Home Thoughts From Abroad

As we packed up our home to head to Asia we were faced with the question of  a suitable home for our cat Frank, who with his near human personality, had firmly enthroned himself in our living room, and just as firmly established a place in our hearts.

When Jon married Nicole our family welcomed not only a dear daughter-in-law but also her cat, Frank. We took “temporary custody” of Frank when Jon and Nic moved down to the States and no longer had room for both Frank and Jon’s lumpy cat Daisy. If you’ve met Daisy, you know we got the better end of that deal. Unfortunately, a couple of years later we also had plans to move, and we agonized over what to do with Frank.

I was reminded of  a cat that we had for a number of years during my childhood.  His name was Pussyfoot John (Don’t ask; I have no idea what that name was about).  Although he was a family cat, everybody knew of the special bond that existed between Dad and Pussyfoot John.  Dad was always an early riser and every morning would fry himself eggs for breakfast.  Dad ate the yolk and the cat ate the whites.  If Dad were ever tempted to sleep in even an extra few minutes, that cat was on his bed batting him around the face to get up and make him breakfast.

From this came the devious plan to ask dad to “babysit” Frank for awhile.  They have become fast friends and, even though I think that Frank actually runs the place, I know that he is great companion for Dad.  And, after all, if you are going to take a walk around the property, it is nice to have company. We owe this picture to my niece, Jenelle, who had this lovely picture posted on Facebook. I thank her for this touching photograph which has brought back some very fond memories.

My flight from Humberside Airport to Schlipol in Amsterdam was very brief, but I had a six hour wait before my next flight to KL. What do you do with six hours in Amsterdam? No, it is not a trick question, but it would make a good conversation starter. The last time I passed through Amsterdam was with the teaching team I travelled to Malawi with. Most of them went on a tour of the Red Light District. I went to the Van Gogh Museum. I assure you, I had the more pleasurable experience.

This time I went to the Reichs Museum. It had been years since I had seen it last, and I read that there were a couple of Vermeer’s from the States on loan that I hadn’t seen before. I paid an extra five euros for the audio tour, and it was well worth the coin. The narrator was Jeroen Krabbe, a veteran European character actor (The Fugitive, Transporter 3), whose brother is an artist and who clearly loved the Dutch Masters. His insights were charming and valuable. Did you know that the red in Rembrandt’s painting was derived from crushed lice only found on a certain cactus? Or that Vermeer used real lapis lazuli for his blue? That combined with the thin cracks caused by aging catches the light causing the tablecloth in the picture above to appear almost iridescent.

The Dutch were indeed masterful painters, and represented a huge leap forward from the sterile canvasses of the Medieval Age. In some of their techniques they presaged the work of the Impressionists with their innovative layering and brush techniques and their brilliant use of light. With time at a premium I could only catch the main attractions of the museum, but it was well worth the effort to get into town, and time spent with Rembrandt is never a waste. What a student of human character he was! And Vermeer, such serenity of soul; it does one good just to get lost in his inner spaces.

The streets of Amsterdam were crowded with pedestrians, trams and the ubitquous bicycles. As with most European towns, cars were mercifully almost completely absent. I had a pleasant late lunch (art comes before food with me) overlooking the square and caught the fast train back to Schlipol with plenty of time to spare. I sat beside two pleasant British women who lived in the Yorkshire Dales, of all places! The plane was quiet, and I got some much needed rest. Pam had prepared the closest thing to a turkey dinner that can be managed in this country, and it was good to get back to Malaysia.

What has always amazed me about England is that in a country no bigger than British Columbia, with a population of 70 million people, there can be places in the heart of the country where there is virtually no one around. On my last day in England I excused myself and took off for a drive into the Yorkshire Dales, a national park around two and a half hours from where my sister lives in Lincolnshire.

The drive was nothing short of wondrous: beautiful scenery on a bright, sunny day with relatively little traffic. I drove through little towns with tiny pubs and humpbacked bridges, along narrow roads with stone walls through rolling brown and green hills dotted with sheep. And it was like that for hours! It was utterly charming and delightful, a wonderful tonic for the soul.

Coming home was a little less delightful. I made the mistake of thinking I could get home more quickly on the M1. Major mistake. It was a three lane parking lot, nothing more. I got off at the very next exit, which fortunately was only three miles down the road and headed for the back roads again. Rosey had loaned me a decent road atlas and I wove my way home on some very pleasant country roads with no trouble at all.

At the end of the road, just a few miles from my sister’s place, I stopped for a terrific pub meal: broiled plaice and roast vegetables at The Red Lion. Pubs are still by far the best places to eat in England, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. All together a great trip home, my only regret being that Pam wasn’t able to join me in it. But Air Asia has just secured the right to land in England, so there may well be a next time!

Spring has already arrived in England. The daffodils and crocuses are in bloom and the grass is green. Colin, my nephew, is eager to get on his fields and get the Spring planting underway. The warm Gulf Stream brings heat early to this part of the world, and the sun is up by six and beginning to have some strength.

On the cobblestone streets of this quaint provincial town are streams of shoppers, tourists and tradespeople who have barely missed a beat from their regular rounds since last autumn. Everyone complains bitterly about how cold it was last winter here, but there really was only a couple of major dumps of snow, and even that disappeared pretty quickly. Hardly worth a headline in a Canadian newspaper.

Street life is therefore possible for almost the entire year, and as a result there are little stores and shops, teahouses and pubs on almost every corner. Lincoln Bailgate, the part of town closest to the cathedral, is particularly thick with them, although Lincoln High Street is similarly busy. The Bailgate and High Street have been closed to traffic for years, as long as I have been coming here. People move around freely, from shop to pub without having to risk injury by dodging cars and trucks, as we do in Canada.

Because of our weather, our lack of city planning, our obsession with the automobile and our indolence, we in North America have allowed our street life to be choked by featureless malls. That hasn’t happened in England, nor in Europe. They have kept their charming individuality and the sturdy independence of their shopkeepers in defiance of the modern trend toward a uniform blandness. In terms of the quality of social life this gives, they win, we lose.

I was not born in Lincoln, but in Colchester, which is just outside of London. But as I was six when we emigrated to Canada, Colchester means little to me. Lincoln, on the other hand, was where my family settled when they moved back to England. First my sister, who married a Lincolnshire farmer, then Mom and Dad, when his company closed up shop in Canada, and relocated him back here. I have been coming here every two to five years to visit my family ever since.

Lincoln is everything you think of when you think of England; old, quaint and green. There are few hills in this farming county, but on top of the largest sits the imposing Lincoln Cathedral. Construction began in 972, and continued for some three hundred years; fathers passing their skills and their position in the guild to their sons for generations. The result is one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture anywhere in Europe.

Coming here evokes a mixture of reverence and relief: reverence for the spiritual and historical traditions of my British heritage, and relief at being free of the terrible burden of that heritage. The beauty of Lincoln’s cloistered galleries carries the claustrophobia of its suffocating rituals that eventual choked the life of the Spirit of Christ’s church in England. Malaysia, with all of its draconian laws, has done less to inhibit the life-giving message of Christ’s resurrection and glory that the weight of that dead ecclesiastical tradition. All of England suffers from that irrepairable loss.

When he was 17 my brother Wyn worked in the Columbia record warehouse out by what was then Malton airport. As a perk he got to buy albums incredibly cheap. As Columbia was top dog in those days, he came home with some sweet vinyl.

For my 16th birthday he gave me a copy of Moira Lympany playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto #2. I had been a fan of Tchaikovski’s for many years, but this was my first introduction to his protege and successor. It became my instant favourite, and has remained so to this day.

Tomorrow the MPO is playing this, and two other pieces, one by Lizst, and one by Dvorak. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this. The MPO play in Petronas Towers in an absolutely gorgeous concert hall with great acoustics. Pam will be back from her conference in Thailand tonight, and tomorrow we will head off with friends Gary and Kveta for what promises to be a very enjoyable afternoon. Xarošego Dnja!

Tomorrow, Dad will be undergoing a surgical procedure that we are all praying will relieve the excruciating attacks of pain that he has suffered through for  a number of years now.  Trigeminal Neuralgia has consumed his life for the last two winters and the effectiveness of medication has gradually decreased over time.  The procedure is a particularly nasty one, but please pray with us for protection and healing for dad.

So often we are reminded of  the fact that without the love and care that my brother Randy and his wife Sylvia provide, we would probably not have the peace of mind that we need in order to be so far away.  Sylvia has been a precious gift of God to our whole family, as well as to many other people that she has so lovingly served over the years.

We wish that we could be there with you Dad!

We are very proud of you and wish you great success in your new job.  It will undoubtably be a huge challenge to learn all that is required but we have every confidence in you.  You are a very gifted young lady and will rise to the challenge, even when  it is in Spanish.

Elizabeth Wise   

Business

Development for

Saxon Drilling

Calgary, Alberta

We hope by now that you have been able to see the Christmas slide presentation that we have prepared and sent out by email. If you have not received a copy, just give us a hit in our comments or email us at steve@spwise.com or pam@spwise.com and we will send you one.

We had a lot of fun putting it together and had a chance to reminisce about this past year. The hardest part was choosing just 30 slides from the hundreds that we have. We also learned some things about recording and embedding sound, and formatting pictures to maximize content and minimize size. Next year maybe we will be ready to send you something on movie maker!

We will miss seeing you at Christmas, but we hope our little slide show will give you a little visit with us. We wish you all a very merry Christmas.

You can not live with someone as long as Pam and I have without sharing some fundamental pleasures in life. Kids, yes. God, yep, Him too. Love for travel; we both have that in spades. But there are many other things as well that we both enjoy doing, and one of them is looking at the beauty of God’s created world.

We had the great privilege of visiting the Jurong Bird Park in Singapore last week, and it was just amazing. There are over 9,000 birds in this park, many of them flying freely around large netted enclosures that cover about 50 acres of property in western Singapore.

This is Pam clearly enjoying feeding a pair of parakeets which were dazzling in their variety. We also saw larger parrots and macaws and hundreds of other species, including Malaysia’s famous hornbills. There were flamingos in every shade of pink (apparently that is from their diet) and penguins, both standing and swimming.

It was kid’s day at the park, but like everything Singaporean there were no line ups, bratty kids or litter. We spent the entire day, and it was well worth the visit.