Last weekend I participated in one of the many launches planned for Rocksalt, a new anthology of BC poets. The event I went to was in Nanaimo at the new public library which is large and beautiful but didn’t have quite enough seats for all the people who crammed in the foyer to see the 17 poets reading. The 108 poets featured in the anthology include, sadly for me, a Rhona (yay!), a Rhoda and a Rhonda. I think the sheer number or poets reflects the retirement and pre-retirement patterns for poets in Canada…

Harold Rhenisch, one of the editors,

Mona Fertig, the other editor and publisher

Nanaimo poet Tim Landon,

Joe Rosenblatt,

and my publisher, Ron Smith:

Meanwhile, working through my list of things to do, I had sent a post-six month query to a Canadian literary magazine I’d sent poems to back in the spring. Because the journal publishes an email address, I thought for purposes of a follow-up I’d email rather than send a letter, but my message bounced in seconds. I was feeling persistent, and rather fed up with technology that works against communication rather than for it, so I printed off the email and the bounce message and stuck it into an envelope with a suggestion the magazine check with its IT department, as things had reached a sorry state when a legitimate enquiry was being dumped as spam. Here’s the reply I got from someone (not an IT guy) at the magazine:

We haven’t received any other complaints about blocked emails (and we receive hundreds of emails a week). I suggest that the problem is on your end. You should run a full system scan on your computer. We have a Spam filter on our computer, but it does not block Spam, it only identifies it as such and lets it through. In other words, your email is being identified as malicious, not simply as Spam.

I guess unhelpfulness is not the exclusive domain of profit-oriented company employees. How could you know for sure you “haven’t received any other complaints about blocked emails” when those complaints can’t actually get through?

For that matter, how many of us even have the energy and persistence to lodge complaints about all the things that don’t work right in this indifferent and alienating world? It’s tiring! Even here in supposedly customer-friendly Canada it’s taken me all week – 3 failed phone calls and 4 email messages – to get my phone bill sent to me.

But out of control spam blocking has been on my mind a lot lately. It happened that in my attempts to arrange a poetry reading with another Canadian college this summer, my messages were sent to the Spam folders of two different organisers. When I hear about these things, I always suggest to the recipients that they contact their IT department, but I don’t know if they do. I think I might have to go back to using paper and stamps.

After a single day back in London it was finally time to return to Canada last week. We went out to find a nice last supper for me, but our timing had us hitting the street at just a few minutes after a freak black-out darkened the doorways of most of the restaurants we would have tried. So we ended up at GBK, where I found myself suddenly unwilling to try the beef burgers, after having tracked down the manager and asked him what he knew about the life and death of the cattle used in them, and he said he knew nothing, but could say with certainty they were not organic, not grass fed, and the chickens were neither free range nor organic. I looked around at the crowded restaurant and was saddened to think that nobody there had thought to ask, let alone think about the quality of the meat they were eating. I ordered an organic lamb burger and hoped it had had a good life as promised on the menu, which named the producer.

I was less impressed by this sign which I thought was a good example of what not to do for customer appreciation. But then again, the place was crowded and nobody really cared. I guess they were there for their industrial meat products and that was that.

Afterwards, we shared some of the bonet I’d brought back from Turin. Which was delicious.

Heathrow Terminal 5 was an experience. I was happy to find Carluccio‘s there, which meant travellers could grab some quality grub before taking to the air…

but they were outside security, so I wondered who exactly would be buying all that lovely wine, vinegar, olive oil, condiments. I wish they had managed to get a spot the other side of the magic wall. How much better a shopping opportunity than the same old duty free players.

I ordered the vegetarian option on my British Airways flight, and was glad I’d done so – I got what I suppose was feta and spinach tortellini. It is beyond me why airlines still offer the ‘beef or chicken’ routine. One thing I’d liked about the late lamented Zoom was their innovation of offering ‘chicken or vegetarian’ on my last flight. Surely even in the name of thrift it would be a brighter idea for airlines to incorporate veggie options into the mainstream? I was less impressed with the vegetarian sandwiches that came – though they were still better than the alternative – because of the awful bread, which came with its full complement of noxious ingredients, emulsifiers E472e, E471, vegetable fat, flour treatment agent and so on.

Vancouver was wet and getting itself ready for Halloween. In fact the ferry I took on Halloween was full of people heading for parties. Or else they just wanted to dress for the crossing.

Before leaving though we had a tasty lunch at La Reglade in West Vancouver. The parmesan sable tart was lovely

and the soup kept us chipping away forever. I wish they could have kept the cheese in the bowl though.

We passed on dessert, though it was very pretty.

Back in Victoria, it was a red sky at morning, and has rained ever since. Not the warmest homecoming, since the furnace had packed in, which I discovered on Saturday together with the fact that all my firewood had apparently gone up in smoke during my absence. Thanks to a couple of space heaters, some firewood donated by my kind neighbours and a whole lot of woolly jumpers, I’m managing to bide my time till it can be repaired. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Monday. Just glad it hasn’t gone below freezing since I’ve been back.