2015 – Year in Review

John Oyston

 

The year was notable mainly for two important family events in England:

My dad celebrated his 90^th birthday with a nice dinner at Bertie’s Banqueting Hall in Elland in January, and my nephew James married Jen at a country house hotel in Bury St Edmunds in September.

 

The wedding party

Grant, Dad, Kate, Meg, me

 

Both were very nice events. Dad had about 30 guests for his birthday and we had a nice meal. We had a bench installed in his neighbourhood park in his honour, which he seemed quite chuffed about. Grant was working for a family in Spain who wanted to visit London, so he arranged that trip for them and was then able to get up to Halifax for the Birthday party.

The wedding was also a great do. Kate and Grant joined us. Kate had been doing a tour of Greece, France and Ireland. Grant just flew over for the wedding and had to head straight back to University in Nova Scotia the next day. We stayed in a very nice renovated annex to an old pub. Bury St Edmunds was a nice place to wander around. The wedding was a completely non-religious and all the officials, and the photographer were female.

Meg and I spent some time in Holland, staying in Amsterdam and Rotterdam before dad’s “do”. In Amsterdam we stayed in a fascinating converted tram shed and appreciated the classic tourist Holland, with canals, bicycles, windmills and cheese. Rotterdam was quite different, a very modern city with a fancy new train station. We stayed in a Holiday Inn Express in an office tower between the station and a large but dated pedestrian shopping area. We were impressed by the new Markthall, a huge indoor market built in a tunnel formed by apartments. We did day trips to Harlem and Delft (by rented Vespa scooter, despite the cold!).

We rented a car to visit RAF Rheindahlen in Germany, where I lived from age 8 to 10. The actual camp is now closed and was barricaded, but we were able to see quarters identical to the one I lived in over the barriers. We searched out Im Fuchsbau, the pub in the woods where we used to go for lunch at weekends. They were still open, and still serving the paprika-roasted chicken I remember. Sadly, it is now served on a plate with a knife and fork, not in a basket to be pulled apart by hand.

Typical Amsterdam	Markthall in Rotterdam
Traditional chicken	Outside the “Fuchsbau”

 

In June, I did a short and quite luxurious hiking trip to Utah, staying in nice small hotels, being well fed, and doing fairly easy guided day hikes, some in stream beds and others in desert areas.

Stopped off in Colorado for a few days and did some hiking around Denver, including the Boulder Flatirons, with my American friend Deb.

Hike in creek	Zion State Park  – hiked down to the bottom!
Outlook Hike		Colorado

 

Deb visited us in the summer, and we showed her the sites of the city then took her out to help us plant trees at the farm. Things are going very well there. I finished putting panelling inside the new garage. The 4,000 trees and shrubs that were planted last spring are doing well, some already five feet high. Our farmer is helping me remove some invasive European Buckthorn trees. He has a backhoe that can pull whole trees out of the ground in a single action, shake the soil off them and dump them. It makes my efforts with a chain saw and herbicide look quite puny!

 

In September Meg and I did a big Norway trip. We flew via Copenhagen, where sadly we only had time for a Danish pastry at the airport, to Bergen. After a day there we boarded the Nordnorge, a Hurtigruten boat that takes passengers up the coast of Norway as it delivers mail and other materials to various towns and cities. This was an amazing seven-day trip. We were blessed with excellent weather and spent a lot of time on deck, watching the fjords pass by.

 

The major stops in Trondheim, Tromso, Honningsvag and Kirkenes were all interesting. In Tromso I rented a bicycle and cycled to Telegraph Bay for a brief dip in the Arctic Ocean, and in Honningsvag I hiked up the hill behind town for some amazing views of the bleak northern landscape. In Kirkenes we rented an ATV and rode to the Russian border. We then flew to Oslo where Meg did some shopping, and I detoured to Stavanger to do the famous Pulpit Rock hike, which ends at an exposed plateau 2,000 feet above a fjord.

 

 

On board NordNorge in Geirangerfjord	Nordnorge moored in Honningsvag
Lofoten Islands at dusk	Buildings in Trondheim

 

The kids seem to have had a good year. Grant finished off his year in Spain with a good command of the language, then headed back to Wolfville, Nova Scotia, to buckle down and complete his last term of a politics degree at Acadia University. He has just come home and is back to working at Starbucks in the Eaton Centre while he decides if he is going to start his own business or work for some charity that he believes in.

Kate has had a good year studying communications in Hamilton. She enjoys her courses and has been getting good marks; She is also in a nice house with a bunch of girls, many doing the same course, who she gets on with well. We see quite a lot of her as she likes to come home at weekends and work at a local hair salon.

My work does no change much. The hospital is still in limbo, waiting for the government response to an “Expert Panel” report on the hospitals of Scarborough. The report says both that the government should spend over $200 million on building a new Operating Room suite at my hospital in the short term, and that we should build one big new hospital for all of Scarborough, replacing three existing ones in the next 15 years. The provincial government has no money so I doubt that will happen in my lifetime.

On the other hand, I am quite enjoying my work as a Peer Assessor for the College. Typically, on those days Meg and I have a leisurely breakfast, she drives me for an hour or two to some small city, we have lunch in a bistro together, I visit a hospital, review an anesthesiologist’s charts for about three hours, talk to him or her for an hour, then have Meg pick me up, We do a brief wander around town, have dinner and head home after the rush hour. The College pays me for all my time, including the travel, picks up the meal tab, and pays mileage. It makes for a nice change of pace, usually one or two days per month.

It has been a stellar year in Canadian politics. We got rid of a couple of people I was pleased to see go and have replaced them with great substitutes.

The fat, loud, drunk, cocaine-using Rob Ford has been replaced as mayor by John Tory, a decent guy from an influential family with a law degree. He is working soberly to improve the city with better public transport, more bike lanes, and a welcome rather dull and businesslike approach to problems. Despite the success of the Pan-Am games in Toronto, he has decided not to get us involved in an Olympic bid.

And, at the Federal level, we have got rid of the arch-conservative, Steven Harper, and replaced him with the young and pretty Justin Trudeau. Harper put ideology ahead of data, muzzling scientists who were saying anything about the environment, supporting Albertan oil interests, strongly supporting Israel no matter what, and doing his damndest to circumvent any democratic controls. Justin is a true breath of fresh air.

He appointed a cabinet that included a former Afghanistan refugee (as Minister of Democratic Institutions), a Sikh (as Minister of Defence), and a First Nations woman as Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. They are all actually well qualified, not mere tokens. Trudeau was filmed showing one of his kids around Parliament on the day he was sworn in, pointing out dad’s (Pierre Trudeau) portrait, showing his office, then going to the Peace Tower to put up a new Maple Leaf flag.

He opened his swearing-in ceremony to the public and posted online the “mandate letters” that Canadian Prime Ministers traditionally send privately to each minister to explain what he expects. So far he is keeping his promises. He was at the Toronto airport when the first of our 25,000 Syrian refugees arrived, helping kids into their new winter jackets.

< Trudeau’s cabinet. V Helping refugee into ski jacket.

 

In the Fall, I took a writing course in “Creative Non-fiction” (telling true stories in an interesting way) which was fun and in testing, especially as the group was very diverse in their interests and stories. I mainly wrote about the evils of the tobacco industry, and now have a well-polished article I hope to get published.

 

Also, got inspired by “The Great British Bake Off”, a surprisingly popular show on American TV, and got into baking. My mince pies (to a Paul Hollywood recipe) seem to be a big hit this year!

Next year I am planning a father and son trip to Bolivia in May, and we are renting a cottage in the Lake District, just out outside Ambleside for a couple of weeks in September. My 60^th Birthday is coming up, and I am looking into having a birthday lunch at a pub in the Halifax are to celebrate.

I recently received a picture of myself exploring a lead mine when I was 21 (thanks, Ben). I looked so young! Then I realized that my son is now two years older than I was when the picture was taken. I can remember my dad saying he felt old when he celebrated his 50^th birthday, and now he will be 91 in January!

 

It makes me realize how important it is to enjoy the present!