From Thoughts in Westminster Abbey by Joseph Addison (1672-1719):

When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.

I’ve written previously about Mark’s Mailbox, the letters section of Canadian journalist Mark Steyn’s web site, but I just had to share the following excerpt from a piece of fan mail published there this week:

Mark, I’m a long-time reader going back to National Post. As it happens, I’m a Canadian actuary currently living and working in Trinidad, a beautiful and wonderful country where we get garbage pick-up 4 times a week, no limit on number of bags or anything, no recycling, they take it all, and you couldn’t find nicer, more courteous guys – stark contrast from that socialist paradise Chrétien is so proud of, where the unions have the run of the place…

Gene Dziadyk
Westmoorings by the Sea
Trinidad, West Indies

People are strange. Since when is a great place to live defined by the frequency of the garbage collection? How much rubbish does Mr. Dziadyk produce in a average week? And when did a failure to recycle become a good thing?

On the other hand, perhaps the lack of recycling is a good thing in Trinidad. Some years ago, a Rough Guide television programme about Trinidad was broadcast, in which the country’s poor were shown crawling all over the municipal dump in search of things to use or sell. The narrator explained that this shocking behaviour was necessary because Trinidad had no welfare system for its unemployed whatsoever. So the lack of recycling presumeably means better pickings for Trinidad’s poor.

The saying one man’s rubbish is another man’s gold clearly applies in this case; not just to Trinidad’s poor, but also apparently to Mr. Dziadyk.

PS – What deluded developer came up with the name Westmoorings by the Sea? It sounds like it should be in Sussex; not near Port-of-Spain, Chaguaramas, Guayaguayre, or Tunapuna. It would be just as appropriate to call the place Beaulieu-sur-Mer.

Speaking of Camembert, a review of Camembert: A National Myth by Pierre Boisard was published this week in the Guardian:

Pierre Boisard seeks to show how, over the past 150 years or so, the cheese has been ruined: industrialised, homogenised, delocalised and, finally, pasteurised – and all without the assistance of American multinational corporations. It’s almost wholly an indigenous French story: the Camembert producers made it into the national cheese – the most popular and best-selling of any cheese in France – and then into an internationally recognised and traded commodity. Camembert is a gripping read, and if it winds up using cheese as a perspicuous site for understanding the making of modernity, well, there are lots of other cheese books which really are just about cheese.

So it seems the French weren’t such cheese-eating surrender monkeys after all. Cheese-eating, yes; but they practised modern methods of globalization and began conquering the commercial world long before Coca-Cola or McDonald’s.

The Marriage Contract by William Hogarth

The Eonomist’s New York Briefing arrived in my inbox this morning and it contained the following statistic:

New York has more single people than any other state, with most of them living in the city, according to a report released in October by the US Census Bureau. The city’s five boroughs boast some 2.4m people who have never walked down the aisle. And the New York metropolitan area ranks fifth in the country for its number of young singles with degrees.

That explains the article Love For Sale by Rebecca Mead in last week’s New Yorker magazine, which reviewed the book Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School by Rachel Greenwald.

I suppose it’s one way of putting your education to practical use; and who knows, perhaps this approach will breathe new life into the flagging business book sector.

I had no idea that an election was imminent in Toronto until I read about it in this weekend’s Financial Times of all places: Election is a turning point for Toronto.

Having not lived in Toronto for 11 years, I found the following excerpt interesting:

Canada’s largest and richest urban centre goes to the polls on Monday to elect a mayor amid a pervasive sense of decline. Once lauded across North America as a beacon of intelligent urban development, US academics and civic leaders would come and gaze in wonder at “the city that works”.

But rising crime, traffic gridlock and growing homelessness have quashed that sense of easy superiority.

“In the past decade or so there has been a slow wearing down of the infrastructure. The level of dynamism on the cultural and economic front is also not what it was,” says Nelson Wiseman, a politics professor at the University of Toronto.

Somehow I had a feeling that Toronto had declined culturally. I’m not sure why I would get that feeling, given that I’ve only been back three times in the last decade. I guess it’s just the lack of good news: a weakened TSO, the usual chronic disarray at the CBC, and still no new opera house on the scene. Whatever happened to progress?

Adam Gopnik writing seriously in The New Yorker about this newsworthy greeting, which promted the headline “Laura braves weasel kiss!”, offered the following suggestion:

A good piece of advice for the weasel-bashers would be that, every time France makes their blood boil, they should substitute the magically pacifying word "Canada." For the truth is that the Canadians — who, last time we checked, kissed a woman’s hand only when they couldn’t get at her face through all the winter wear — have virtually the same policy of emphatic non-participation in the war on Iraq.

Obviously, Chirac was just thinking of that old saying a bird in the hand is worth two in the Bush.

These days some of the most interesting writing, both on and off the web, is about cultural exchange, by which I mean people writing about their experiences as they visit or live in new places. One of my latest weblog discoveries, dervala.net, is a good example.

Dervala is an Irish casualty of the US dot.com bust, and she’s spent the last few months living alone on the shore of Lake Superior, discovering life in the Canadian wilderness. Previously Dervala lived and worked in Manhattan with everything she could possibly want right on her doorstep. Now, she carefully plans her grocery shopping in advance because the nearest store is an hour and a half’s drive away in Sault Ste Marie.

Until recently that is, because Dervala is on the move again. This time she’s on her way to visit her sister in Ottawa, but she continues to write about and post her adventures along the way.

Dervala’s writing is crisp and imaginative, and the thought of her trapped in an office job seems like a terrible waste of good talent. A retrospective trawl through her weblog is an impressively good read.

Canada has a disproportionately low profile in the UK in my opinion. Australia, which is much farther away, is frequently in the news and kept at the front of British minds, thanks to among other things, the popular Antipodean daytime soap-opera Neighbours. Canada on the other hand is hardly ever mentioned, being judged by the UK’s media and “chattering classes” as too dull.

But perhaps that perception is beginning to change? Not only has the Economist recognised Canada’s hidden depths, but yesterday BBC Radio 4’s Sunday morning current affairs show, Broadcasting House, aired an interview (available for the next 6 days; RealPlayer required) with the outspoken mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman. He can hardly be considered dull, having confessed to being afraid of Kenyans boiling him alive.

So thanks to Canada’s emerging liberalism and some of its less tactful politicians (Ralph Klein, the Premier of Alberta, is another that comes to mind), Canada may finally be shaking off its reputation for being boring.

The British will soon need to find another country for that old joke:

Canada’s a fabulously beautiful country. Wonderful place to visit. But not for the whole weekend.

P.S. – The Lastman interview occurs 51 minutes into the programme.

I read this today, the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United States, and it seemed appropriate to just post it:

Hereditary monarchy offers numerous advantages for America. It is the only form of government able to unify a heterogeneous people. Thanks to centuries of dynastic marriage, the family tree of every royal house is an ethnic grab bag with something for everybody. We need this badly; America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home. We can't go on much longer depending upon disasters like Pearl Harbor and the Iranian hostage-taking to “bring us together.”

Florence King (b. 1936), U.S. humorist, essayist, social critic.
From Why I Am a Royalist, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye p. 125, New York, St. Martin's Press (1989).