As it happens, we missed a few days of our daily ravine rambles. We experienced a return to very cold temperatures accompanied by blustery winds and a fall of snow that was thick and ongoing. That's the kind of formula that makes for real discomfort.

In the sense that we no longer move as swiftly as we once did, generating enough energy and warmth to pay little mind to the cold, wind and presence of falling snow. And under a certain temperature, our little dogs require boots so they are able to trot along in comfort. Without boots we have to pick them up, warm their little paws, then put them down for a short length of trail before picking them up again.

So while boots are required, it's difficult to put them on our older dog who has entered her 20th year, and has little patience for that ritual. Her slower progress, hampered by her blindness and our need to gently guide her along the trails, along with my own slower gait now that I'm 75 and not as springy as I once was, makes for some unpleasantness if we venture out in truly inclement weather which once was never a hindrance to us.

When we were out yesterday the temperature was just on the cusp minus-6-degrees Celsius, of the need of boots for Button and Riley, requiring that we pick them up several times, but not through the entire hour-and-a-half jaunt. Holding Riley while struggling uphill is no longer a picnic for me, so it does detract from our enjoyment.

I was dispensing peanuts in the usual cache places, though we saw few squirrels out, they sensibly enough having decided to bed down cosily in their nests to wait out the weather. What we heard was noisome crows congregating above us, and if I turned to look, I knew they were watching us, being long aware of all those same cache spots that the squirrels are familiar with. I don't begrudge them peanuts at all, they too have to survive the winter.

At one point, I watched as a crow, triumphantly holding a peanut, cleared off a patch of snow from the branch it was standing on so he could pound the peanut shell and unleash the nuts within. Crows are quite intellectually gifted, I've often seen this kind of manoeuvre on their part.

We haven't seen Stumpy - the little male squirrel whom we've fed at close range over the years, he representing the first and boldest little fellow to approach us directly for peanuts - for a little while. We know him to be male having watched him once, the last in a line of squirrels hot in pursuit of a little female.

We did, however, see Stumpette, another little tailless squirrel, although her tail is slightly more than a stump, albeit similar to Stumpy's. Oddly enough Stumpette too approaches us boldly and directly although lacking the extreme confidence that Stumpy exhibits with us. By now, having fed the squirrels in the ravine for such a long period of time, other, normal black squirrels have taken to approaching us, as do some of the grey squirrels.

And while the chipmunks, when they're not hibernating, are also self-confident and they too will confront us for peanuts, stuffing them into their pouches and demanding more. Not so the red squirrels who, like the chipmunks move at lightning speed. They await the deposit of the peanuts in the usual cache places, no trust where they're concerned, and surely that represents a boost to their longevity.

So, what to prepare for Tuesday's non-meat dinner? A quiche, a pasta-cheese dish, a frittata? How about cheese blintzes, since ricotta had been on sale when last we shopped, and there was a container of it in the refrigerator? Good enough.

I'd thought of adding blueberries to the cheese mixture, then recalled there was leftover blueberry pie from Friday's dessert, so ruled that out; we'd have the pie this evening instead of the usual fresh fruit. The blueberries are wild, from British Columbia, albeit frozen, so they'll do well enough, even in the form of a fruit pie. Besides which, we'll have a fresh vegetable salad before the blintzes, to round out the meal.

First came the ingredients for the blintzes; butter, half-cup flour, dash of salt, two eggs, and a half-cup milk. It's quick work to prepare and to cook the blintzes, one side only, flip them onto a clean waiting tea towel, and then mix together the filling: a dollop of melted butter, egg yolk, honey, cinnamon, and of course the ricotta.

The waiting, cooled blintzes are filled, folded in half, then placed within a platter, covered with plastic wrap and refrigerated, ready to be hauled out at dinner time, both sides to be gently browned in butter, and served with sour cream.

Small ones for me, large for him.

When the weather is such that you struggle to keep warm, what better way than to simmer a good, hearty soup for hours to warm your interior at dinnertime? Sundays used to be dedicated to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but now people who are aware of the need to fuel themselves with an eye to health, turn elsewhere for their dinner menus. Yesterday was one of those icily blustery days, so cold and windy that even triple-glazed windows emitted gusts of chill.

Overnight Saturday I had put to soaking a mixture of lima beans, lentils, chick peas and white peas. Early Sunday afternoon I began assembling the constituents of a soul-satisfying soup for dinner, starting with a jalapeno pepper, olive oil, garlic cloves, onion, and sauteed them briefly before dumping the well-soaked bean mixture over them, adding three chopped tomatoes, tomato puree, boiling water, bay leaf, a bouillon cube and a dash of salt. That simmered for several hours, nicely infusing the house with a delectable fragrance.

I stirred the soup on the odd occasion I passed by the stove, inhaling the promise of a hot, flavourful dinner. Shortly before serving time I added chopped zucchini and chopped celery, stirred gently, sprinkled thyme generously over the top, and replaced the cover, letting it simmer again until finished.

That, accompanied (for me by a small fresh vegetable salad, for him an egg-salad sandwich - chopped Vidalia onion and turmeric included) and finished off with fresh raspberries accompanied by ginger cookies I'd baked a few days earlier, concluded Sunday dinner.

An undoubted winner.

It is amazing how much food two people are capable of consuming. Two people of modest height and equally modest girth. Two physically active people, but aged over three-score-and-ten. I scan the total of our weekly shopping, contained in three fairly large black plastic baskets for conveyance, and just wonder at the fact that we eat it all.

Oh, of course we share our home with two very small dogs. Their food intake is slight in comparison to ours, needless to say.

We share the shopping, because it is a pleasure, not quite a chore, both of us making careful selection of what we feel we will need to sustain us throughout the course of a week, and what can be used to make nutritious, good-tasting meals. When we get home with our shopping, I usually look over the receipt to ensure there have been no errors, and there rarely are, but for those on occasion for which whoever feeds the input into the computer system errs with.

We're blessed, in Canada, with a wide variety of foods; whole foods is what we mostly focus on. And it is those whole foods that are mainly reflected in our receipt for items purchased. We are able to make a wide array of fresh food choices because this country imports fruits and vegetables that are in season in other countries, giving us more than ample choice throughout the year, when our own growing season is in winter abeyance.

Another thing about our food availability; it is so relatively inexpensive. If consumers veer away from pre-prepared and convenience foods in favour of whole foods, they eat better, more healthfully and pay substantially less for their nutritional needs.

We are ourselves not vegetarian, although we do make an effort to refrain from eating red meat; we may do so once or twice a week, no more. We look to poultry and fish and cheeses for our main sources of protein, supplemented by eggs, beans and rice.

And on looking over that food shopping receipt it is striking just how much of our purchases are represented by fresh fruits and vegetables. This past week's is an example; the baskets contain, among other things, green leaf lettuce, mandarins, navel oranges (all from the American south) cauliflower, pineapple (Costa Rica), bananas, carrots, green beans, yellow onions, green, yellow, orange and red bell peppers, white button mushrooms, yellow potatoes, sugar snap peas, snow peas (Guatemala), zucchini, asparagus, cantaloupe, tomatoes, raspberries, avocados, red grapes, garlic (China).

There seems little logical reason in Canada why people cannot eat well if they exercise their options to do so; it is less costly and certainly wholesome. We bought coffee cream, Earl Grey tea, mozzarella cheese, garlic-onion bagels, omega 3 eggs, whiting fish, provolone cheese, orange juice and cranberry juice, cream cheese, lean ground beef and lean ground pork, ricotta cheese and chicken breasts.

Next week our choices will be slightly different in the non-vegetable-fruits category, but the fruits and vegetable choices remain fairly uniform. And to us, most satisfactory.

The somewhat good news is that the second snowstorm that was predicted by Environment Canada to take up from the first that struck at mid-day yesterday, did not bring its disgruntled presence to reality. The forecast was for the second in this series of two to make its presence around midnight, and to peter out around noon the following day, today. We awoke to the bright presence of yesterday's heavy snowfall muffling the landscape, but no new burden. Nicely bypassed.

Mind, the original is still heavy enough to make walking and driving difficult if not hazardous. Because of the quality of the snow the ice beneath - which had sheathed the landscape as a result of previous snows and intermittent melt periods - became even more slick. And by mid-afternoon yesterday, municipal and provincial police were warning motorists of the risks inherent in driving in these circumstances, which included white-out conditions. Over one hundred accidents had already been recorded.

The snow was tumbling down so thickly and so speedily that from the time we parked our car in the lot at our local supermarket to the time when we emerged with full shopping baskets, our car resembled a humped white ghost of considerable proportions. Brushing the snow off before driving away took its time, with the gale howling relentlessly during the process.

When we had earlier gone out for our daily ramble with our little dogs, the wind was whipping up a storm of ferocious activity, and before we emerged from our walk, which now takes us about an hour and a half each day on a roundabout circuit, the snow had begun falling heavily, and the wind was delighted with this opportunity to fill in every nook and cranny in the woods, and to cover us liberally with snow, so we resembled walking snowmen.

So where does the time go? I would venture to repeat, 'never a dull moment'. It has been well over fifteen years since retirement. Isn't the concern rampant that, once having retired, time will drag and there won't be enough opportunity to fill it all in satisfactorily, to ensure we're constantly challenged physically and mentally so we can remain alert and vital?

Yet it has been and continues to be our experience in these years that there never seems to be enough time to get everything done that we anticipate, that we involve ourselves with. Each day has its own challenges and we struggle to meet them with the time allotted in the discrete 24-hour-period. The seasons change bringing with them alternate strategies to take advantage of the time we have to slot everything into.

Simply maintaining ourselves, the amount of cooking, baking, cleaning and household repairs required to meet our needs is time-consuming. There are those quotidian routines like walks in the woodlands close by our home that imbue life with a further appreciation of our place in nature that during the course of a working life are confined to week-ends, when they can be squeezed in.

Food shopping and preparation, looking after two little animal dependents, supporting the needs of extended family, involving ourselves in interests pertaining to art and culture, all take significant bites out of the time given for each day's concerns. The retirement years are, famously, the "golden years", those times of rest and relaxation. When travel and gardening take precedence over early waking hours and the rush routine.

Rest and relaxation also up there in the consumption of time, but vaguely and somewhat thinly allotted. Necessary, however, and when during the day the afternoon beckons for a rest, it is time to regroup, to think, to compose a poem, to read the daily newspapers, to speak with a grandchild over the telephone and occasionally, remotely, help with their homework.

There goes the time.

A long-time neighbour of ours, who is an outstanding example of what can happen to the human form when inadequate care is taken to the things that matter, like proper nutrition in adequate amounts, and a sedentary lifestyle resulting in morbidly gross obesity, emailed me a few photographs she had taken of a tiny red squirrel that has taken to visiting her property.

She has a deep appreciation of nature, although she is confined to viewing it, unable to immerse herself in it physically. For the past several years she has put out peanuts around her porch, for visiting squirrels, and a few black squirrels have set up domestic shop because of the reliability of their food supply.

Our neighbour has three beloved cats, one of which is never out without being securely tethered, the other two permitted to roam where they will. It is the Maine Coon cat that she takes such close care of, the other two are not thoroughbreds.

The Maine Coon, in fact, somewhat resembles our neighbour, since its long, fluffy haircoat makes it look very spheroid, as is our neighbour; a perfect sphere. The cat, needless to say, weighs nothing like near what our neighbour does; hold down its hair and it would have a perfect physical conformation.

Our neighbour, on the other hand, is just as she appears, fully rounded, weighing somewhat over 300 pounds, I'd guess about 340. She is of modest height, around 5'-2", and absolutely immodest girth. She is a victim of her flesh, it encompasses her enormously, rendering her incapable of walking any distance - say the several hundred yards it would take to reach the communal mailbox.

She is a pretty woman, which is to say her face is very attractive, and she is intelligent enough with an active curiosity of everything surrounding her. But she lives a life of strict routine imposed upon her by that enormous weight, confining her to a very limited number of activities and spheres.

A victim of a familial environment that accustomed her to this way of life, and of her robust appetite. A poster-child for warnings of the end results of excess.

The high school experience has most certainly changed since the time I was a teenager, some 60 years ago. Partially explained by the fact that I was enrolled in a commercial school, and our granddaughter is obtaining her secondary education in an academic stream, leading to university.

She is learning things that would have been quite beyond my intellectual capacity, I'm certain, in science and mathematics, had I been exposed to them all those years ago. My husband, on the other hand, did attend a high school that prepared its students for university entrance, so he was exposed to complex math and geometry and Latin and the classics. Still, it amazes me that Grade Ten youngsters are given assignments that are so different than what I can recall having experienced so many years ago.

At that time, for example, there would never have been a focus in Canadian history on the immigration aspect of the population. Her history class's latest assignment is to delve thoughtfully into the entire immigration experience, and to compose a series of letters from someone who decided to emigrate from their country of origin to another country, halfway across the Globe.

Our granddaughter has sought my help, as she often does, when she has to compose something lengthy and requiring some details of which she has no familiarity. We discuss these matters and out of our discussion comes a minuscule but coherent look at what transpired in other peoples' experience which we become familiar with at a remove.

She's well on her way to absorbing that experience, not with any depth, but with some level of awareness of the difficulties involved, to produce a useful and imaginatively personalized piece of historical fiction, however brief.

An item in yesterday's news.... Someone in this area has identified a new market niche, and is taking advantage of it, inviting pet owners to consider the services she is offering. A more personalized euthanasia for one's pet in its declining years. This veterinarian will come to your home to perform the last rites of life-withdrawal from a family companion considered to be beyond its years of optimum health and activity.

In the service of which the human owners of the companion animal will not have to remove themselves from the comfort of their home, and the pet itself will be in familiar surroundings, with those whom it cares most deeply about present and accounted for. This is said to be the first such service of its kind offered in Canada although evidently it is available in some places in the United States.

The bells and whistles that one can choose to accompany the ritual of end-of-life decision-making can be approached with flowers and the lighting of candles and one's choice of musical background. This solemnizing and ritualization of the farewell is thought to be able to have a calming effect on the participants.

Testimonials in the article describe one person deciding the end must be nigh for the family pet because it could no longer fulfill the usual half-kilometre walk in the woods behind the home. Another claimed it was clear the pet had to be "given up" after a last walk, and the assembling of the family to witness the expiration of their pet.

Why should this be so? Our little female Pomeranian-Poodle is now into her twentieth year, and although she has lost most of her sight and hearing, she remains interested in life. She has forgotten many things, and we must be alert to her needs, but she has a robust appetite where in her prime she did not, and although she cannot walk as far as she used to, with careful guidance and patience she does fairly well.

Above all, from our long familiarity with her we know when she is expressing pleasure, and she does fairly often. We can see when she is comfortable and content, and this is often enough to assure us that she finds life more than tolerable.

Animals are not disposable, dependent on when we feel we've tolerated enough of their feeble presence when they are old and tired.

There, it's done. Finished. Finally completed. Reason it took so long was not procrastination, but the devilish details. Lots of planning design went into the transformation from a slightly feminine look to a definitely more masculine one, placing the finished result into the Victorian era.

It began in the winter months, and was put on suspension when, during the spring and summer months other, more pressing issues dealing with retrofitting our exterior windows, not merely re-decorating, presented themselves as an emergency situation, and to those issues was attention then given.

The millwork related to the powder room make-over was time-consuming, as was its installation, but nowhere near as time-wearying as the painting of it turned out to be. Putting up the wallpaper was a brief affair, and represented the penultimate touch.

Figuring out what should appear on the walls and still leave some unoccupied spaces to enjoy the mural-like wallpaper was another matter, entirely. In the end, it all worked out satisfactorily.

Although the finished product does have a masculine look, I've managed to slip in a bit of a feminizing whimsy, regardless.

Last night was entertainment night for us. Saturday evening, old habits are hard to break. It's been many years since we've been retired, but Saturday-night entertainment has become a sticky routine. We start off by together making our pizza; me rolling out the dough, spreading tomato paste, basil, pizza spice, grating the mozzarrella cheese, and he chopping up the red, yellow, orange, green bell peppers, the mushrooms, the tomato.

And he assembling it all, picturesquely atop the prepared crust and tomato-paste/cheese. Oh, he does sprinkle over half of the pizza, his choice of pepperoni. And then into the oven with it, to bake until the crust is - well - crusty, the toppings melted and browned. During which process the house swoons with the irresistible fragrance of pizza. When it's ready to be devoured, we seat ourselves for our feast.

Washed down with wine for him, tea for me. And finished with bunches of red seedless grapes. I try to select those grapes that are hard, small and sweet, and sometimes succeed, wholly dependent on what the supermarket has on offer. After which we wash up the clutter and settle ourselves down to view a film. We've no longer any television reception, but the old set is useful as a screening device.

Last night the choice was The King's Speech, which had been sent to us as a birthday gift (our birthdays are roughly a month apart), along with the first series of Downton Abbey, from our oldest child (at 52 years of age, hardly a child, but still our child). For some odd reason, we chose to view Downton Abbey first, segment by segment, and having enjoyed them all, turned to the piece de resistance.

Except that's not what it turned out to be, for us. The Academy award winning film, having captured 'best picture' status, hugely disappointed us. True the splendour of the visuals was excellent, the interiors of the film in their sumptuous gorgeousness voluptuous, but the flair, drama and a sense of deep involvement for the viewer were absent.

Entirely too weak a screenplay, so heavily reliant on an empty drama of a monarch-to-be suffering agonies of self-uncertainty, with not the slightest hint of intelligence and common sense lurking in one's apprehension about a man entirely consumed with his inherited royal status. His miserable uncertainty and self-awareness absent any astute intelligence was wearying.

We were in total agreement; the sole actor of note was Geoffrey Rush, as a totally unaffected, sympathetic and resourceful character whom one could admire with the aplomb with which the role was carried by this man. The affected agonies of Colin Firth were sad to behold for their absence of balance. Helena Bonham Carter was as cloyingly fey and all-knowing as usual.

This was thin gruel for a film, and gruellingly boring to watch. An entirely flaccid - far less affective view into a socially-conflicted society than Downton Abbey, and not to be compared with The Remains of the Day with its real dramas and tensions and superior acting. Downton Abbey may be a pot-boiler with its anachronistic but entirely human diorama of life in Britain at the time, but it is also absorbing.

The King's Speech has, by comparison, little to boast of as a piece of entertainment, despite all the public relations hyperbole, and the resulting coronation of its presentation at the Academy Awards. It's amazing how it never fails to fascinate the public to be exposed to the visuals of inherited royalty, entitled aristocracies, and the population that sustains those archaic institutions of privilege.

If you became so accustomed through tradition, custom or simply habit, to eating the same things over and over again, it seems reasonable that it would become boring, and you'd yearn for something different. And you'd be wrong. At least by our experience. And that of any ethnic group that traditionally prepares dishes that are familiar by custom and social acceptance.

Take, for example, us. As long as I can recall, in most Jewish households it is customary for a Friday night dinner to consist of chicken soup and rice, potato or noodle pudding as an accompaniment to chicken. Usually, feeding a family meant roasting a large chicken. Because there is now just two of us left at home, we simply have chicken breast, roasted. And a vegetable, say steamed cauliflower, and mushrooms done with the chicken.

The only real variable is the dessert prepared week after week; chocolate cake, blueberry or apple pie, Madeleine-cupcakes, cheesecake, raisin pie - just about anything that might seem complementary to the meal and the end of the week, greeting the welcoming week-end.

No, it doesn't become a bore. When the aroma of soup cooking on the stove top wafts through the house, it's comforting and anticipatory. Even our little dogs know what that means; they get to eat the chicken leg and thigh used in the soup throughout the week, topping their kibble.

It's that time of year again. In British Columbia the sun is shining and fruit trees are in blossom. In Ottawa the sun is also shining, though the sky is covered with white billowy clouds in places, and milder weather is on the horizon; no fruit trees will bloom here yet for months to come. But municipal crews are out on the Ottawa River, cutting keys in the ice to ensure that spring flooding is kept to a minimum - when it begins.

An ice control boom is installed in the late fall at Strathcona Rapids to slow the surface flow, promote an ice cover, and limit the volume of ice (slush), anchored ice and ice dams in the river. The ice control boom increases the efficiency of ice breaking and clearing operations in February and March.

Cutting keys

Starting above Rideau Falls, saws are used to cut keys to remove large pieces of ice along portions of the river.

Ice breaking operations

Charges (explosives) and amphibious excavating equipment are used in various spots along the river to break ice apart to create open water. Ice breaking operations continue daily until the river's flow is stabilized.

And here, in our little geographic corner of the Ottawa Valley, part of the City of Ottawa, but somewhat removed, we can almost smell the teasing fragrance of spring at times. Today is also quite windy, so that will add some chill to the otherwise-mild temperatures. Which will also assist the snowpack to begin its long, inexorable melt.

Ambling through the woodland ravine adjacent our street it's clear, as is always the case at this transitional time of year, that neighbourhood dogs have abandoned their civility, and dog owners their social responsibilities, leaving the trails littered with dark piles of droppings. At this time of year we keep our eyes on alert and do the well-exercised spring side-step.

The squirrel population is far more in evidence now, veritable hordes of them streaming out of the trees to the cache places they know peanuts will be left for them. During the winter months they're less likely to be seen in their numbers, although on our round-trips we can see that the peanuts we've laid out have always been discreetly collected.

The ice on the streambed in the bottom reaches of the ravine has rotted, and the stream itself quickly moving. Where a light layer of fresh snow has fallen on what is left of the stream's ice, we can see the square footprints of ducks beginning their spring migration, stopping briefly in the urban forest, swooping down to the stream.

It is sad beyond words that the human condition is so flawed for so many people that they become neurotically dissatisfied with what life offers them. Their own genetic endowments are found to be faulty, from the inheritance of hair colour and texture to the shape of their bodies. Rarely do people regret that they did not inherit greater intelligence; it is the external, the surface that seems to matter so much.

They reject and find inadequate their genetic endowments, and do everything they can to alter what they can so they can project a physical appearance more approximating in their judgement, what is desirable. In the same token, those born with chronic physical impairment are more likely to accept themselves, while those around them do not, and make targets of them.

Suicidal escapes from reality afflict both those who are dissatisfied with themselves, as well as those plagued with mental illness, and who can find no inner peace, and those whom others afflict with their dislike or disgust at their apparent physical deformities or intellectual backwardness. Human nature is an imperfect instrument too prone to emotional confusion and rejection.

Least understandable is those who are born with beauty and talent, and for whom hard work and good luck bring them fame and fortune. While they revel for a while in their celebrity, and preen and parade themselves before their admirers they become all too readily bored with the level of their success and look for other avenues to give them the highs they crave.

In order to determine how addictive a street drug is, researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland train a rat to press a bar until it gets a shot of the drug. The harder the animal is willing to work to press the bar, the more addictive the drug. Cocaine, almost all other illegal drugs, and even nondrug addictions such as running make the pleasure-giving neurotransmitter dopamine more active in the brain. Dopamine is called the reward transmitter, because when we accomplish something - run a race and win - our brain triggers its release. Though exhausted, we get a surge of energy, exciting pleasure, and confidence and even raise our hands and run a victory lap. The losers, on the other hand, who get no such dopamine surge, immediately run out of energy, collapse at the finish line, and feel awful about themselves. By hijacking our dopamine system, addictive substances give us pleasure without having to work for it. Norman Doige, M.D.

Popular public figures who derive their celebrity from the field of entertainment are notorious for becoming addicted to alcohol and recreational drugs, to a degree that they deliberately, albeit helplessly, endanger their lives. One star in the firmament of popular entertainment after another, of immense talent and tragic self-rejection, makes headline news after losing their lives to their own sense of insecurity and misery.

They've achieved everything they set out to do, and their vast audience cherished their talents and made them wealthy, yet this is not satisfying enough for them to rationally rest on their laurels. They end up spurning normalcy, and in the end, court death.

There seems to be no end of them, those truly irritating, intrusive, maddening telephone calls that come in at all times of the day, and mostly at the most inconvenient of times. These intrusions are not only by way of telephone, but also through email communications and by posted mail as well, although the most frequent are made through telephone contact.

We can always tell when it's one of those calls, because there's a pause of some duration from the time we respond to the time the other end does, and it's at that point that we should hang up, but we don't, just in case it's a call from someone we know, needing to make contact. Which is likely what these nuisance callers depend on; the uncertainty factor.

Invariably, it's a marketing call of one sort or another, extolling the virtues of some service we have absolutely no interest in. Occasionally it's a polling call, and generally revolving around marketing as well. We hate to be impolite to these perfect strangers attempting to probe our defences, but sometimes do resort to a brusque "not interested", feeling somewhat badly afterward about some poor soul just trying to earn a living.

Many, the great preponderence of those calls are from offshore sources, whose verbal English is distinguished by accents making them almost intelligible. They always, remarkably, introduce themselves with distinctly and presumably, comforting North American common given names.

On the other hand, a remarkable proportion of those calls purport to represent some well-known entity upon whom we depend for service, offering to solve truly vexing problems for us. For example: Under the guise of calling from Microsoft, some unscrupulous hordes of callers try to convince those they prey upon that it has been brought to their attention that there are outstanding performance problems with one's computer, and they have been tasked with solving the problem. Just divulge vital information, inviting the caller into your computer, and to complete the process whereby all their problems will be solved, send funding. Which can end up being substantial.

And to which some people evidently trustingly respond. Mostly, it would seem, the elderly who are, it seems, the most likely target falling victim to these schemes to bilk them out of their bank savings. These numerous daily calls become irritating to the point of utter frustration. My husband responded to the last one of the day yesterday evening by speaking gibberish to the confused caller who quickly hung up the line.

They're not called fraud artists for nothing; their creative genius revolves around relieving people of money, and they're amazing successful at it.

For men have ever a likerous appetite
On lower thing to perform their delight
than on their wives, be they never so fair,
Nor never so true, nor so debonair,
Flesh is so newfangel, with mischance,
That we can in no thing have plesaunce
That tendeth unto virtue any while. Chaucer

Love creates a generous state of mind. Because love allows us to experience as pleasurable situations or physical features that we otherwise might not, it also allows us to unlearn negative associations, another plastic phenomenon.
The science of unlearning is a very new one. Because plasticity is competitive, when a person develops a neural network, it becomes efficient and self-sustaining and, like a habit, hard to unlearn.
Falling in love for the first time also means entering a new developmental stage and demands a massive amount of unlearning. When people commit to each other, they must radically alter their existing and often selfish intentions and modify all other attachments, in order to integrate the new person in their lives. Life now involves ongoing cooperation that requires a plastic reorganization of the brain centers that deal with emotions, sexuality, and the self. Millions of neural networks have to be obliterated and replaced with new ones - one reason that falling in love feels, for so many people, like a loss of identity. Falling in love may also mean falling out of love with a past love; this too requires unlearning at a neural level. Norman Doidge, M.D.

Now what could artless Jeanie do?
She had nae will to say him na:
At length she blushed a sweet consent,
And love was eye between them twa. Robert Burns

A man's heart is broken by his first love when his engagement breaks off. He looks at many women, but each pales in comparison to the fiancee he came to believe was his one true love and whose image haunts him. He cannot unlearn the pattern of attraction to that first love.

Or a woman married for twenty years becomes a young window and refuses to date. she cannot imagine she will ever fall in love again, and the idea of "replacing" her husband offends her. Years pass, and her friends tell her it is time to move on, to no avail. Norman Doidge, M.D. The Brain That changes Itself

But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, chaos is come again. Shakespeare

Love, all the hours are long
that once so fleetly flew;
I am bereft of song
Being bereft of you.
but when you come again
How nimbly time will run
To such a jocund strain,
For you and song are one. Clinton Scollard

A lifetime of habit and a neurotic stubbornness add up to an existential dilemma when old age creeps inexorably into the picture. And the picture is this: our little poodle now in her 20th year is resistant to adapting to her frailties and limitations and adopt alternate strategies for comfort and self-reliance.

She will sleep and feel comfortable only where she has been accustomed in the past to sleeping and being comfortable. In the past she was fully capable of herself deciding when she would leap to the places she preferred, and finally relax fully and fall asleep. She is no longer capable of leaping anywhere; although she does retain the ability to leap down, not upward. Even that is fraught with difficulties since she can no longer see and must depend on her faltering memory to inform her where it is safe to leap down. Because she has had so many falls, having lost her spatial memory of what was once so familiar and sight-aided, we have taken to placing restraints in front of the two places she prefers to sleep upon, the family room sofa and the loveseat in our bedroom; the former during the day, the latter at night.

We have also had to barricade the stairs with small swinging doors to keep her from falling headlong down them, as she has done in the past, before those doors were erected. At night a temporary 'gate' has been placed at our bedroom door leading to the hall that leads inevitably to the second-floor stairway.

Left to her own devices, unable to leap to her desired resting place, she paces restlessly, without stopping for anything. She will pace this way all through the first floor of the house, from room to room, occasionally stumbling into immovable objects,sometimes actually crashing her head against door jambs, table legs, and becoming confused and 'stuck' into small corners, forgetting how to extricate herself until finally she manages to back off. She also has developed a tendency to circle back into those corners before finally emerging.

When she has paced for what we feel have been more than sufficient hours, we simply pick her up and place her on the sofa downstairs where she finally relaxes, settles down and falls to sleep.

Earlier this week, my husband, whose extended prostate causes him to get up frequently during the night to the bathroom, was groggy enough that he headed for the doorway to the hall rather than the doorway to the en suite bathroom, fell over the temporary gate and crashed to the floor. In the process bruising his left upper thigh, and straining his shoulder.

At my insistence we have now permanently removed that gate as redundant. And his shoulder is gradually healing.

A perfect winter morning, this was, with the sun pouring its liquid gold into the house, flaming it with light. Just as well, since when we trotted downstairs to prepare breakfast it was minus-16-degrees Celsius, with a biting wind. Sufficiently frigid to ensure that our two little dogs would spend an absolute minimum of time out of doors in the backyard, to relieve themselves.

And then, they, like us, looked forward to a warming breakfast to banish the winter chill. And what better way to celebrate, in our modest household, Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee than to use a recipe for drop scones that she herself had sent along as a gift from her kitchen (!) to then-U.S.President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960.

I'd always thought of scones as biscuits which one split open while warm to lather with butter and preserves, for afternoon tea. But these are clearly hotcakes or pancakes, suitable for a winter's breakfast.

Button and Riley were very patient while I went about preparing them. They're quite able to distinguish what's on the menu at any given time and figure, correctly as it happens, that they'll be served little tidbits of whatever it is we're having, once they've finished their own meals.

The recipe called for 2 eggs, 1/4 c.caster sugar (I just whizzed ordinary granulated sugar in a grinder until it was finely textured), 1-1/2 cups milk, 3 cups flour, 3 tsp.cream of tartar, 2 tsp. baking soda, and 2 tbsp.melted butter. Of course that's far too much for two people to consume for a breakfast sitting, so I cut the recipe to a third, but kept the eggs intact, as indeed a note to the president from the Queen pointed out: "Though the quantities are for 16 people, when there are fewer, I generally put in less flour and milk but use the other ingredients as stated...."

I would, on another occasion, put in less sugar, and perhaps think of adding flavouring, such as vanilla extract. Otherwise, the resulting flapjacks, hotcakes, pancakes, scones, whatever one wishes to name them, were quite, quite good.

Humour, if not downright hilarity, is important to our lives. Levity leavens the burden of the human condition. Science has pointed out how vital it is that we exercise our sense of humour, to lighten moods and circumstances, to give us breathing space between episodes of difficult times, to make us appear to our peers as moderate, engaging and pleasant to be around.

Since we are, as a species, given to 'being around' others as a genetic inheritance reflecting in part survival techniques, humour is a way we can share ourselves.



We need to laugh at ourselves and the human condition. Sometimes gently, sometimes pointedly with a view to deflating received wisdom and urban legend alike. Children do it naturally, seeing the absurdity and contradictions in life through their clear, unsophisticated eyes. It is why they sometimes ask the most intriguing questions revealing the depths of social shibboleths for the empty veneer they represent.

Of course children are also thrilled with the deliberate pricking of social prohibitions. The forbidden has its own allure, and to allude to it within the safety of a humorous context provides a special sense of one's own daring and cleverness. For children nothing seems as useful a target as normal bodily functions, particularly the excretion of food by-product via the bowels.

The giggles elicited in children with the use of scatological humour reveals their rejection of the forbidden in human discourse and the underlying social courtesies they recognize no need of supporting. As they become older, that gravitates toward other forbidden subjects, most notably those of a sexual nature, as they begin to explore the mysteries of hormonal changes in themselves, and join the ranks of the physically mature.

The older we become the more need there is of laughter, however wry and ironic it may be. Humour helps us to deal with situations that might otherwise seem impossible to fathom, let alone live with. Certain ethnic groups gravitate toward a typical kind of humour and this seems most pronounced in Jews. One might feel abhorrence that a Jew could write a black humour-tinged book about the Holocaust, but the reason is obvious enough; it represents a way of dealing with the spectacularly incomprehensible.

There is also an instant recognition among Jews about a particular type of self-disparaging humour that excludes those who have never lived the life of a Jew. With an underlying tinge of melancholy, a wish to belong, yet a defiance in clinging to an ancient heritage, even exclusive of religion, with a shared set of values and traditions and a history of unrelenting rejection by the world's other ethnicities and religions.

Only a Jew, for example, could fully and immediately catch the yearning absurdity of David Bader's little Haiku:

Look, Muffy! I've found
the most splendid tchotchka for
our Hanukkah bush.