A few months from now I hope to have a video of ‘Salterton’ you can walk through, in case you can’t come to visit. It is a real place in the world, as real to me as it was to Robertson Davies who invented all the names for the places we will visit in the book and soon, here on the web.

I am a neophyte in terms of doing a website so it should certainly improve soon. As well as prose, I have been doing poetry the past couple years, thanks to poet friends and publishers, John Barlow and Kemeny Babineau. Kemeny published my first chapbook last year as Laurel Reid Books. There will be a link to where you can buy a copy from him if you like.

Generally a song finds me everyday so I will probably be noting what it is. Today’s, Saturday, after two days of my job share it was Bing Crosby’s, ‘When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.’

As well, I usually write a daily poem which I am planning to post here too. The Antagonishe Review will be publishing one, Complaint in their next issue so I will be linking to them shortly.

They have asked for a short bio which are always tricky. I am a mid-life woman with a newly-discovered meti heritage, making me a meti-jewish-pennslyvania dutch, possible dane. Every single bit of that history makes me sing which I do a lot of on streets and in the locker rooms of Salterton.

With his wife, the artist, Ruth Dupre, Glover spoke about the “pure act of fabrication, made of bits of this and that.” His new book, from San Marco Press, a sixth collection of poems, ‘For The Sheer Hell of Living,‘ lay on the table, all 94 pages of it. But he quotes W.H. Auden’s:”Poetry exists in the valley of its making - it makes nothing happen.” He approves of love poetry; “Poetry depends on it for survival.”

“There is no such thing as poetic diction,” Glover pronounces. He is intimate with the language, seeming to know it, upside down, backward, forward, in and out. The clothes on his lanky frame seem coated with words, like the chemicals we spray on cars to keep the road salt off in winter. Glover seems literally made of tasty words, like one of those calligraphic exercises you are told to execute in man-shape. “I always feel slightly sorry for poems trapped in books,” he goes on.

“Iambic pentameter…the ten syllable line, is the absolute foundation of English poetry,” he says. “The poet’s voice falls into it all the time.” He explains the ten stress lines, divided into five bits, with each line containing two stresses, called a foot. An unstressed line followed by a stress. “There are lots of examples,” he says. Then he spouts a line as one: “I couldn’t sleep until I stole your voice.” He gives the six of us a few words and has us construct 4 lines in this verse form.

Around us, in a downtown cafe, employees are counting receipts, mopping the black and white tiled floor, covering the cases and getting ready to close down for the night. Backs to them, the eight of us sit at a long wooden table, heads together, listening and interjecting. Ruth breaks in to clarify, to ask for more illustration, now and then. The two work together as one, to describe something of the dark inside that now and then breaks into a thing of fizz and light.

“The fruits of our reading feed [continuously] into our poems” he assures us. When blocked, the poet does well to read himself whole again. For Glover, an atheist, his back reading is the King James Edition of the Bible and a certain Belgian Surrealist, whose name I did not catch. He reminds us that Wordsworth and Coleridge stirred everything up by using the actual language, as it was spoken in their day, street words rather than ‘literary language.’ Their resources were meter and discourse.

He speaks about how a poem gets made, how all the words we have ever read feed into us, a clash of reason and unreason, as our subconscious does its work. That we must watch free verse lest it become slack prose, crude outpourings of soul without craft. He says there is a re-emergent use of certain metrical openness. He recites a poem from Lewis Carroll about seasons, a serious writing, seldom if ever quoted from the creator of Alice In Wonderland.

“Poetry is an intuitive activity,” he says. “It comes from inside, never outside.” Which indicates the best thing a poet can do is to carry a notebook at all times since a poem is no respecter of time of day or circumstance. “A certain openness to experience always helps to bring on a poem,” he adds. “Cultivate a mood of eager expectancy,” he advises. “Also read other poets assiduously and continuously.” He means reading what we consider the old poets, whose words schmooze up to each other. He believes we should write every day and at about the same time.

We take a break by reading the 20 line pieces each of us was invited to bring. Topics range from sexual teapots, Al Purdy, mothers, bike thieves, memories and, from Jason Heroux, the violence of rain and flowers.

Glover props his bearded chin on one long hand and recommends that we revise continuously, reading our poems out loud once we have finished a draft, not examining just the words but also the sound of those words together. Body rhythms will be in there too. “We have all these words feeding into us while we attempt to cajol our words into the poem.” The afternoon light is waning. Through the window, civil servants are popping into Hondas, going home from work. A summer day sweeps the streets, heavy with exhaust.

The poet Tom Gunn let whatever book he had finished, sit for six months, till it was “cooled down,” he said. He spoke of John Ashbury’s routine in making a poem. He would have his writing on his computer screen in his study, and as was his habit, he would then get up and wander about his study, pouring a cup of tea, drinking some, then setting the cup down, walking further to fiddle with a bookshelf, twiddling his thumbs, examining something on a table, looking out his window at the trees and dogs walking by, then, as if by chance, passing by the computer screen and exclaiming, as though he’d never seen it before, “Hey! What IS this?”

One of Glover’s poems, to close:

The magistrates

The magistrates hold tightly in their arms

Worlds we had never known to sing about,

They rock them, highly, nimble on their feet

Pale flowers are strewn, which keeps the occasion sweet.

The magistrates, those old men, muscled taught,

Sing about worlds long vanished from this world,

Strange, heightened places with viridian streams

Which soodle, winking at the brightest suns

How can these men be magistrates? we ask

How can they uphold laws when all we see

Are goatlike creatures, beckoning with their thumbs

To dance with them and chatter mindlessly?

Michael Glover, (from, ‘For The Sheer Hell of Living’)

The old stuff starts like a teapot
set to whistle; lonelies first, all the
memories, might’ve beens, then mountain
and cotton field songs which always
lead into Jesus. After that a bunch of road songs
some of them the blues and as much
part of me as my toes and whiskers,
singing till the words stick in the wind
like strawberry jam in a beard, till it blows
like Dylan, high and outside while dusk
settles in around us like a good old quilt
being shook out and sleep starts calling
for someone to lie down and get comfy.

Even if it’s just regular hurting, something
you can’t yet make out, or even death’s
drab daughter, I’m inclined to get someone
with any sort of voice at all
to come help me find the song.

Science has proved that everything in nature has a voice, a distinct sound of its own, it actually speaks if we could only learn the language, as Dr Dolittle pleads, though in the books he was a short, chubby bald guy who would be amazed to see that woman-hating Rex Harrison in the movie role. In actuality, the author of Dr. Dolittle, Hugh Lofting, WAS a short chubby bald guy who write the books as letters home to his son while he served in the trenches in W W I (and made it back). How popular culture overwhelms our best work. Rose

You’ve got to admire those dead flies

Hanging from the sticky strip

In the far from model kitchen

At least they felt passion,

died in the throes of it,

disappointing spider Sunday dinner

not gone for nothing

but wild with desire

not hunted down,

life fluid sucked slowly

till just dry husk remains,

strapped to nursing home bed.

No more choice.

Decisions have sharp edges,

necessary risk. Weigh the odds.

What do the bookmakers say?

Abandon yourself then,

Glorious, all the mouth sputtering

explosive words; with gusto

chutzpah, pizzazz, tah dah!

Deliver yourself into the arms

of what could be the last love.

Message hanging

till broom or bulldozer.

Swinging in the air

From the sticky strip.

‘When did the chant begin? How many generations or thousands of years, shaken in the womb to the same damn rhythm…”

Measuring, (“today I have been a good mother…”) releasing, (“wandering off without us”) returning (“an ear tuned to those who walk beside us all the time).

 Arnott introduces us to words for the questions we’ve been born with. Even her sections are timed, bearing the dates, where she was when she wrote, starting with the mid-eighties for Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, that now notorious part of Canada. Arnott’s poems give us the work of the world; birthing and rearing, then on to Unmaking the House which made me wish Susannah Moody could’ve had this book as a long winter read: “gather your children, sweep out the house, leave the broom at the threshold and fly.”

The title poem, Mother Time, brilliantly weaves both themes, along with Arnott’s mixed heritage: “sweetgrass hair moss eyes matriarch of clan bends berries folds dried leaf.”

We follow her lead, echo her mind, bodies tracing patterns she enacts, protocol running thick, then thin then thick again, through millennial time.

Small changes weave the old into the new again, braiding youth, maturity, great age, cycling seasons. Now it is fish. Nnow it is digging sticks and roots. Now it is fruit. Now it is home repair and the snowbound truth; dress for a small child, feast for a clan, dancing slippers. tea for a treacherous cough, song for a broken heart, laughter.

She can make each of these things at the proper time, given community, a perceived need and an ear tuned to those who walk beside us all the time.”

Yet they do as they very well please. Oh please

They cannot ride a bike

Though Inukshuk can hike

Like the rates of Olympic park fees

Inukshuks are made out of rocks, they rock

On their flat feet you never see socks, no sock,

Sometimes they may stir

It will rarely occur

But when outraged, Inukshuk could walk

John Barlow knows one on the beach, a peach

Its head is too tall to reach, no reach

He’d like to have poets

Read there and they know it

An Inukshuk PO-etic niche!

Behind one Inukshuk is me, oh me

And maybe another from you, (or he)

These rocks they are old

Never plastic, not sold

Make your own for Inukshuk are free!

Rose

What went on behind the scenes of the old bookshop?

Why did the police bring up the bodies at dinner?

When were the newspaper headlines accurate?

Where was the bishop when it started?

How did the burglar break in?

Who knows the secrets?

A Story Of Salterton is the memoir I have finally finished. Below are all 36 chapters with short descriptions of their content. Think of it as James Herriot’s vet stories only this time with felons, felon wannabes, old books and family. Let me know what you think.

LIST OF EXCITING CHAPTERS (You won’t want to miss a single one) -

1- FAME - Having just joined a church I knew only through books, I was hired as a national columnist to be their symbol of the youth revolution, replacing the economist, Barbara Ward On the job front, I was about to start managing a hostel for runaway teenagers in Toronto. “Okay,” I said [to the hostel], brushing away the warning in my head,. How bad could it be? So some of them would probably be criminally inclined? Only a year later I heard myself saying, ‘Armed robbery?’ Well, he sounds very nice…”

2- RUNAWAYS - Why would any thinking child welfare expert put a hostel for teenage runaways smack up against that hippie bastion, Rochdale? “The doorbell rang again. The police were suppose to call after a delivery [of teens], to see how many beds we had left, as the teenagers were picked up by every precinct without co-ordination. ‘We’d be full up tonight,’ I thought, heading for the door. But it was the neighbour from next door. “I’m afraid you might not know about the three girls climbing out the upstairs window on bed sheets…?”

3 - MIXED BAG- “Up against the wall. Spread ‘em,” one of the police officers yelled as they stepped out of their vehicle, lights flashing. We were on our way home from the subway, the eleven of us [of every racial mix and size], no doubt looking like a disparate mob…”I’m the group home father!” Dick was saying… “These are my kids,” I said. “That so?” the officer looked at me and then the motley crew they had under control. “Which ones? “All of them,” I said proudly. “Except the one with the beard.”

4 - POLICE AT DINNER- “The self-help movement was just being invented, fresh and vital. Ripe for satire and flawed or not, I credit it with having saved my life. I had never before looked beneath the surface, asked why things happened and what role I had in the cataclysmic events that constituted existence as I knew it. I was reading happily in cognitive therapy at the time, which was as new as the movement it embraced. Albert Ellis’s How To Live With A Neurotic was a profound discovery.”

5 STREETS OF SPADINA - “If the heat doesn’t come on, when it’s cold or if it get too hot up here or when the water and electricity go off, keep these holes in mind. First you go downstairs to the old guy and tell him about the problem. If he doesn’t fix it, get something sticky,” he paused, considering. “I usually favor pancake syrup or molasses,” he said. “Pour it down the holes. It works surprisingly well.” “Where do the holes lead?” my husband asked. “Directly into the hardware store,” the fellow said. “What’s even better is that the holes are right over the wallpaper section.”

6- MYSTERIOUS OLD BOOKSHOP- “Inside, the shop itself was like one of those dreams you have in childhood. All the books you ever wanted. I stepped across a patch of sunlight into the dark little shop…A tall handsome looking man came in with several bibles. ‘I’d like to sell these,’ he said…’Leave your name and phone number, I’m sure [the owner] would be interested…’ I handed him a pencil and a piece of paper. For name, I could see him writing, ‘Jesus Christ,’ in a clear firm hand. ‘You see, I’m writing my own,’ he said.”

7- POLICE IN THE SHOP- “We came out of the diner next to El Macombo and one of the artists went by. We stood a moment, talking. I suddenly realized the children had left and were clustered around a woman who worked the street. She was talking to a sailor, unconcerned about three bright pairs of eyes following their transaction. “We’re going now,” I said, reclaiming them. “Not yet, Mommy,” my oldest son said. “We want to find out how much she’s going to get.”

8- ADDICTION- “I was coming down the stairs when I heard a customer ask, ‘Is this guy any good?” He was holding a copy of Northrup Frye’s The Great Code. {my husband] who hadn’t read Frye and whose course of study ended emphatically in the nineteenth century, was immediately dismissive. “Oh, no. Frye’s just an English professor. Now if you want a REAL scholar…”[it was then I noticed] the professor himself was standing behind the two of them…immensely amused.

9- SHOPLIFTERS & MURDER- “Like all booksellers in the seventies, Abby Hoffman’s, ‘Steal This Book, was giving us nightmares. It didn’t make sense to sell it, since that was plainly not the author’s intent. He went into the rudiments of shoplifting with the idea that intellectual property should be available for all. He did have a philosophical point that was debated quite substantially at the time but nobody said what they expected authors to eat, if they had to give their work away, free.”

10- LEAVING THE STREET- “Though he’d been dead well over sixty years, Robert Service still got fan mail from out of touch readers, from time to time, that needed answering…Hugh Garner would storm into the publishers, chomping on a cigar and stomp right past reception…managers would hastily pile down the editorial aisle to hide in the men’s room till he was gone. You could smell Hugh’s cigar as he went from empty office to empty office, trying to find someone who would listen to his complaints about book sales.”

11- BIG BUS TO NOWHERE- “True Confessions prided itself on erotic non-fiction, though at that time, the eros was pretty soft… [I sold them my honeymoon]. “There was a construction boom on and housing [in Idaho] was scarce to non-existent. We were lucky to get what I referred to as the ‘madman’s cabin,’ attached to the ranger’s shack on a cliff overlooking the Clearwater River… But when I showed the copy editors my check, they were very impressed, though, to be honest, they had been trained to automatically genuflect towards any published writer.”

12- CON MAN TALK- “I wondered if the new physics would someday find that folks like us send off a sort of homing signal to strange endeavors in the universe. No high school guidance counselor would ever steer anyone to jobs like this one, way, way off a career path. You had to stumble over them in the dark. True there were usually some hidden advantages. The bookshop with the housing perks. The group home with the housing perks. “A house doesn’t go with it?” I asked, nervously.

13- IN THE HOLE- “It’s a great book,” she went on, motioning to a stack of papers on her desk. The top one was titled, Go Boy. “Unfortunately, we’re only going to be able to publish half. Someone needs to tell the prisoner about that…’ So the company I worked for, wanted my husband to go into a federal prison and tell a prisoner, dangerous enough to need sticking in a hole, that they only wanted to publish half his book? It certainly sounded like a lose-lose situation.”

14- (Flashback) DANGEROUS BELIEFS- “Street Team was a lot easier than having to cobble together a Sunday school lesson… or take the official pamphlets entitled, ‘Five Things God Wants You To Know’ and argue, door to door, with the Portland rain dripping down your collar, about how much better our information was, than what the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Mormons, handed out… I didn’t question any of this as my brain didn’t seem to have kickstarted at the time. Shortly after Christmas, caught between the horrors of life back home and total non acceptance at school, I decided to kill myself.”

15- SEX & RELIGION- “Of course, reading only the Bible, I’d never encountered a Harlequin Romance, let alone a movie that wasn’t Disney. We were constantly admonished to not be part of what was designated as, ‘the world.’… I acquired a few friends, particularly an older woman who was amused to discover how little I knew about sex…’actually it’s important to get the details right,’ she said…after breakfast one Saturday morning, she appeared with a biology book and began to explain sex and how it worked. ‘My goodness,’ I said, when she went into what happened between a man and a woman. ‘And they take their clothes off?’

16 -PHONE TAPPED- “Men on parole called to chat. One day after a conversation, Dick wondered if I’d noticed the little click on our line that preceded talk? Our phone’s probably tapped,” he said. “But since we have nothing to hide, don’t let it worry you. “Tapped?” I said. “Why would anyone be tapping our phone?” “Just the job,” he said, comfortably. “The RCMP are bound to think these guys or their families are going to tell me something interesting, sooner or later.” But that means they hear all our private calls too?” “Part of the work,” he said. ‘You’ll get used to it…” But I never did.”

17- THE CATHEDRAL - ” Not so much a welcome, as an inspection. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, fitting into a new parish…’It’s a church, the cathedral. They give you the kiss of peace after the sermon. They’re supposed to mean it…The way they act as though you’re a tourist they’ve never seen before in their entire lives. Maybe it’s just British,” I sighed. I liked the stiff upper lip so much in theory but not when it seemed to be applied to me… it was probably just like cats. At first there’s a lot of hissing and spitting when a new one is introduced but sooner or later they forget.”

18- CHOIR STRIKES BACK- “I thought there wasn’t anything they could throw at me that I couldn’t take. I hadn’t imagined anyone would target the children…”I think that you’ve become a problem, somehow, to the choirmaster. Look at how you’re always asking questions, talking to the bishop, coming by when the boys are out in the yard? You’ve even quizzed the dean a time or two. The choirmaster’s probably afraid that sooner or later, you’ll write about him.’ ‘You sound like he’s got something to hide,” I said.

19-MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP - “By the Colborne street window, I had started the first [out of print] comic book section in Salterton. I loved everything about the well-drawn comic; its heft, bright inks, plots and portability. You could roll one up in your pocket and go sit under a tree…except I had two middle-aged black and white cats who liked to sunbathe in the boxes of comic books by the window. Ma, the eldest, slept on her back in a box of ducks (Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, Walt Disney Comics & Stories, Donald Duck Adventures). If an eager little hand reached in first without checking, there would be a swat…”

20- SHENANIGANS- “I’d put a sign on the door with our opening date, but I still hadn’t expected to see several people standing outside… The front yard was a sea of wet clay, the sort that gloms to your foot like quicksand…I’d put down a roll of woven grass matting which would sink you immediately into the mud, the moment you stepped on it. I opened the door, backed slowly towards the counter and sat down. One man with a long beard like an out of control rash, went immediately to the back wall… I looked at his long dark overcoat, remembering Abby Hoffman’s instruction from Steal This Book.’

21- KID COPS-“Staff only!” a woman yelled. “Wives are NOT part of this agency… you have to leave.” A murmur started as I got up slowly, feeling stupid, my face red…I started for the door, hoping this wouldn’t hurt Dick’s job…”I’d really like her to stay as my guest,” a quiet voice said from the other side of the room. Dr Benjamin Spock rose to his feet, unfolding his length as though he was hinged like a ruler. “Why don’t you come over here and sit by me?’…More like it, I thought. I got up and sashayed across the floor in the light of his warm smile. It was hard not to smirk.”

22- STOLEN BOOKS- “”Here I was again, democratizing another institution. I wondered if it would end in tears, as it had at the Cathedral…? The room was packed as the meeting began, everyone sitting on small metal folding chairs, some standing along the back. My throat was growing drier and drier…my adrenalin was pumping faster. I’d never done anything like this before. If I was leading the meeting, I would hate me… I got to my feet, quavering and waved my hand, as though a question period had been announced.”

23- PRISON- “Unfortunately the prison system was rethinking the whole guard image…if they started taking civilized, educated individuals from university, especially lots and lots of women, the public would have to take notice of how the system was trying to change…Dick filled in the application and did the written and then oral tests…’what would you do if an inmate escaped and took an officer hostage?’ ‘Shoot him,’ he was told to answer by former students. ‘Shoot him’ was evidently the right answer in most cases.”

24- CONVICTS- “The children and I had gone into Warkworth and Joyceville Penitentiaries to meet Icebox Todd who had killed his wife and stuffed her in a freezer. He made teddy bears in his spare time. Another con called Tony had killed his wife and her lover when he caught them together. “Tony’s going to get out soon,” Dick said. “You liked him, didn’t you? I’ve arranged to take him out on a pass” “He was okay,” I said. “Where are you going?” “Actually I thought he could stay with you in the shop.” Hmm. When I’d met him, he was safely locked up with big men in uniform only a few feet away…”

25- GUARDS- “Far worse than an affair, Dick fell in love with the prison system from the very beginning. I should have realized, given his background and nature, that a ‘something on the side’ for him, couldn’t be anything so mundane as a woman. He was there every waking moment. Eating meals, cooked by inmates, listening to war stories told by other guards at endless games of euchre, signing up for all the overtime he could get. If they’d let him work twenty-four hours a day, he was up for it.”

26- STRANGE SHOP- “[when the cat caught a mouse, I screamed]. Dick, waking up, wearing only a pair of briefs, grabbed the mouse by the tail, rushed downstairs, opened the front door and pitched the mouse into the darkness, forgetting that we lived on a busy downtown street. The mouse became airborne. Then there was a scream as if someone walking innocently along the sidewalk had been smacked by a flying rodent, flung by an apparently naked man from the door of that mysterious bookshop…the rumours began…What rites did we indulge in, once the shop was closed?”

27- MONSTERS IN PRINT- “We’ve been asked to produce the union newsletter” Dick said, …an opportunity to point out to management where they were going wrong, which of course they would then immediately correct with their apologies .”Graphics! I said…With no conscious thought, I knew I wanted to use the best in horror illustration…mad scientists, tearing the heart from the union, death raking the prison with his long scythe, black blob monsters rising from the ooze that was sinking the prison…It was probably a bad idea to entrust such a publication to a woman who was already unhappy with what the prison was doing to her husband.”

28-I GO INSIDE - “My assignment was to teach cataloguing to a team of inmates who would help me dismantle the schoolhouse library…I discovered the choosing had already been done on a first-come, first-served basis…They were…about the ages the boys from my group home would be now. I prayed that all of them were out of the joints…’if they decide they don’t like you, you haven’t got a chance,’ Dick told me the night before. ‘You can’t force them to work. They can make life miserable for you if they chose to, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it.”

29- CONWRITER- “There’s this con I talk to a lot on midnights, who’s writing a book,” Dick said. We were downtown, having breakfast before I opened the shop and he went home to sleep off his night shift. “What’s it about?” “His crime. Supposedly he killed his wife.” “Yeah,” I said. Wife killers with no wife to dampen the picture any more, had leeway to present themselves as real sweetie pies… After all, there was no one left around to contradict that impression… “I’m inclined to believe him,” Dick said. “But..” “What?’ I said. “You’re thinking that I should take a look at it?”

30- NEWSPAPER HEADLINES- “Family links choirmaster to suicide of teenage son,” the headline read on the front page. “Hierarchy at St Nicholas Cathedral accused of ‘religious, criminal neglect,” a subhead read. A side story said…”St Nicholas has ignored our warnings for 13 years.” it suggested the choirmaster had been sexually abusing boys, beginning as far back as 1977, the year we’d come to Salterton and the boys had begged to join the choir… the paper said that the committee that had hired Dick…and others I knew from the Cathedral, had been told about the choirmaster’s problems, even before we moved to Salterton.”

31- LEFT OUT- “At the door was a woman with a book to write down the names of attending parents…Her finger traveled negligently down a list of choirboy names, as though she knew what she’d find. “You didn’t have any boys in the choir,” she said. They had erased my boy’s names from the choir list. Were they going to get off that easy? My boys sang in the choir during the school year in 1977 and ‘78 up to the England trip.’ Nope. She closed the book…‘No record.’ ‘Try and prove it,’ she might as well have said. ‘This meeting is for choir parents only. You’ll have to leave.”

32-BACKSTORY- “The bookshop, in people’s minds, had a kind of authority. It was a place where you went to get information. Or in this case, to provide it, in case it was needed. I hadn’t expected the confidences…pedophilia was common at the Cathedral, was what their stories said. It went way back. You could almost call it a tradition… The church was mounting a vigorous defence, seeking to prove the quality of the boy’s parenting was at fault, rather than the minor inconvenience of a pedophilic choirmaster.” In the midst of this, Dick was stabbed in prison.

33- PICKETING- “If I had been given the column for any purpose at all, it was for such a time as this. Maybe even the boys being in the choir was so that, at a time like this, I’d be involved…Was it a good idea to take along a man who had been recently stabbed inside a prison? A man who hadn’t lived in the real world for the past several years? Wouldn’t this, at the very least, inflame his paranoia and unleash his adrenalin, not to mention putting his recovery back to go? But then, was there anything I could do, to stop him?

34- REACTION- “GIVE ME THAT!” the [vicar] bellowed…with one huge hand he grabbed my St Nicholas and the Dragon sign and broke it across his knee…’GO HOME!’ he yelled. Then he threw the pieces of my sign at my feet, turned and walked away… As I watched his departing back, all the vicars in literary history rose up in outrage. Trollop, Thackeray, Wodehouse, Holt, even Dibney. But this churchman didn’t seem aware of any tradition…this was my church, yet it seemed to have only that one message for me.”

35- PEDOPHILES-‘Last Crack At Jane Austen Before The 401′! (sign on my bookshop lawn). The author of the only book any of us parents could find on pedophilia, was Mary Wells who had written a government pamphlet on the problem. The Cathedral appointed her as a convener, to restore order. “An objective, experienced outsider was desperately needed before something awful happened. Would she understand? ..Our picket line was inflicting loss on the individuals of this congregation every day, driving down donations, humiliating them in the press, causing them anxiety about the future. We were pushing them to the wall and they were fighting back.”

36- AFTER- “It was February…we were invited to come forward, light a small white candle and stick it in a snowbank till waves of small flames circled the building…I stood alone for awhile, watching the huge crowd…finally I got in line and took a candle…there were many bodies jostling in the relatively narrow space…I felt a sense of peace as I bent down and lit my white candle from others in the snow bank.I had been part of what made this historic occasion happen…I set my candle down beside the others. ‘Oh no you don’t,’ a voice said behind me…she yanked my candle out of the snow…and threw it disdainfully over her shoulder into the darkness.”