Fall fairs -- a great tradition

The CNE, the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, the Capital EX (formerly known as the Edmonton Exhibition) and the PNE, our own local Pacific National Exhibition are some of the bigger ones.

These summer into fall fairs are part of a long and great tradition. Originally based on the agricultural calendar, they served to celebrate the season of harvest home.

At the PNE, baking, preserving and quilting competitions have taken a back seat to massive sales of an impossibly wide range of stuff, from gimcracks to treasures. But no matter how many big shows, dance competitions and scary new Playland rides are added, and no matter which weird new foods (like deep fried Mars bars) are sold each year, the farm animals remain central.

For city people, the barns provide the rare opportunity to get close and personal with large farm animals that have been trucked in from all over the Fraser valley. It's a treat to see the teams of muscular draft horses, the prize calves, the sheep and lambs and piglets. And it's an eduction to watch the owners, often quite young, who take such great care of them.

Recently a friend told me her twelve-year-old daughter thought milk came from Safeway. Where before that? She didn't know. At the PNE, kids can watch milk cows in action, see baby chickens and ducks hatch and even watch bees in a visible hive producing honey.

In today's golden fall sunshine, I remembered my first experience of the Bulkley Valley Fall Fair in Smithers. It was a few hours' drive from our town, and my brother and I went with our neighbours. I was fourteen, and it was a spectacular adventure.

I'll never forget the thrill of that first evening, watching nervous horses being cajoled down the wooden ramps from their trailers, the whites of their eyes showing as the loud echo of their own hooves on the boards spooked them into tossing their heads and whinnying.

Now this year's harvest fairs are long over, and the PNE has been transformed by Fright Nights. The Thanksgiving weekend is past. Fall is definitely here.

Happy Birthday, Mom

Mom was born on October 13, 1913, so she would have been ninety-eight today, if she'd lived. At the time, it was only 11 years since the death of Queen Victoria. The Queen of England was of course also the Queen of Newfoundland, the colony of Mom's birth. Newfoundland would not join Canada for another thirty-six years.

It would be just one more year before World War I began. The Halifax disaster, the biggest man-made explosion to date, was still four years in the future. When those two ships collided in Halifax harbour, my mother, age four, would feel the vibrations from the explosion in St. John's, hear the rattling of bottles on the shelf of the pharmacy where she stood with her older sister. They would think it was an earthquake.

Mom didn't know it, but she would survive the great cataclysms of the twentieth century: World War I, The Great Depression and World War II, before marrying, in her thirties, a serving sailor in World War II. Once Dad left the navy, she would leave her six siblings in St. John's and emigrate with him to the Canadian prairies, when the joining of Newfoundland to Canada was still three years in the future.

She would give birth to her first and third child in Edmonton, but I, the middle one, would be born in mid-winter in a small hospital in the town of Tofield, the closest to our farm. My parents, who had no vehicle except the tractor at the time, would rely on the neighbours to take her to the hospital.

The twentieth century is over, and the world is a very different place now. I wish you could see it, Mom. Happy Birthday.

Oslo Freedom Forums

In 2005, filmmaker and human rights advocate Thor Halvorssen founded the Human Rights Foundation. This organization held its first conference, the Oslo Freedom Forum, in May 2009.

The goal was to bring together former heads of state, Nobel Laureates and prisoners of conscience, joining them with a selection of business, political and cultural leaders and authors. Among those in attendance were Vaclav Havel, Elie Wiesel, and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. The second conference was held in April 2010. This time the speakers included Lech Walesa, Jody Williams and Jacqueline Moudeina.

May of 2011 saw the third Oslo Freedom Forum, featuring international speakers including Iran's Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, WikiLeaks whistleblower Julian Assange and Canadian public intellectual John Ralston Saul.

This year one of several topics of discussion was the impact than individuals can have on society. If Thor Halvorssen's experience is anything to go by, that's quite a lot.

Calling last month's UN anti-racism conference Durban III a "weapon of mass distraction" in the Huffington Post, Halvorssen organized a parallel summit, We Have a Dream, to be held across the street involving an international coalition of NGOs. Speeches from that event have been posted on YouTube.

The Speakers' corner of Hyde Park

Photo courtesy of London's Hyde Park

Since 1872, the Speakers' Corner has been a symbol of free speech. The Speakers' Corner Trust says it was "born out of the struggle for civil liberties in Victorian Britain," and calls its creation "a significant milestone" in the development of British democracy. Famous orators have included George Orwell, Karl Marx and Marcus Garvey.

The Trust supports the creation of Speakers' Corners in other UK cities including Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, and Bristol, and is working to create mobile ones.

Other countries, including Canada (Victoria, Calgary, Toronto), have had Speakers' corners.

In 2000, Hong Lim Park in Singapore became the designated location of a Speakers' Corner where Singaporeans may use any of their four official languages to peaceably orate on subjects excluding religion, providing that they do not use obscenities or incite violence or racial hatred.

The traditional ideal of free speech goes back at least to Socrates.

Zimsculpt at Van Dusen Gardens II

Photo: Flower for a friend, by Colleen Madamombe, Zimsculpt

Sadly, Ms Madamombe, who worked with Zimsculpt, died in 2009 at the early age of 45.

Sculptor Passmore Mupindiko, who likes doing semi-abstracts of guinea fowl, says "We kind of talk to each other, stone and me."

Artist Patrick Sephani also speaks of looking at the stone and trying to bring out what's inside it. He enjoys doing the female form, something he often sees in the stones he chooses.

Those who missed the recent Zimsculpt exhibition at the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens can see many of the works, as well as brief interviews with two artists here. In this brief video, Curator Vivian Croissette also showcases "Proud Lady," a work by Agnes Nyanhongo, one of Zimbabwe's best-known woman artists.

Five percent of Zimsculpt sales go to support the Zimbabwean charity Inter-country Peoples Aid.

Youthful friendship and long-ago days in Arts I at UBC

In 1967, I was part of the flagship class of Arts I, an inter- disciplinary program for first-year students. Among its merits was the fact that we were a small group in our own building, and thus, got to know one another very well.

In Arts I, my new friend Pat got into the theme group Love and Death, for which I envied her. I had to settle for Utopia and something else that I've no memory of now.

I first met Pat in Arts I. We discovered that we were in the same residence, Totem Park, though we lived in different buildings. After finding one another, we went everywhere together. One fine fall day, we rolled in the freshly cut grass in Marine Drive Foreshore Park, then ran giggling up to our respective rooms, dripping clippings in the stairwells.

In the spring we were more sedate. On sunny days, we spread ourselves on the lawn in the Rose Garden by the Faculty Club and read TS Eliot together. We were both crazy about his poetry, especially "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

"Do I dare to eat a peach?" we used to say to one another meaningly, and sometimes say even now. And laugh as we remember finishing one another's sentences during our many long conversations.

Somehow we mixed up our Eliot books (Faber & Faber edition, London). On my shelf still, never far from where I can easily pull it down, is the book I ended up with. At least half the annotations are in Pat's handwriting.

What a gift it is to develop a profound friendship in youth, when one has time and energy, and then keep that friendship for a lifetime.

Zimsculpt at Van Dusen Gardens I

Recently the VanDusen Botanical Garden hosted a remarkable exhibition of sculpture by artists from Zimbabwe.

Two artists travelled with the Harare based exhibition and worked on their creations in the gardens where art appreciators could watch them.

The many and varied sculptures looked fabulous set among the plants of the garden. Animals and human figures, natural objects and abstract shapes from tiny to huge were all part of this feast for the eye and soul. One of my favourites was Dried Seed Pod, by Albert Wachi, a piece so tall I was unable to photograph it properly.

The baboons and guinea fowl in the photos above are made of a stone that can be finished in rough-textured grey on some parts of the sculpture and polished to a high black gloss on others. Different kinds of stone are used as well.

Zimsculpt showcases works by numerous Shona artists by touring with the collection to a variety of locations around the world. In May, this collection of art was exhibited in Windsor, and then at the Chelsea Flower Show in London. In June it went to Guildford in Surrey (not our Canadian version but the British one) and in July it visited Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast.