles's strong points. Anyway, the book has been digitised by Google, so we can see how Claude Trouvé, writing in 1672, was treated by the Cayugas when he arrived here. This must be one of the earliest European descriptions of squash in this area:

Having arrived at Kenté we were regaled there as well as it was possible by the Indians of the place. It is true that the feast consisted only of some citrouilles (squashes) fricasseed with grease, which we found good; they are indeed excellent in this country and cannot enter into comparison with those of Europe. It may even be said that it is wronging them to give them the name of citrouilles. They are of a very great variety of shapes and scarcely one has any resemblance to those in France. There are some so hard as to require a hatchet if you wish to split them open before cooking. All have different names.

After the mission closed down, however, the Great Canadian Lakes site informs us that:

A brutal fate awaited the natives that were left behind. In 1687, from his base at Fort Frontenac, a new French Governor, the Marquis de Denonville and his Iroquois allies attacked and tortured the remaining Kente natives, taking those who survived back to France to work as galley slaves.

Nice.

The mission and the village were short-lived, but the area now called Prince Edward County became known as the Isle of Quinte (or Quinte's Isle) and the stretch of water between it and the mainland to the north is still called the Bay of Quinte. Not much comfort to those poor Cayugas, I'm sure.

First sowing

I was planning to hold off on sowing any seeds until after my trip to the UK in April. Not that I don't trust Mike to take care of them (honestly!), but I just thought it might make things easier all round. Plus I didn't have any potting compost, which does rather constrain that kind of activity. And I wasn't sure if my UK-purchased propagator was going to work here.

While the kids were at their swimming lesson we did the usual mad dash round the library and supermarket in Picton, followed by a trip to a garden centre. This is a small business, comprising three or four polytunnels and a small barn which houses the shop. The shop had a sign by the till saying "We're in the greenhouse, come and find us!". This is fairly common for businesses here, which are often small family concerns run out of the owners' homes. This style of doing business took us a bit of getting used to - there isn't always an obvious 'shop front' to go to, for example.

I used to spend ages of indecision looking at all the different types of compost when I bought it from garden centres in the UK - peat free? multipurpose? sowing and cutting? brand or own brand? moisture-retaining or not? So it was quite refreshing at this establishment to be offered the choice of either a 10 litre bag or a 107 litre bale. And that was it. So I plumped for the bale (Mike was with me to carry it, luckily (or maybe not, from his point of view)).

I've just looked at the ingredients and it's 70-80% Canadian sphagnum peat moss. Cue feelings of guilt about destruction of peat bogs, followed by superficial internet research, which seems to suggest that there are an awful lot of peat bogs in Canada:

...more than 270,000,000 acres, 25% of the world's supply, of which our industry harvests on less than 40,000 acres, or one acre in 6,000.

According to the Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association, anyway. They harvest the stuff, so they might be just a teensy bit biased. Not sure now whether I should be feeling guilty or not. Maybe I should make myself a hair shirt out of sphagnum moss to be on the safe side.

Anyway, we hooked the propagator up to one of the voltage regulators we had to buy to save getting all new electrical appliances, so that works fine. Now I couldn't resist starting some seeds. What did I sow, you may or may not be asking. Red tomatoes in this batch - Riesentraube (an heirloom grape-style) and Amish Paste (another heirloom plant, ideal for tomato sauces). I think of the propagator as an incubator or intensive care unit, so once they're up I'll replace them with peppers, chillies or aubergines and get a little production line going.

Eh, eh?

A Canadian character in an episode of The Simpsons that we watched the other day was marked as such by ending his sentences with the word 'eh'. I'd heard of this supposed Canadianism before we moved here, but thought that it didn't sound that much different from the use of 'eh?' that you hear in Britain.

Having spent a lot more time talking to Canadians since then, I realise that the use of this tag (as linguists call it) is actually quite different. In England, 'eh?' is usually associated with a question (or is an alternative word for 'pardon?'). Here it seems to be more similar to the use you hear in the UK of 'like' or 'you know' - as a sort of audible punctuation mark. But it's more widely used than 'like' and 'you know' are in England, although there is a similar stigma attached to its use.

There's been research into it - Mark Liberman at the Language Log describes a survey carried out at the University of Toronto by Elaine Gold, which explains the different uses of the word. It's the 'narrative' use that sounds strange to British English speakers. Here's the example Gold quotes, from an earlier work by Walter Avis:

"He's holding on to a firehose, eh? The thing is jumping all over the place, eh, and he can hardly hold onto it eh? Well, he finally loses control of it, eh, and the water knocks down half a dozen bystanders."

I don't remember hearing 'eh' used this way (or at all, really) when we visited Alberta and British Columbia in 2006 and that is borne out by Gold's paper, where her survey suggests "that eh is used more in central Canada than in the west".

She also looked at the response of immigrants to the word:

New immigrants quickly pick up the use of eh, with two-thirds reporting use of eh with opinions after less than five years in Canada. They associate the use of eh with their developing Canadian identity: one speaker, who had been in Canada for less than two years, said, "I was kind of proud when it slipped out of my mouth the first time."

I'm too aware of 'eh' now for it to 'slip out' like that, but I'll be monitoring the children for signs of incipient ehs.