Saturday in London

Saturday in London is spent meandering through town from event to event. Part of the Slow Down London Festival on in London at the moment includes a special free Wallpaper Printing Workshop with master printmaker, Linda Florence. We team up and print a long roll of wall paper. Some choose white stars. We choose red on gold. Next we take the Tube east. To find ourselves wandering through Portobello Market in Notting Hill. All sorts of antiques line the streets in stalls and stores. Old film cameras. Food stalls galore. We find a falafel place and hunker down. Next we hop on a double decker bus to meander for most of an hour towards the city centre. Through streets lined with taxi cabs and shoppers, we pass through Oxford Street. A day of English folk-inspired performances are taking place in celebration of St. George's Day in Trafalgar Square. The crowds gather in front of the National Gallery. There are some great dancers that show up in toupes, thick gold glasses and and disco outfits. All the while Napolean looks down on the crowds. We wander off through the square. And head over to Leicester Square instead. We find a small cafe and get the best hot chocolate I've had in a long time made by the Italian owner, Fernando. The drink has us under such a spell we accidentally leave our roll of hand printed wall paper in the corner. We wander through China Town... ...and head over to Soho... ...where we gaze at more food in the windows. Finally we settle into a cheap theatre to watch The Tale of Benjamin Button before heading back home to bed.

Mercy Ship Talk

I attended a talk this year by a dentist who had worked briefly on the Mercy Ships in Liberia. Nigel and I were invited as guests by a surgeon to the members only event that was made up of mostly medical doctors in different disciplines. I was very interested in hearing someone elses talk after Nigel and I had given two already on our experience. Well, no one can quite prepare you for suddenly having background knowledge on what would turn out to be a bit of a scam talk. I can only say that Nigel and I were incredulous as we listened to tales of patients who we had been directly involved in. One funny story he had involved the sunken ship that sat beside our ship in the harbour. He had some elaborate story about how it sunk and a dozen people were killed. They had never recovered the bodies but the ship had been dragged out to sea. The photos show this very same ship, which still sits in Monrovia's dock half sunk. It was being loaded or unloaded and became unbalanced and tipped over. The ship loses the country US$3000 a day in port fees by just sitting there. There are so many sunken ships in the port that the port police have to navigate you through to your own dock. Fortunately, there were no deaths and the ship was still sitting there when we left, despite efforts to refloat it.

Getting Sucked In

I recently finished "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini and cried my eyes out throughout the entire thing. I was warned it was sad (but good), but that did not prepare Nigel for a quiet evening on his computer and me curled up on a couch reading and weeping. He looked at me and in his usual dry humour told me to "stop it!" Of course I couldn't which fueled his next question, "why do you do this to yourself?" It brought back a funny story we often tell when we were on a plane between Canada and the UK. I was watching a light Disney movie and Nigel was busy reading or listening to his iPod. The movie's plot had been about a young family whose father had died, but had come back to help his grieving child through a last task. I again, was crying my eyes out, but desperately trying to be as silent as possible, knowing I was on a packed plane. Nigel at one point must have glanced over or heard a sniff and, nudging me, gave me a look that said, "why are you crying?" In my not-realizing-how-loud-my-voice-is-with-earphones-on I sobbed loudly, "the dad died and now his ghost has come back to help." Nigel rolled his eyes, "isn't this a Disney movie?"

UN Women

When I was in Liberia I was fascinated each time I passed the parliament building in the capital city, Monrovia, where I lived. I really liked that Liberia had the first female president in Africa, Ellen Johnston Sirleaf, who was transforming the country. I was even more fascinated with who was guarding the building. It is well known in the area that the best body guards come from Nigeria, and the president herself makes use of them. But to guard the presidential building she chose the only all female UN unit in the world: the Indian Women's Unit. I have to admit that of all the UN country units left in Liberia (the western countries pulled out much earlier perhaps due to lack of media in the area) these women appear the most attentive and fierce. I found this very attractive and was fascinated that such a unit derived from what I considered a very traditional culture. From what I can understand, some of the other UN units from similar West African countries took advantage of their position and there were reported cases of abuse of power involving peacekeepers and Liberian women. To nip it in the butt, President Sirleaf had the women brought in. On an official visit that some of the higher ranking ship members made to see the president, I hitched along and hung out outside with these women. They were shy and giggly, but loved to chat. They told me they were career soldiers who had committed to the Liberia post for 6 months. While there, they either lived in their army base or they were on duty. All of them had husbands, families and children and immediately brought out pictures to proudly show me. When asked if they felt their families were missing them and unable to cope without their mother, I was met with confusion. It became evidently clear that in a culture with extended families all under one roof they were more free to easily go off on a tour of duty. Besides, they said, they all loved getting away and being somewhere completely different. BBC links on these women: Indian Women to Keep Liberia Peace Liberia gets All-Female Peacekeeping Force All Female UN Squad a Success

The Other Non-Fiction I Would Like to Read

Spent by Frank Lipman, M.D. I came across an article in a magazine for this book and it sounded fascinating. I hear he is on YouTube too. It is a book inspired by noticing a trend among his female patients of feeling tired after 8 hours sleep, craving sugar after meals, feeling exhausted, struggling to lose weight and concentrate: in short, spent. He noticed that his poorer patients when he had worked in South Africa had more energy than the affluent "sushi-eating, treadmill-pounding Manhattanities". He points out some reasons why. His old patients lived in accordance with nature and their DNA. They woke when it got dark and ate foods that were in season. He has some interesting eating suggestions, which I won't get into here, but what I liked was his "electronic sundown". He says, "electricity is burning us out. Dalily exposure to computers and mobiles overstimulates us and ruins our sleep. I tell my clients to have an electronic sundown at 10pm, and turn off everything electrical." This includes emailing, TV, texting and exposure to electromagnetic fields (which too close to bedtime stops melatonin, the sleep hormone). "And don't charge your mobile on your bedside table - the signal it gives off also interferes with restorative sleep." -Article by Maria Lally, Grazia Magazine

A Non-Fiction I would like to Read

Resilience by Boris Cyrulnik. "A household name [and psychoanalyst] in France, Cyrulnik is revered for his work on over-coming childhood trauma and helping heal the wounds left on the country by the second world war." [He himself is Jewish and is the only surviving member of his family during the Holocaust.] "'When I became a doctor, I was very personally hurt when I would hear people say of a child: 'No point in bothering with him. He is lost.' Knowing what I had gone through,' he taps his chest passionately, 'it felt like a condemnation.'" "He is fascinated by the paradox of wealth, especially in the consumerist west: the richer a society becomes, the more unhappy its people. 'It is not easy to have a family life in a rich country. Wealth fragments family life because people can travel in a way they can't in poor countries. Poverty is a barrier to many things, but it gives solidarity to family life. In modern life, the personality can flower, but we hold our families less dear.'" Viv Groskop, "Escape from the Past", The Guardian, April 18, 2009

The Human Right

I finally sat down for 3 days to Photoshop and upload "The Human Right" series of portraits that I completed in Liberia and exhibited in both Monrovia (Liberia) and Vancouver (Canada). Click on the photo for the link... "Alfred", 2008, oil & conte on drafting film, 46 x 61 cm (18"x24") Caption: Alfred abruptly stated he believed all white people come to Africa to take pictures of the poor black Africans. At 14 years old he has more insight than most.

My Dream

I dream vividly, I dream a lot and I usually remember what I dream. Some are profound, some recurrent, some adventurous and fantastical. Their mood usually sticks with me for a long time throughout a morning. The night before last there was one moment that I kept thinking about in the morning. It was the 19th century and after a whole series of adventures I sat down with Nigel who was working on experiments in clinically putting someone to death and then reviving them using the anaesthetics of that time. He asked me to be his subject along with another doctor and patient. He said I could trust him. I sat in the chair while he reassured me everything would be okay. He would initially give me ether to relax and take me into a semi-unconscious state followed by lethal injections to stop my body from living. It wouldn't hurt and it wouldn't last longer than a moment. I remember I trusted him with my life implicitly. He put the ether soaked cloth close to my nose and I began smelling the fumes and drowsing off a bit. I closed my eyes. Then he injected two needles into the gums in my mouth and I waited to feel death come as he rubbed my arm and reassured me. I opened my eyes for one last look at him before I died and saw that he was crying uncontrollably. I imagined he was thinking about what it might be like if I really was dying. I felt my veins burn a bit as the serum travelled around my body and my breathing slowly stopped as I drifted backwards down a long dark space. I waited to suddenly be brought forward towards the light and see him immediately, but I kept moving backwards into the darkness. Something had gone wrong. I wasn't going back. I wasn't breathing. I was dead. Then slowly I felt a little bit of a breath catch in my chest and my blood moved again. I felt transformed through another tunnel but in a different direction and a different time. I slowly became aware of where I was as my breathing steadied and I slowly awoke. I was in present day real life lying next to the present day Nigel. I was both relieved and grateful to be alive and still with Nigel, but also grieved for the Nigel that was left in the last century, with what I knew was a dead wife.

I am Stuck on Susan Boyle

Susan Boyle has taken the Internet world by storm and everyone wants her to succeed. I can not stop watching her performance and find myself equally endeared to her character, her sense of humour, her authenticity, and her lovableness. Lisa Schwarzbaum asked in her article, "why do we all cry when we listen to Ms. Boyle?" She does reorder the popular world's view of beauty, transforming from quirky and loveable to stunning when she sings. The rest of what we focus on becomes irrelevant: the latest fashions, the celebrity culture we are all mesmerised with, and the self-packaging we all present to be accepted. She is not a trained singer, has not been moving in the right circles, has not bought into the "steps for success" that seem so essential when working towards an arts career. She has simply been caring for her aged mother who died two years ago at 91, singing only in Karaoke and her church. I am encouraged for the world of arts. I am weary with the theory that unquestionably goes along with being a visual artist. The discourse is exhausting and rarely feels authentic or humble. It is easy to get discouraged when focusing on it and this performance and person suddenly make it as irrelevant as I hoped it was. Many viewers have commented on a higher Universe that has given Ms. Boyle her talent. When I hear such raw beauty I don't doubt for a minute that the Creator of the Universe especially gave that talent to her. In this raw and unpackaged individual, we stare into the face of God's beauty when she sings and something unjust is made just. That is why I believe we are all inexplicably moved to tears. So forget the celebrity gossip. Forget trying to make the perfect career move. Do what you love to do to the best of your abilities. I ask myself, "what would I paint if no one else was ever going to see it?" Susan Boyle hit me somewhere deep. Our celebrity culture is suddenly exposed as irrelevant, distasteful, and complete false. I am left remembering that the real in us is the most beautiful, warts and all.

Susan Boyle

There are some things that I see or hear that bring tears to my eyes: the underdog rising to the top. I suspect Susan Boyle is exactly what the world needs...just as she is. Lisa Schwarzbaum writes for Popwatch: "I'm pondering why the experience of watching and listening to Ms. Boyle makes so many viewers cry, me among them. And I think I've got a simple answer, at least for me: In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging -- the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts -- the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms. Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace. She pierced my defenses. She reordered the measure of beauty. And I had no idea until tears sprang how desperately I need that corrective from time to time." Click here to hear Susan Boyle singing Les Miserables on Britain's Got Talent.