Military School

At Fifteen Dad was home on holiday from private military boarding school

They Were So Beautiful

My mother and father

The lower picture was taken on the second day of their honeymoon

Think of Me When the Daffodils Bloom - 2

My father had a difficult decision to make. He could advance his military career by continuing his assignment in India as a colonel or he could get an honorable discharge and take his wife back to his boyhood home and start a new life.

My mother was not too enthusiastic about living in India. She had heard horror stories about the poverty and she didn't want to raise her children there, even though there was a fairly large British, military community there. She had seen enough horror living in London throughout the war. My father too, had the kind of spiritual and emotional exhaustion soldiers get when they have seen too much active duty. So, with a little prodding, he chose to take my mother back to Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands. Jersey lies thirteen miles off the coast of France in the English Channel but it is completely autonomous, belonging neither to France nor England. His family was well known there, wealthy and respected and his brother was very poplar since he was the island's soccer champion.

They lived very happily in Jersey for several years. My mother loved it. They had a house almost on the beach with marvelous sea views. She had a baby to care for and was content with her life. She loved the island.  It is always lushly green, with beautiful vistas. It nestles in a protected bay  and is sub-tropical like the French Riviera. The palm trees are a short stubby variety, bougainvillea in brilliant colors spills over every wall and beautiful blooms in rainbow hues thrive everywhere in the moist sea air. I remember the gardens, full of vegetables and fruit, ripe and juicy from the seaweed used as fertilizer. The beaches are clean with golden sands and a favorite with tourists. It was idyllic but my father became restless.

He had been receiving letters from Jack, in Canada, telling him of the opportunities to be had there and inviting him to come over. Jack even offered the hospitality of his home for as long as we needed it. A new adventure, a challenge, exciting prospects; he was up for it. So, he tore us from contentment, prosperity and from the bosom of our large loving family and thrust us into the huge, wild, open spaces of Canada. Coming from a small island, it seemed a very alien place indeed.

Canadians are a very nice people,  friendly and sweet. We were welcomed, and spent that summer exploring amazing places and marvelling at the amount of space between towns, between farms, even between houses. We were awed by the wilderness and the abundant wildlife in the north. We were spellbound by the might and the power of Niagara Falls. Nothing prepared us, however, for that first winter, the biting cold , the deep drifts of snow, the white white world.

We became accustomed to our new life. My dad worked so hard to provide a good life for us. My mother worked hard too and gradually they made progress. They built their dream home, provided me with a good education and we all lived the good life. It was too good. My father became ill in his forties. I idolized him . When we learned it was cancer, all the light and joy fled from our lives and we lived every day in dread. He was so young and his prognosis was poor, about four months. The surgeon performed radical surgery, removing a kidney and most of his bladder, but told us not to hope too much for any more time.

Four months passed and my dad got a little stronger and went back to work. We went about our business with heavy hearts and waited. After six months he underwent some tests and examintions and was found to have new tumors forming in his ureter. They were removed and the waiting started again. It was torture. It was like living under an axe, waiting for it to fall. Another six months and two more small tumors. They were removed and again we watched him and waited. It began to tell on all of us . My dad came home drunk, at least twice a week. His buddies would carry him into the house for us and we would put him to bed in silence. My mother became a very silent shadow of a person and I began failing at school.

When the time for the tests came around again, we were so tense and scared, my mother gave me a little glass of her wine so I could sleep. This time, the tests were clear. We could not believe it.We were overjoyed. A year passed, then, another. After five years we were told to relax, he had been cured. He was a cancer survivor. We never took his health for granted again.We knew that at any time the cancer might return. We were all changed by our experience. My dad most of all, he had become an alcoholic......

To be continued.

Daffodils - The Happy Little Family

Upper left- Jack and Dad---Upper right-Dad,my mother's younger sister Rose and me

Centre-the happy young family

Lower left-"Stand up straight,head up, shoulders back."

Lower right-"'At ease' little soldier."

Daffodils...Part Three

 

Is China the Eco-Villain We Believe It to Be?

China's rapid economic expansion in recent years has been matched by its increasingly voracious appetite for energy and natural resources. But, the nation has sometimes been unfairly portrayed as the world's biggest environmental villain.

As early as 1995, Lester Brown, one of the world's leading environmentalists, predicted that China's increasing demand for food and other commodities would soon drive world prices to record highs.

If the figures were alarming then, they have only grown more so as China's prosperity has increased its global reach and purchasing power. Cries of alarm have come from more and more people, as China's demand for everything from oil to hardwood timber has been blamed for global price rises.
The increasing affluence of Chinese consumers and their new-found ability to travel the world means that far more of them have the opportunity and the means to purchase tiger skins, ivory and rhinoceros horn.

And as the nation's energy and mining industries have ventured beyond the nation's borders, they have turned out to be every bit as rapacious and unethical as western companies can be; perhaps more so, since they do not have to answer to an open press and domestic outrage.

The impacts of China's affluence are being felt downstream as well, in the form of greenhouse gases emissions. China has huge reserves of fossil fuels, such as coal .CO2 emissions from China are increasing faster than from any other country in the world. In 1990, it already accounted for some 10.5% of the world's CO2 emissions. Now, according to some analyses, China has become the world's largest emitter of climate-altering gases.
The backlash has been predictable. China's exemption from caps on greenhouse gas emissions was one of the major reasons why the US Senate unanimously rejected the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. It was a powerful justification for the Bush administration's stance on Kyoto.
The politicians believed that US efforts would be pointless if China's emissions continued to grow.
But are the criticisms entirely fair? First, markets and emissions must be considered relative to China's enormous population and fairly recent emergence as a newly industrialised nation.
China's population of 1.3 billion is about four times larger than that of the US, but each Chinese citizen uses about 25% of the energy consumed by his or her US counterpart.
Even that measure is skewed, because much of that energy used in China is to manufacture goods that are then purchased by Americans, Europeans and Japanese.
The current rates of emissions also hide the fact that the industrialised western nations (including Japan) have been belching out CO2 far longer than China, which only reached newly industrialised status in the 1990s.

China certainly deserves criticism for its impacts on other areas of the environment.
Chinese consumers have a large and growing appetite for exotic medicines that has directly led to dozens of species in China and throughout the world becoming endangered.
Its citizens are still responsible for consumption of staggering amounts of wildlife and threatened timber products, some illegally smuggled from as far away as Indonesia and Zimbabwe.
In 2008, several US states moved to ban turtle trapping on public lands, and 12 more US turtle species have been proposed for the endangered species list - all because of the impact of trade to China.

But even with regard to trade in wildlife, the story is hardly as simple as it is often portrayed.
China signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) and put it into force in 1981, passing legislation soon after to back up the treaty.
In many areas, the government has made dramatic strides in controlling wildlife trade over the past 20 years, even as demand has sky-rocketed due to consumers' new affluence. Illegal wildlife products have largely disappeared from shops and markets in much of China, as enforcement of wildlife laws has become clearer and more effective.

China has also made dramatic strides in protecting the best examples of natural habitats in nature reserves and other protected areas. More than 15% of the nation's land area is legally protected in thousands of nature reserves and national parks, and most national reserves now have full-time staff that carry out regular patrols.

The proposal and approval of the enormous Giant Panda Sanctuary World Heritage Natural Site in the Sichuan Qionglai Mountains is just one of the most recent examples of China's political will and dedication to protecting world natural heritage.
This is essential, since the rapid pace of development means that natural ecosystems outside protected areas are under increasing threat from the relentless search for more land and resources.
Controlling the breakneck development has proved to be difficult or impossible for many regions, but a new law on Environmental Impact Assessments, which became effective in September 2003, has been praised as a model of good legislation. It includes provisions to increase protection for critical habitats and protected areas. There is still a major gap between policy and implementation, but it takes time, patience and team effort.

China has made impressive efforts to rise to standards set by the international community, but the efforts have not always been good enough to stem the tide in the face of massive and growing pressures.

China has experienced a number of environmental disasters recently
It can be argued that none of this will mean much if China's greenhouse gas emissions cause climate disasters to habitats and species throughout the world.
But here too, China has responded to global needs.
It signed the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1998 and ratified the Protocol in 2002, something that the US failed to do.
More importantly, it made emissions reduction a national policy in 2005.

Given the pattern of exaggeration and over-statement often seen in the international press, it is little wonder that strident international criticism just seems to be dismissed as sour grapes by most people in China.
Is it time, as many Chinese critics argue, for westerners to back off and tend to their own houses? Perhaps. But isn't it the responsibility of all, both producer nations and consumer nations, to work together to solve problems such as depletion of ocean fisheries and over-exploitation of threatened species?
We might hope that at least global climate change is so much of a clear and present danger that, for once, countries could put aside their differences and act together to find a workable solution,
Global problems demand global accountability;

And That's When the Fight Started

My wife and I were sitting at a table at my high school reunion, and I kept staring at a drunken lady swigging her drink as she sat alone at a nearby table. My wife asked, 'Do you know her?''Yes,' I sighed, 'She's my old girlfriend. I understand she took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago, and I hear she hasn't been sober since.''My God!' said my wife, 'who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?'And that's when the fight started....................................................

My wife and I were watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire while we were in bed.I turned to her and said, "Do you want to have sex?""No," she answered.I then said, "Is that your final answer?"She didn't even look at me this time, simply saying "Yes."So I said, "Then I'd like to phone a friend."And that's when the fight started................................................

I asked my wife, "Where do you want to go for our anniversary?"It warmed my heart to see her face melt in sweet appreciation."Somewhere I haven't been in a long time!" she said. So I suggested, "How about the kitchen?"And that's when the fight started.................................................

Saturday morning I got up early, quietly dressed, made my lunch, grabbed the dog, and slipped quietly into the garage.I hooked up the boat up to the truck, and proceeded to back out into a torrential downpour.The wind was blowing 50 mph, so I pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio, and discovered that the weather would be bad all day. I went back into the house, quietly undressed, and slipped back into bed. I cuddled upto my wife's back, now with a different anticipation, and whispered, 'The weather out there is terrible.'My loving wife of 10 years replied, 'Can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in that?'And that's when the fight started...............................................

A man and a woman were asleep like two innocent babies.Suddenly, at 3 o'clock in the morning, a loud noise came from outside.The woman, bewildered, jumped up from the bed and yelled at the man 'Holy Crap.That must be my husband!' So the man jumped out of the bed; scared and naked jumped out the window. He smashed himself on the ground, ran through a thorn bush and to his car as fast as he could go. A few minutes later he returned and went up to the bedroom and screamed at the woman, 'I AM your husband! 'The woman yelled back, 'Yeah, then why were you running?'And that's when the fight started................................................

I tried to talk my wife into buying a case of Molson Canadian for $24.95. Instead, she bought a jar of face cream for $17.95. I told her the beer would make her look better at night than the face cream. And that's when the fight started...............................................

A woman was standing nude, looking in the bedroom mirror.She was not happy with what she saw and said to her husband, 'I feel horrible; I look old, fat and ugly.I really need you to pay me a compliment.'The husband replies, 'Well your eyesight's damn near perfect.'And that's when the fight started................................................

After retiring, I went to the Social Security office to apply for my SIN. The woman behind the counter asked me for my driver's license to verify my age. I looked in my pockets and realized I had left my wallet at home.I told the woman that I was very sorry, but I would have to go home and come back later.The woman said, 'Unbutton your shirt.' So I opened my shirt revealing my curly silver hair.She said, 'That silver hair on your chest is proof enough for me' and she processed my Social Security application.When I got home, I excitedly told my wife about my experience at the Social Security office.She said, ' You should have dropped your pants. You might have gotten disability, too.'And that's when the fight started..................................................

My wife was hinting about what she wanted for our upcoming anniversary.She said, 'I want something shiny that goes from 0 to 150 in about 3 seconds.I bought her a bathroom scale. And that's when the fight started............................................

CHUCKLES ARE FREE. HELP YOURSELF.