Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon; burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc. “Wondrous is this wall-stone, wrecked by fate; the city-buildings crumble, the work of giants’ decays.” From the 10th century Anglo-Saxon Poem The Ruin Anna my tour guide and I arrived in Eaglesfield, located in Dumfriesshire around lunch time hoping to find something…
On a recent trip to Quebec visiting les Cantons-de-l’Est and I noticed the magma intrusions abruptly arising from the flat landscape of the surrounding plains. This reminded me of how the theory of plate tectonics is one of the foundational theories of my academic career and yet this theory has not always been foundational….
As I struggle to make sense of the wildfires consuming our boreal forests, I feel a frustration that I am at a loss for words to describe how I feel. This English language idiom, of being “at a loss for words” reveals a much deeper truth about language as words don’t just describe the…
So, who gets the bill? The bill for the meal arrives at the table and here is where we get a bit weird. Out comes a tape measure. And following our rules the person who gets to pay is determined on how close the bill is to one of us. If it arrives and…
Arriving in the dining room for breakfast, already seated were a couple from the Netherlands, who were also hiking the Cumbria way. I took my seat at a table, only partially awake, to see the tips of two pointy ears staring right back at me holding up an early twentieth century black and white postcard…
The time was the early 1960’s in Stratford, Ontario and this was a time when neighbourhoods had stores where you could order groceries delivered to your home on bicycles. Supermarkets (is that even a word anymore?) had yet to put local grocery stores out of business. This was also a time when each neighbourhood also…
Grief is one of those emotions that may ebb over time but never ever disappears sometimes emerging at times when you least think it will arrive. The first week of March which contains both of my parents birthdays are one such time where my thoughts often turn back to memories and reflections. This year is…
Recently I was able to watch the musical &Juliet at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. The musical reimagines Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The musical dives into how the normative box of social constructs drive how the traditional Romeo and Juliet ends with the lovers dying. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, class, family honour,…
Looking back over my life I have come to realize how often I dismiss something out of hand and in retrospect I realize how I have come to regret it. Travel, especially writing about it, requires an open mind. So, I need to make a confession; I find castles boring and choose to skip…
“We are desperate for knowledge of self, but even more we are aching for the stories that have made us. We dare to touch the histories of this world, knowing that in them we are brought into a collective.” Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh. I began examining my family’s history as part of…