It is still light this evening as I sit beside my candle and gaze through my lounge window. However, my thoughts are led to wider vistas than my modest front garden can provide. I am thinking beyond compact suburbia to more expansive scenes. I am remembering wide-ranging mountains capped with snow. Not the mountain ranges that my dear friend and inspiration Marcus Aurelius might have seen on his military campaigns: the Carpathians, the Tatras, or even the Buda Hills, which, though smaller, can be capped with snow too.
I am remembering the Canadian Rockies which provide the epic backdrop to the city of Vancouver, which I have recently visited once more. My thoughts have also turned to the Olympic mountains in Washington State in the U.S.A. This equally impressive mountain range lies on the misty horizon across the water from where I also stayed: a little town called Sidney on Vancouver Island, where my relatives live. My friend and I could see the mountains from the little balcony of our hotel suite, mysterious in the early haze of morning. We saw their grandeur more clearly when we were bobbing about in a boat on a tour around Victoria harbour.
Victoria is quite near to Sidney and despite being on Vancouver Island and therefore not on the mainland, is the capital of British Columbia. It has a nineteenth century colonial atmosphere, with its Royal Empress Hotel, named after Queen Victoria, whose statue stands imperiously outside the Parliament building by the harbour. The Parliament building is lit up at night – as are our own Houses of Parliament of course. However, as well as being floodlit, the outline of the building is traced by lines of lights too, making it look like a fairy castle or a Disneyland attraction, which contrasts strangely with its legislative dignity. I digress and I am being unkind as I like the city very much.
Indeed, on this recent trip, I realised how much the Island has become a part of me. Perhaps I have become aware of this because I last visited in July 2019, before the pandemic. Prior to that, I made visits nearly every year for 15 years or so. It was good to be back and my relatives are fine thanks. It was also good to show a friend around a little. I enjoy showing people around places I have visited before. Over the years I have learnt a great deal about the history of Victoria. This was because I became interested in the work of Emily Carr (1871-1945), the artist and writer who was born in Victoria and spent most of her life on Vancouver Island. Maybe showing him around also made me realise how attached I am to the place.
Because I spent so much time in Sidney, staying with my aunt in her apartment, I gradually became so attached to the sleepy retirement enclave of Sidney that I began to write stories about it several years ago. Or rather about the people who may have retired there. What might be the secrets from their past which they are now forced to face up to? Or the feelings of guilt or grief, remorse or regret that return to haunt them, eddying around their thoughts, like waves over a rock pool? What might be happening behind the placid exterior of the town? I called the collection ‘Driftwood’ after all the strange shaped logs that lie around on the beaches there. I’ve almost finished a (hopefully) final revision of the stories now and my next stage is to see how I can get them published as a collection, or even separately in magazines.
One of my reasons for starting this blog was to promote my writing. It is strange that only now, four years after I started publishing these meditations, I am finally mentioning ‘Driftwood’ in them. But then, there has been so much else to reflect upon over the last four turbulent years, hasn’t there? I will keep you posted about the future progress of ‘Driftwood’ in these pages no doubt in the future.
Of course, Sidney has changed since I was last there, nearly four years ago. Shops and restaurants have closed down and new ones have opened, as has been happening here in the UK. The pandemic seems to have drawn a line in the sand, hasn’t it? It has caused some businesses to go under and new ones have replaced them. In the same way, I sometimes wonder how some small businesses or independent cafes or eateries have survived through it all. I thought as much when walking around Sidney. But then, nothing is immutable, not even us. Yet, like the little town of Sidney, we change and yet we don’t change. We move on, often imperceptibly, and yet somehow we are the same person. Something retirement has taught me: just because our circumstances have changed, we don’t have to give up who we are. Retirement should enhance who we are.
Aside from new businesses emerging, new apartment blocks are going up everywhere. The town doesn’t seem so small now or so cozy. It had a ‘village’ atmosphere about it when I first went there in 2004. Now it is definitely a small town and growing. Things have moved on. And yet if you walk down the main thoroughfare, Beacon Street, at night, it is as quiet and sleepy as ever.
The streets are definitely quiet and sleepy in April, before the summer season starts, as everything closes around 9. Except, we discovered, the Dickens Pub at the top of the town. I think Charles Dickens would be pleased that despite the low season, conviviality was continuing in a pub named after him. Although somehow I can’t imagine him watching ice hockey games on the TV like some of the customers in the bar. He would be more interested in engaging them in conversation and observing the other customers casually but intently (as a possible inspiration for a character or story). However, as he was fond of games and pastimes, he may not have been averse to shooting a game or two of pool with some of the regulars.
Always observing everything and everyone around him, Dickens loved to walk the streets of London late into the night. It was a compulsion in him and of course his nocturnal rambles provided him with so much material for his novels and stories. I think he would find the streets of Sidney rather tame in comparison. Like me, he would have to imagine what was behind the silent facades of the properties. Dear me, I should not be linking myself to Dickens in a sentence! It is most immodest of me!
Sadly one of my favourite haunts, the Rum Runner bar and restaurant, right by the ocean, was closing the week I was there. It was a happy coincidence that I was visiting Sidney before it finally closed its doors. The Rum Runner (under a different name – The Cannery) has a story all to itself in my collection, and the story is coincidentally about its possible closure. Dickens would definitely have been at home there. He often frequented waterfront inns and pubs, though the ones he visited would have been far less salubrious than the Rum Runner, as is evident from the low dives along the Thames waterfront that appear in his novels.
I think he would have got on famously with Bill, the landlord, and would have commiserated with him heartily on the Rum Runner’s closure. No doubt he would have dashed behind the bar, juggled with a couple of lemons and immediately set to making his own rum and brandy punch to cheer Bill’s spirits. The recipe is mentioned in one of his letters and, indeed in ‘David Copperfield’. When David finds Mr Micawber at home in a melancholy mood, he asks him to make a bowl of punch and immediately Mr Micawber’s spirits soar as he begins to make the punch, ‘his face shining out at us out of the delicate fumes’. Perhaps Dickens would get Bill to join in to cheer him up. When I return to Sidney, I shall miss the Rum Runner.
My visit to Sidney has reminded me of how much change we have all been through in the last few years. I am no longer able to stay in my aunt’s apartment now, as she is in a care home. She is still very much alive and alert, aged 88! Her accommodation may have changed, but she hasn’t. There may have been many changes in and around Sidney, indeed, in our own lives, but there is so much that hasn’t changed. The Pacific ocean for one and the driftwood on the shore, blanched by the endless ebb and flow of the waves. And the mountains on the horizon shrouded in the morning mist.
And the stillness.
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Meditations of Neilus Aurelius 