Learning and understanding

Whew!  What a year was 2014!  First off, many, many wishes for a wonderful holiday season and a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2015.  May things get better and better as time goes on for you, your families and all your friends.  I'm very happy, as you may guess, that I'm here to send emails at this time of year.  I've included what I'm calling the "official post-surgery picture" -- which was taken in early September, 2 months after my operation, and the day after the last of the surgical tubes and drains were removed.  My doctors (and my friends) all agree that I do not look like I've been through hell, and for that I'm thankful.      There were several special things about this year.  In March, I celebrated 15 years with the Government of Canada, along with one of my friends.  We collected our service awards a month apart (hers was in February.)  I never expected to get a long service award ever in my career, but here we are, marking 15 y

Hello, I have a problem.  I am addicted to collecting cookbooks.    I have over 40 Caribbean cookbooks – including several that are now out of print – and a collection of about 80 others, ranging from some published in the 1930s to more contemporary fare.  I will also confess that I have 2 vegetarian cookbooks, neither of which is used, and only 1 “celebrity chef” book (all gifts.)  My favourites for reading are my vintage books, where there were few convenience foods or appliances; the selection of ingredients was limited; and instructions often include the statement “If you have a refrigerator…”   Granted, these books are either British or Canadian in origin, so they reflect heavily the cultures of those countries.  One of them, by the noted Marguerite Patten addresses rationing and cooking using scarce ingredients (it was written during WWII) and it does provide a look at extreme economy.  As interesting as some of those are, I’m not moved to try them.    Then there is the classic

This is dedicated to Mrs. E. Borde, my Form 3 history teacher.  Settle down, kiddies, it’s an actual dedication to a teacher.  Mrs. Borde taught us history back in the day.  And for me, she turned it into a subject that was SO boring, SO horrific that 2 things happened.  The first was that history (notably Caribbean history) was the first and only subject that I have ever failed in my life.  The second was that I developed a deep-seated hatred for anything labelled as “historical.”  And that’s very sad.  There were several careers that interested me back when I was 14 in Form 3, but when I learnt that they REQUIRED history, I turned away from them. (I wonder now if I would have enjoyed any of them, really)  My reading (which has always been prodigious) moved away from anything that touched on Caribbean history, because it sent me back to that period in my life where those classes were torment.  At university, I skated through the required History of the Caribbean classes, attending may