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While the new American administration tries to rekindle hopes of a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, the inhabitants of Gaza are taking stock of their plight following the recent Israeli incursion. 1,330 Palestinians (and 13 Israelis) were killed in the operation, and an estimated 25,000 homes were destroyed or are beyond repair, leaving around 100,000 Palestinians homeless. This short video gives some idea of extent of the devastation.
Much now depends on the Gazan reaction to their increasingly desperate situation. Unemployment is above 50% with most households living below the poverty line. Population density in the territory is over 4,000 people per square kilometre – among the highest in the world (in comparison, England’s population density at 395 is the highest in Europe). Recent studies of Palestinian children suggest 70% have witnessed a killing, and 30% suffer from PTSD. On top of all this, most of the international community has cut off aid to the territory since Hamas seized power in June 2007.
Hamas understands that this is a battle for hearts and minds above all else. In the wake of the destruction wrought by Israel, Hamas officials are giving monetary compensation to those whose properties were damaged in the conflict. Much of this money comes from ‘charitable’ donations from sources outside the country including Syria and Iran.
A homeless Palestinian counts compansation money handed out by a Hamas official
Although armed resistance can only lead to more Palestinian blood being spilt in the perpetual cycle of violence, such logic is unlikely to be at the front of the mind of a young Palestinian with no hope, no home, and a fistful of Hamas shekels. However many militants were killed in the recent operation, Hamas is unlikely to be short of new recruits to take their places. As Henry Kissinger observed: the conventional army loses if it does not win, the guerilla wins if he does not lose.
In spite of this, Israel hopes that Palestinians will see Hamas as the sole cause of their plight. The rational response, according to the Israeli argument, would be for Gazans to rise up against Hamas and force the militants to put down their weapons. There will certainly be many who have much to blame the militants for, but Hamas rules the territory with an iron fist, treating those who question their tactics as Israeli sympathisers, and going as far as executing excessively vocal critics. It seems unlikely that Israel has created the necessary conditions to expect an olive branch to be held out to them any time soon.
Thirdly, there is the possibility of a political solution. Unfortunately, for the moment at least, politics seems to be a cause of violence rather than a force for peace on both sides of the divide. While Hamas’s cause grows in strength, political expediency must be suspected as at least part of the reason behind the timing of Israel’s show of force. The ruling Kadima party is under great pressure from Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party ahead of February 10th’s general election. Lagging behind in the polls to a party with a far more hawkish stance, Kadima’s action looks very much politically motivated. It is also notable that it was executed days before Barack Obama was sworn in (an image of schoolchildren fighting in class before the teacher arrives comes to mind). Whoever wins on February 10th, and Likud still seem the likely victors according to the polls, it would seem that the road to a negotiated peace is likely to be a long one.
To (apocryphally) paraphrase Stalin, 13 deaths can be perceived as individual tragedies, whereas 1,330 are a mere statistic. It is easier for Israelis to concentrate their sorrow on the deaths of a small number of their own, whose names and faces they will know, and whose relatives’ grieving words and tributes will have been broadcast across the media, than to truly comprehend the tragedy on the other side of the divide.
However, this conflict has brought Israelis uncomfortably close to one of the human tragedies being wrought in their name in Gaza. The incident in question happened on the last day before the ceasefire, live on Israel’s Channel 10 news. Correspondent Shlomi Eldar had been talking live each day with Dr Ezzeldeen Abu Al-Aish, a Palestinian doctor living in Gaza City, who provided daily eyewitness reports via cellphone on the latest from the front line of the conflict (Israeli correspondents were barred from the area during the incursion). Dr Al-Aish was the perfect Palestinian correspondent for Israeli news. He trained in Israel and spoke fluent Hebrew. He is involved in cross-border research with Israeli colleagues into the effects of the conflict on Israeli and Palestinian children. He is a peace activist, and vocal critic of both Hamas and Israeli violence. His children had attended summer camps for Israeli and Palestinian kids in the United States. Incidentally, just before the conflict he had received an offer of a teaching position at the University of Toronto.
When Shlomi Eldar made his call to Abu Al-Aish on January 16th, this is what happened (click the triangle in the bottom right-hand corner, then the arrow to the left of the second icon from the top to activate subtitles):
There were eighteen people at home when the tank shells hit. Three of his daughters and a niece were killed instantly. Another two daughters were injured, one seriously. Understanding the PR implications of something like this happening on live news, the Israeli authorities quickly got an ambulance to the scene.
The IDF claim they were firing at a sniper in the house. Given Abu Al-Aish’s record as a man of peace it seems highly unlikely, but this is a time of war, and there is little rationality on either side. Here is what happened at the press conference following the incident:-
In spite of having three of his children slaughtered, and verbal abuse from jingoistic Israelis, Abu Al-Aish used the press conference to call for peace. In addition to his words in the above clip, he said: “From our pain we can learn. We may disagree, but we should learn from that. Let us express the pain, let it out. It’s beneficial to us all. Maybe the blood of my daughters was the price, and if it was, I am happy about it. The cost of ceasefire to save lives to be my daughters’ and my niece’s blood — honestly, I am proud of it. I am fully proud of it.” He added: “I will never change the way I believe. There is no other way but for us to live in peace, with justice and respect for human rights. The military way proved its failure years ago. And still we haven’t learned the lessons.”
Before the conflict, Danny Seaman, director of the Israeli government press office, candidly stated : “There is an unequal war going on there between a power and a terror organization, and the only way to hurt us is to get those images to hurt us in the battlefield of public opinion. In that sense, the less pictures coming out helping them the better”. The Israeli government knows that it cannot be beaten on the battlefield, but that in spite of 94% of Israelis being in favour of the operation before it took place, public opinion could easily be softened by the veil being lifted on the human stories behind the statistics of war. In the words of one Israeli columnist, the Abu al-Aish story has “managed to finally penetrate the layer of cast lead that has sealed the ears of the Israeli public [...] He made the killing suddenly appear tangible, close, shocking and threatening.”
In spite of his great loss and the abuse he has suffered even in his time of grief, Abu al-Aish has not wavered from his message of peace. His story has sparked intense debate in Israel, and pricked untold hardened consciences, not to give in to terrorists, but to insist on seeing every loss of life, regardless of nationality as a tragedy rather than a collateral damage statistic. We can only hope that this conflict represents the lowest ebb of hope, and that public opinion on both sides will one day soon demand peaceful solutions. This is a terribly hard problem to solve, but the first step is a political resolve on both sides to find a peaceful solution.
Since I arrived in Canada the weather here in Kitchener-Waterloo has certainly been showing what it can do. In early November I was treated to temperatures in excess of 20 degrees, just to lull me into a false sense of security. Within weeks, however, the snow had arrived, heralding the third whitest autumn on record, the snowiest since 1951. Having survived snow-mageddon, temperatures started going haywire. On the morning of December 23rd the temperature was 14 degrees below. By December 27th it had rocketed to 13 above, the highest December temperature in the region since 2001. By New Year’s Day morning it had plunged once more to minus 19 degrees, a swing of more than 32 degrees in just five days.
Since then we have been in the deep freeze. This afternoon the temperature crept to just above zero for a couple of hours, the first time it has done so at any time of day or night since December 29th. At 8:15 last Thursday morning it hit minus 28.75 degrees here – the coldest it has been for four years. However, all these temperatures are registered without wind-chill. Last Thursday was a relatively still day, whereas Friday, although warmer, brought a strong icy wind which made it feel even colder. I rashly walked across the parking lot at our local shopping plaza with my nose running. By the time I got to the store my nose was stinging like crazy as the moisture started to freeze.
Worse was yet to come that evening. My mother-in-law came back early from the movies having arrived to find her film was sold out. Turning on the tap, she found only a trickle of water coming out. Testing the taps upstairs, we found no flow of water, and just a little more than a trickle in the basement. We immediately suspected freezing pipes, knowing that if they were to freeze completely they were liable to burst and cause a flood. Having little experience of these things we called a neighbour across the road to come and have a look. He quickly identified the potential cause as the exhaust vent for the spin-dryer. The four-inch diameter exhaust tube ran only an inch away from the cold water pipe. Our neighbour had experienced a similar problem in the past where a build-up of lint had filled the vent, holding it open. We needed to go outside, and we knew we may be gone some time…
Our knowledgeable neighbour’s theory was on the money. The vent was totally clogged with lint. What was more, the icy wind was blowing minus thirty degree air straight down the exhaust tube, freezing the cold water pipe running adjacent to it. We took it in turns to lie on our backs in the snow, picking lint out of the vent above our heads with a knife. I have to say that I’ve found more pleasurable ways to spend a Friday evening.
With all of the accessible lint removed, the vent closed almost completely. My wife hooked up the hair dryer and warmed the cold water pipe. To our relief, the water started flowing normally within about twenty minutes. We’d had a lucky escape. If my mother-in-law had chosen a less popular film, the first we may have known about the problem may have been a flooding basement. I still find it hard to imagine a pipe inside our heated house getting frozen by cold air from an adjacent but unattached tube. I clearly have a lot to learn about the effects of extreme cold.
My introduction to Canadian culture, first through my relationship with my wife and now through my move to Canada, has challenged many of my cultural assumptions and introduced me to new ways of thinking about many everyday matters. One of the most unexpected and fundamental of these revelations came at the dining table. I was surprised early on in our relationship to note that my wife uses her cutlery very differently to the way I was taught. It turns out that this is not just a personal idiosyncrasy on the part of my wife; North Americans in general have a radically different etiquette to the rest of the world when it comes to the use of cutlery.
The principal difference is in whether the fork stays in the left hand (continental style) or is transferred to the right hand (North American style) before being used to convey food from plate to mouth. The continental style is illustrated in this video from the International Etiquette Center:
Here, in contrast, is the North American, or “zigzag” method:
The reason behind this cultural cutlery schism is the late adoption of the fork at the European dining table. Until the late Middle Ages, knives and hands were the tools of choice for eating, the use of forks being restricted to Greece and parts of the Middle East. Even into the early 17th century forks were a rarity in Europe, being used mainly to keep the hands clean when eating messy dishes.
In 1630, Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay colony is recorded as owning the only fork in North America. Meanwhile, the fork was gaining popularity at the European dining table and, as a consequence, blunt knives began to supersede the pointed variety as they were rendered increasingly obsolete by the fork’s pointed tines. The colonies also began to receive the blunt-ended knives in spite of their lack of forks. This meant that the colonists had to use spoons to hold their food while they cut it. Given the established custom of using the spoon in the right hand, they got into the habit of putting down their knives and switching the spoon from left hand to right hand before scooping up their chopped food. It was not until the early 19th century that use of forks became widespread in North America, but by this time etiquette was well established, and the fork simply took the place of the spoon, creating the modern zig-zag method.
What amazes me is that, in spite of the fact that North America is the only place in the world that favours the zig-zag style, the custom has withstood so many waves of immigration from the old world. At some point, every family of European immigrants schooled in the continental method would have had to abandon their old ways and teach their kids the zig-zag style. For me, however, this is one cultural change too far. I’ll learn to love hockey, shovel snow at thirty below, and even put maple syrup on my bacon, but you’ll have to pry the fork from my cold, dead left hand.
The heroic stories of America’s space race have been etched in our collective history: the moon landing, the miraculous story of Apollo 13 and the tragedies of Apollo 1, Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia to name but a few. However, the stories behind the Russian space program have been hidden from sight, particularly those that do not reflect well on Soviet technological superiority. Today marks the 40th anniversary of perhaps the most extraordinary story of a Russian cosmonaut beating the odds against him.
Soyuz 5 was launched on January 15th 1969. It is remembered from that time as part of the first successful docking of two spacecraft in space, when it successfully linked up with Soyuz 4. Of the crew three man crew of the craft, cosmonauts Alexei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov transferred to Soyuz 4 and returned to Earth without a hitch, leaving Boris Volynov to bring back Soyuz 5 by himself. This is all anyone in the West knew of the mission until 1997 when the secret broke of Volynov’s remarkable return home.
On January 18th 1969, Volynov prepared for the return to Earth. A crucial stage of the process was jettisoning the equipment module of the spacecraft. Volynov completed the procedure, firing the explosive bolts which were meant to detach it, but to his horror it remained attached to his tiny descent module.
As we know from the fate of the Columbia space shuttle, re-entry to earth’s atmosphere generates so much heat, around 5000 degrees centigrade, that without a fully intact, specially designed heat shield, burn up of the spacecraft is inevitable. Unfortunately for Volynov, the heat-shield was located between the still-connected descent- and equipment-modules. There was no way of separating the two, and Volynov had already taken the irreversible steps towards re-entry. Knowing the inescapable fate of the pilot, the team in the Soviet Mission Control HQ started a collection for Volynov’s wife. Volynov, however, did not give up hope. He continued to go through the re-entry protocol as per his training, making meticulous notes as he did so.
As the craft came into contact with the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere it settled into position with the wrong end of the descent module, the thinnest part of the shell, taking the brunt of the heat generated from re-entry. It stood no chance of withstanding the enormous stresses, and as it heated up the fuel tanks exploded and the heat started to melt the seals on the hatch, filling Volynov’s cabin with noxious gases. As the door distorted inwards towards him, he knew he only had a matter of seconds to live.
Fortunately for Volynov, the effects of the extreme temperature were also being felt elsewhere on the spacecraft. Just before the hatch would have given way, the flames licking around the descent module caused the equipment module to be dislodged. Instantly, the craft righted itself, with the heat shield taking the brunt of the heat of re-entry as it was designed to do.
This was just the start of Volynov’s misadventures, however. The fuel from the the thrusters to control his descent had now been lost, and the lines of his parachute had become tangled. He was heading for a landing hundreds of miles off course at a dangerously high speed. The parachute engaged just enough to slow his landing, but not enough to prevent him being ejected from his seat and crashing into the opposite wall of his craft head-first and at such a speed that he lost all his front teeth upon impact.
No better news awaited him as he opened his hatch. He had crashed into the icy heights of the Ural Mountains. In temperatures of around minus thirty degrees centigrade without cold weather wear he would not last long. He knew he was so far off course that he could not rely upon rescue crews to find him before he perished from the cold. Surveying the horizon, he observed a column of smoke, and decided to head for it. Only a few kilometres away, he arrived at a cottage, where the peasants fed and took care of him until the rescuers, following the tracks and spits of blood in the snow, found him.
Remarkably, Volynov was not put off by this experience and returned to space in 1976 on board Soyuz 21 to spend 18 days in space station Salyut 5. This mission was also not without incident. His fellow cosmonaut Vitaliyi Zholubov was taken ill early on in the mission, and the decision was taken for the craft to return to earth. When Volynov completed the protocols to detach Soyuz 21 from the space station, the craft did not budge. He received emergency procedures from Mission Control, but still it refused to detach from the space station. For one entire orbit of the earth the two cosmonauts waited for the final set of emergency procedures to be received. They followed the necessary steps and the craft disengaged. Because of the unexpectedly early return, the conditions for landing were not optimal and Volynov had to endure another bumpy landing, but nothing as bad as his previous return.
The current issue of Psychology Today examines how important academic breakthroughs in understanding what makes us happy have been co-opted and distorted by the self-help movement to the point where some psychologists are now turning tail and feeling the need to extol the virtues of sadness.
It must be almost enough to wipe the smile clean off Martin Seligman’s face.
Seligman has built his career studying the benefits of positive thinking and the dangers of excessive pessimism. But he is no flaky self-help guru. In the course of his career his discoveries have helped overturn the conventional wisdom of his field, including the belief that all behaviour can be explained without reference to a person’s mental state, and the idea that depression is a disease best treated with drugs and electroconvulsive therapy.
His first major discovery was that of learned helplessness. He subjected laboratory animals to minor electric shocks, giving one group the ability to turn off the shocks by pressing a lever, while another group were given no control over the shocks. The animals were then moved to a pen where they could easily escape the shocks by jumping over a low partition. The group which had learnt to control the shocks quickly jumped over the partition, while the majority of those that had been given no control just sat there and continued to be shocked, having seemingly given up hope.
Further experiments demonstrated that humans exhibit similar behaviour. For example, two groups were given an anagram quiz. Group 1’s anagrams were easy to solve, whereas Group 2’s were not anagrams at all, and therefore could not be solved. When both groups were then given a further identical set of soluble anagrams to unscramble, Group 1 performed significantly better than Group 2. The effect of helplessness on future attitude and performance have been confirmed in numerous other experimental situations.
The results of these and subsequent similar experiments were important in the field of psychology because they proved that mindset had an important role to play in determining behaviour, something which may seem obvious to us now, but which dealt a severe blow to orthodox thinking in the psychological community at the time. However, it was another aspect of the results of the experiments which held the key to Seligman’s later research. It was found in the experiments that around a third of all those in the ‘helpless’ group did not actually give up. Whatever hopeless situations were thrown at them, they refused to give up. Roughly the same percentage of ‘incurable optimists’ was found irrespective of whether the test subject was an animal or a human being, and regardless of the structure of the experiment. Seligman wanted to find out why most people give up, and what could be learned from those that didn’t.
He found that whether people had an optimistic or pessimistic mindset was reflected by their explanatory style. When bad things happened to pessimists, they explained them as being permanent (“things will never get better”), pervasive (“I mess everything up”) and personal (“it’s all my fault”), whereas optimists characterised the same events as temporary, unique and caused by external factors. Seligman found that optimists bounced back quickly from setbacks, whereas pessimists took a long time to recover. His research showed that excessive pessimism was a highly significant predictor of depression and poor health in general.
Around the same time that Seligman was carrying out this research, Aaron T. Beck was developing a radical new form of psychotherapy which bypassed psychoanalysis’s obsession with the murky world of the subconscious, and directly tackled flaws and inconsistencies in patients’ core perceptions and beliefs about the world. Beck found that he could teach patients how to consciously identify and evaluate their thought processes, weeding out and correcting dysfunctional and distorted thinking. Ultimately, his methods evolved into cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), a method of treatment which is now widely used to treat anxiety and mood disorders, and which is considered the most effective approach to resolving post-traumatic stress disorder, OCD and clinical depression.
Seligman was quick to note the relevance of Beck’s methods to his own findings. The hallmark of extreme pessimism was distorted thinking (permanence, pervasiveness and personalisation). If Beck was right, pessimists could be trained not to generalise, personalise and exaggerate their misfortunes, and thus escape the clutches of depression and bounce back from adversity much quicker. Seligman embarked on a personal mission to develop a ‘positive psychology’ which could provide people with the tools to learn optimism. In 1990, he published his findings for a general audience in his book Learned Optimism. In 1998, in his capacity as president of the American Psychology Association, Seligman chose positive psychology as the theme for his term of office, encouraging his colleagues to divert some of their attention away from the study of mental illness and towards ‘mental wellness’. The result was a flood of research into the causes of mental wellbeing, not only in psychology but also in other social sciences, particularly economics. As the current decade progressed, the results manifested themselves into a growing body of literature. As the Psychology Today article points out, 4,000 books were published on the subject last year compared to only 50 in the year 2000.
Some of the psychologists involved in the recent groundbreaking research into the necessary conditions for mental wellbeing have published highly readable accounts of their carefully tested and peer-reviewed findings. Among the most notable are Carol Dweck, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Daniel Gilbert.
Sadly, such rigour in the self-help genre is a rarity. Most texts are little more than rehashed homespun wisdom, dressing up the ideas of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale in the regalia of the latest new age trend. While the psychologists are careful to state the limitations of their theories, as their academic background has trained them to do, the self-proclaimed authors feel themselves to be under no such obligation. Applying positive thinking without qualification and direction can lead to negative results – willing oneself to recover from illness without seeking medical attention for example. Many self-help authors seem to see such distinctions as watering down their theories. The recent outbreak of literature such as The Secret, claiming that simply asking ‘The Universe’ for what you want is sufficient to get it as long as you totally eliminate negative thought, are the worst of the bunch, but many fail to point out the distinction between constructively positive approach and simple Pollyannaism. The difference is a subtle one, well illustrated by the following anecdote.
When Jim Collins, author of business bestsellers ‘Built to Last’ and ‘Good to Great’, wanted to define the characteristics of what made the difference between an ordinary CEO and a great one, he knew that although most of the business leaders he dealt with were positive thinkers, there was a qualitative difference between how they turned this thinking into effective action. He couldn’t put his finger on it until he met Jim Stockdale.
Stockdale was one of the most decorated naval officers in the history of the US Navy. In 1965, during his term of service in Vietnam, he was shot down behind enemy lines, and became the highest ranking naval prisoner of war in the conflict. He was held for seven years, and was repeatedly tortured during his captivity. When the Vietnamese wanted to film him for propaganda purposes, he slashed his own face and beat himself with a stool to prevent them from using his image. He taught other prisoners to resist torture, earning their immense respect as a leader. When released, he had a broken back, his arms had been wrenched from their sockets and one of his legs had been shattered beyond repair, but he had not broken under interrogation. Upon leaving the Navy, he took up residency at the University of Harvard to study stoic philosophy. It was here that Jim Collins interviewed him.
When Collins asked Stockdale what had given him the strength of mind to get through his ordeal, Stockdale replied, “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Collins then asked him what characterised those who didn’t make it out. Stockdale answered, “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
He added: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
Collins called this the “Stockdale Paradox”, recognizing that optimism is not only no substitute for, but actually needs to be complemented by, an honest confrontation with the brutal facts of one’s situation. Without this, optimism is purely wishful thinking.
For this reason, it would be a terrible mistake at the moment for me to glibly try to convince myself each morning that this wonderful new day will bring me a job. The facts are that this particular day probably won’t. However, it is also true that I will find one eventually, and working in search of that goal each day can only help to bring it closer. Being positive that not only can I make it through this tough time, but actually enjoy and learn from the challenge is not just wishful thinking, it is both positive and reflective of my current experience.
Following my spotting of the rare piebald squirrel, I sighted another curious creature in our back yard the other day. It had a body which looked similar to that of a European badger but with a totally white head. Upon checking a field book of North American wildlife I was able to make a positive identification of the creature as an opossum. I wasn’t able to take any pictures, but the internet, as usual, comes to the rescue.
The opossum is not actually that rare, although it is unusual to see one, as they are normally nocturnal animals. They are unique for a number of reasons. First and foremost, they are the only marsupials in North America. They give birth live young when the babies are still tiny (a new born litter of on average 14 opossums would fit into a teaspoon). The babies live in the mother’s pouch for two to three months, following which they stay with the mother for another couple of months, clinging to her back when away from the den.
The opossum is a natural climber, using it’s prehensile hairless tail and opposable thumbs on its hind legs to climb trees, occasionally even hanging from its tail.
The opossum also has more teeth than any other North American mammal. When cornered, it habitually hisses, growls and bares its fangs.
However, when push comes to shove, it is famous for keeling over and pretending to be dead, hence the expression “playing possum”.
I saw the opossum disappear behind the shed in the back yard and went to investigate, but unfortunately by the time I got there it had disappeared. The animals tend to be nomadic and it probably won’t be back, but I’ll be keeping an eye out just in case.
The Independent has an article celebrating the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first photos of the earth from space, including the iconic ‘Earthrise’, perhaps the most influential image in the history of photography.
The article contains this pertinent quote from Carl Sagan:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
The impact forty years ago on people seeing our ‘pale blue dot’ for the first time would have been humbling enough under any circumstances, but this incredible image, framing our planet between the grey lifelessness of the moon in the foreground and the infinite blackness of space as a backdrop, understandably caused a paradigm shift in the thinking of millions of observers. This is the photo that launched environmental consciousness across the globe, as humanity in sudden, visual epiphany awoke to the earth’s fragility and isolation in the dark depths of space.
An article about the Apollo 8 mission in the Observer last November recalled the the following famous stanza from the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which could hardly have been more prescient.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(extract from Little Gidding, 1942)
Being new Canadian drivers with very little experience driving in snow, the prospect of winter driving over here is more than a little daunting. We have only been taught to drive in snow the British way – do not exceed 5 miles per hour, spin your wheels at every possible opportunity and be sure to do your part in making the roads grind to a halt with every snow fall, no matter how minor.
Witnessing the nonchalance of Canadian drivers as they plough their vehicles through deep snow at high speed is a humbling spectacle. Trying to emulate them without years of experience is not a clever idea. In my fortunately limited experience of driving in deep snow, traction is a luxury which is appreciated, but deemed purely optional by the Canadian driver. It is routine to see cars dashing through the snow with their front wheels rotating freely while the rear wheels struggle in vain to keep up. Cops and cab drivers arrogantly slide their vehicles around corners, seemingly losing control of the back end before deftly regaining control with perfect timing. In this intimidating environment, we decided it was imperative that we get winter tyres at the earliest available opportunity.
Cars in Canada are routinely fitted with all-season radials – tyres which attempt to pull off the tricky task of providing safe and economical driving in both summer and winter. The problem is that compromising with Canada’s winter driving conditions has an inevitable impact on safety. Hence the attractiveness of tyres designed specifically for winter conditions. The effectiveness and durability of such tyres has improved greatly in recent years, and demand has steadily grown, stretching manufacturing capacity to the limit.
What makes the tyres so special? Principally the type of rubber they are constructed from. Regular all-season tyres are made of hard rubber compounds, which are highly wear-resistant in normal road conditions. In freezing weather, however, the rubber contracts and hardens to the point where the tyres’ ability to grip the road is seriously compromised, ironically just at the time when snow and ice are likely to appear on the scene. In comparison, the winter tyres are made of much softer compounds which have significantly better grip in the cold. If you don’t believe me, watch this video produced by the Automobile Protection Association in collaboration with Transport Canada:-
Last month, Quebec introduced a law making the fitting of winter tyres on vehicles registered in the province mandatory. This decision was taken on the basis of research which revealed that only 10% of vehicles in Quebec did not have winter tyres fitted, but these vehicles were responsible for 40% of all winter accidents in the province.
The publicity surrounding the introduction of this law led to unexpectedly large demand for winter tyres in the rest of Canada. As unusually heavy early snowfalls affected Canada from coast to coast, drivers across the country rushed to get the tyres fitted. This demand, in addition to the extra orders from Quebec, soon led to serious shortages. We had hoped to get our tyres through my brothers-in-law, both of whom work in the trade, but even they couldn’t get hold of them. We were told that, as most of the tyres are manufactured overseas with long lead-times, production had already shifted back to summer tyres and all-seasons.
But yesterday, joy of joys, a speculative call to our local branch of Canadian Tire hit paydirt. They had just received a consignment of about 80 tyres of our size. We booked ourselves in without hesitation and got them fitted today. Driving the car home could only be described as an anti-climax. The pleasure of winter tyres is precisely the satisfaction of knowing that you are less likely to feel anything out of the ordinary, such as the steering suddenly becoming light as a feather as you glide gracefully into the path of an oncoming truck.
I’m not fooling myself that I can now drive just as I would in summer conditions, but it is reassuring to know that, as long as we drive carefully, my wife and I now have a much better chance of getting through the Canadian winter unscathed.
A year ago, a continent ago, an economic cycle ago, we were just at the start of the great journey which we are still embarked upon. In January 2008 we were just starting the first stage of our journey: the enormous task of filling in the forms and gathering the supporting documents to submit to the Canadian authorities as part of my sponsorship to become a permanent Canadian resident. Since then, we have faced countless challenges and obstacles. The economic crisis in particular has dogged us every step of the way, and continues to do so, meaning that we are still living out of suitcases in our mother-in-law’s house while we search in vain for work – hardly the Canadian dream we had set our sights on.
Do I consider that we have been unlucky? Absolutely not. We have been very fortunate to have the support of family and friends every step of the way, without whom I don’t know what we would have done at times. In the good times the love and support available from those close to us may be recognised, but is very easy to take for granted. It is only in hard times like those we have experience in the past year that this love and support manifests itself in ways that leave us in no doubt as to how lucky we really are.
The economic situation may have made things very difficult for us, but we are hardly alone in that. Millions have been thrown into financial ruin, losing their jobs, homes and life savings. Conditions have seen to it that we are struggling to get by, but our house in England is not likely to be repossessed, we have no debts at the moment other than our mortgage, and we should remember that we are voluntarily unemployed. The latter may not seem like much consolation, but jumping off the merry-go-round rather than being pushed has significant psychological advantages.
Do we regret our decision? I can honestly say: not one bit. In spite of everything, we are still enjoying ourselves, making the most of the adventures and opportunities our new life brings us each day. Yes, it would have been easier if we had foreseen the economic apocalypse and timed things differently, not least because such 20/20 foresight would have enabled us to clear up on the money markets into the bargain. It would have been nice to know the lottery numbers in advance too! Whether having to do things the hard way is such a bad thing we will only be able to judge with considerable hindsight. The challenges we have faced have forced us to learn so much, not least about ourselves and each other. These lessons can only stand us in good stead in the future. Who knows what opportunities the unexpected backwaters we are now navigating will bring? We didn’t embark on this endeavour expecting the same lives as we had in England only with the added novelty of some snow on the front lawn.
Change always brings unexpected consequences, some good, some inevitably bad. What we need to learn is how to see the opportunities in each of them, taking as much pleasure in learning from our setbacks and failures as we do in celebrating our successes, and always remembering how lucky we are to have our loved ones supporting us, no matter how near or far they may be. If I have one resolution in 2009 it is to learn this lesson well. If I succeed, my reflections on 2009 have a very good chance of being positive, no matter what fate chooses to throw at us.
