Designing Dollars

Designing Dollars

I’m a Boomer, and I’m old enough to remember when the mud-brown two dollar bill with a view of Richmond, Quebec on the back was common currency. In fact, I have a framed twenty from the year of my birth, dated 1954. It’s a pale shade of green and looks like an American bill. The Queen on the front is obviously new at her job. On the back are pine trees shrouded in snow. Apparently, the first notes issued in the 1954 series are known as the “Devil’s Head” notes because of some perceived arrangement of the Queen’s hair, but I can’t find anything sinister on mine.

My Twitter™ profile says I’m a “pollster, actor and sailor” in that order. I’ve talked quite a bit about the acting in these pages, and about the sailing, but not much about the polling. Some of it is confidential, and most of the rest is boring unless you are obsessed and consumed by politics. Occasionally, though, there are interesting assignments.

In the late 90s, I worked on a project researching the design for the next generation of banknotes to succeed the Birds of Canada series (my favourite was the Snowy Owl, or Harfang de Neige, on the $50). They were due to be released in 2001, We were to go and talk to all the communities in Canada, and my job was, as usual, to go talk to the hardest to reach. My itinerary included First Nations reserves, communities north of the Arctic Circle and new Canadians in the cities where they land.

I put in a lot of travel that year. The new series of notes was to be called Canadian Journeys, and had to highlight Canadian arts and heritage. We were testing people and images to put on the bills, but we were also testing the new materials for the next series of bills, due to be released in 2011, and the ones you use today. Yes, we were testing that plastic back in the last century, because the Royal Canadian Mint doesn’t do anything quickly. That’s why we don’t have a Steve Fonyo bill. In any event, I was carrying a couple of hundred dollars in Australian currency with me, because they had just made the switch to plastic the year before, and it was all we had to show people.

I traveled west, I traveled north, I traveled by air and rental car (mostly rental car). I stayed in motels where they don’t get CNN. Here are a couple of the key things we learned:

- People expect the Queen to be on the money, but can’t quite remember what bills she is on. She’s never mentioned first as choice to put on a bill, though

- The first choice is always Terry Fox. Eager young First Nations teenagers at a boarding school in Northern Saskatchewan, a hotel meeting room full of Punjabis, Pilipinas, Kenyans and Grenadians, a group of HIV-positive patients in a hospice rec room, first class passengers in a Maple Leaf lounge, they all wanted Terry Fox on a bill. I’m puzzled, with this unanimity of response, and the fact he’s been dead for three decades, that he isn’t on the currency yet.

- The second choice is almost always Wayne Gretzky.  Even when it is explained the person being memorialized generally has to be dead (except the Queen), people think the Great One deserves a bill. I think any number of more iconic hockey players would precede Gretzky, even alive. Howe, Richard, Kennedy, etc.

- The most interesting idea we got was from several First Nations respondents. A series of bills commemorating great First Nations leaders, like Poundmaker, Tecumseth, Joseph Brant; even Louis Riel (which would be a fitting apology for his hanging).

The Mint was determined to put the Famous Five, Nellie McClung and her fellow campaigners on a bill. The $5 was an obvious choice, but that’s not how it worked out. They ended up on the $50 (at least a multiple of 5). This sounds well and good, the Famous Five were responsible for the “Persons” case that established women were persons and could vote.

I did some reading into Nellie McClung and the others. It turns out, by their own writing, they were all enthusiastic racists and bigots, and all believed in eugenics, the “science” of racial breeding. Nellie McClung herself called for the forced sterilization of the “mentally feeble”, criminals and even, on some occasions, immigrants of the less desirable sort. They all believed in restricting immigration to the white races, particularly the northern Europeans. Reading a little further, I found this interest in eugenics and racial cleansing was popular throughout the prairie populist movements. JS Woodsworth, founder of the CCF, was a believer. Tommy Douglas, sainted father of the NDP, wrote his thesis on forced sterilization. It appears the left wing appetite for social engineering runs deep.

In any event, a memo was passed up the chain to the Mint and was ignored. Despite this, they proceeded with the Famous Five. It lasted from 2004 until 2012, but not that many were printed after people started raising a fuss. If they’d asked me, I would have said let’s go back to the 1986 Birds of Canada series. No one can complain a Snow Owl is politically incorrect.

Smooth Sailing, Part 3

Smooth Sailing, Part 3

I’m a Boomer and a sailor, and I’m old enough to remember when America’s Cup yachts were made of wood. I’ve been talking about my adventures in boats in these pages, and I want to finish up here before I completely alienate the non-nautical readers.

In the last installment, I had bought a 38 foot Finnish motorsailer, all teak inside and out (though with a fibreglass hull, of course). My crew and I had discovered that the Passat, while a fine sea boat, was sluggish and unresponsive at slow speeds, heavy and overpowered when docking. We were trapped in our slip because of our fear of damaging other boats when landing (taking off was easy, always getting back in is hard).

Passat has a single screw, a full keel, weighs 8 tonnes, has a minimum speed of 3 knots and no brakes. Try driving that around a crowded parking lot. So, in season two, I begged, pleaded and bribed the Dock Committee chairman and got the perfect dock, an open side, not a slip, right near the entrance to the basin, that required no turning to land at. The chairman said he gave it to us because Passat is the prettiest boat at the club (she is), and he wanted visitors to see her first.

Our new mooring made a tremendous difference. We felt confident in going out, knowing we would be able to land without damage to our vessel or others. And we started taking trips. One of the first was to Port Dalhousie, across the lake. We set out on a beautiful sunny day with a snapping 10 knot breeze. Despite my fear of wind (I know I know, I’m a sailor and I’m scared of wind?), we hoisted sail for one of the first times and idled the engine. The next four hours were bliss, just us and a navy frigate (which my ship identification software said was a “private yacht”) for company. We paused at the deepest spot in the lake just to listen.

Seeing the south shore of the lake rise on the horizon had the feel of homecoming. The entrance to Port Dalhousie is between two long piers, the Old Welland Canal. We moored at the local yacht club, plugged in and walked into town for dinner. After that, we stayed up late watching movies on the iPad, and I stayed up even later listening to AM stations coming in from the southern US, gospel and talk and nuttiness.

The crew was up before dawn the next morning in a drizzle, casting off lines before I’d even made coffee. I motored out in my pyjamas, crew on deck doing all the wet work, and me warm and dry in the wheelhouse, As we emerged between the piers, the drizzle stopped and the mist loomed. About 3 miles out, the sun rose over the mist and outlined a lake freighter waiting for the canal. Soon we were surrounded by fog on all sides, only the sky and the sun visible, and it stayed that way all the way back to Toronto, until we saw the spire of the CN tower poking above the layer of mist.

We do oyster and champagne cruises on the side. $250 gets you and 3 friends a 2 hour cruise of the harbour, 3 dozen oysters and a couple of bottles of champagne. I can hold a small dinner party for 4. I can sleep 7 (with some crowding). I can sail with 12 legally. I can spend 3 or 4 days on the boat and have all the comforts of home.

Passat has made me very popular at the yacht club, she’s generally thought to be the prettiest boat we have, with her broad quarterdeck, fit for dancing a hornpipe, her teak decks and her clipper bow. I work on her, I live on her, and, now I have an easy dock to land on, I go out in her. Excuse me, I have to go now, sailing season is here…

Smooth Sailing, Part 2

Smooth Sailing, Part 2

I’m a Boomer and a sailor. If you’re my age, the first image you have of sailing is Jack Kennedy and a bunch of tow-headed kids on a big cutter, in winds I’d never go out in. I’m what’s known as a wind pussy, scared of anything over 8 knots, 10 knots max. I wrote earlier about my first boat, the Katherine Rose, a modest 22 footer I bought for $5000 on my 50th birthday. I sailed her happily for seven years as a “rubber band” sailor (out and back again). I started to get bored with the regular two hour day sailing.

Then something happened. My wife wanted to get me out of the house more. She suggested renting an office. I said, why not a floating office? We somehow convinced ourselves it made economic sense to buy a really big boat to use as my office, and as our cottage. I knew by now what I wanted. A motorsailer, with both substantial engine power, as well as vestigial sail power. A wheelhouse. A ketch. Lots of wood (not the hull, inside). Solid construction.

Much research led me to a Finnish motorsailer, the Nauticat 33, built from the 80s until today, very handmade, very crafty, 38 feet long overall. There were two available, one in Chicago and one in Texas. They were in high demand, and these two needed work. Still, it was going to be worth my while to put one of them on a flatbed and get it to Toronto.

Then fate intervened. Just up the lake, 40 miles in the other direction from where my first boat had come from, a clean 1986 model of this boat came on the market. It was more than I wanted to spend, but it was beautiful and well-kept; a previous owner, a German, had obsessively labeled every valve, through-hull, switch and connector in the boat. Every spare part he had ever replaced was still aboard. It was called Passat, or trade wind in German.

I had to sell the Katherine Rose, not so much for the money (after 7 years, she was pretty used up) but to get her off my mooring and out of the club. It’s very hard to dispose of a boat in Toronto, and you’re not allowed to sink it. After lowering the price to $2000 all in, motor, cradle, sails, and getting a couple of nibbles, Manny called me. Manny had long oiled hair,  tattoos of tattoos on his tattoos, and a tattoo of a cross on a chain to go with his cross on a chain. Manny has a set of gold teeth he occasionally wears. Manny is not what you’d call yacht club material, and I think he makes his money in sublegal ways, because he paid me for the Katherine Rose with twenty crisp sequential $100 bills.

I did sea trials with Passat on a day with a 20 knot offshore wind, so I never even touched the sails. The next day, delivery day, the wind was just as blustery, and it was right on our stern going back to Toronto. And once again, we set out in a strange boat with a motor we knew nothing about to travel 40 nautical miles to Toronto. I forgot, but this was something I had done with the Katherine Rose and swore I would never do again.  It turned out later, the alternator didn't work and we were running on the last of our battery power. Passat has an autohelm, which keeps her on a set compass course by hydraulically adjusting the rudder. With 20 knots of wind and 4 foot swell on our bum, we were being swung all over the place, and the autohelm was working overtime to keep up.

The trip ended up uneventfully, and we made a perfect landing at our mooring buoy in the yacht club basin. Several weeks were spent modernizing the conveniences and sanding the decks. Air conditioning, heat exchanger, new stereo system, wifi, water heater, BBQ, new shower, TVs, iPad, all the things needed to survive a Toronto summer. I started spending nights on the boat. Other days, I would get down to the yacht club at 10 AM, work through lunch (BBQ!), and sleep in the afternoon in the aftercabin on the double berth, rocking gently and watching the reflection off the water shining on the cabin roof. Home by 6 PM in time for cocktail hour and dinner. Just like an office.

Funny thing, though. My sailing buddy and I didn’t go out that much.  A bigger boat, harder to handle, more comfortable to stay moored, and we were sucked in. We were well on our way to becoming one of those big yachts in the basin that never went out. One of our problems is maneuverability - Passat has a single screw and a full keel, which is the worst combination for turning ability. She weighs 8 tonnes and has no brakes. She can’t go any slower than 3 knots. The only thing she has in her favour mooring wise is a reverse gear that will snap your neck.

We fouled our mooring buoy once, wrapping the line around the screw. That required extensive diving, stress and fuss, and led to me getting a dock instead. The dock was inside the basin, though, nestled among other docks and harder even than the mooring to get into. We made complete fools of ourselves several times the first season trying to land, but fortunately, we didn’t bump any other boats.

So far, one season into owning Passat, the office thing was working out fine. It was the boat part that wasn’t really happening. More on this later

Smooth Sailing, Part 1

Smooth Sailing, Part 1

I’m a Boomer, and the first movie I remember seeing (in 1959) was the Cine-Miracle documentary Windjammer, which I saw at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It made an impression that lasted all my life, that of ships and the sea. I bought a sailboat for my 50th birthday. It was actually a fit of pique that led to it.

My wife and a friend announced they were going to an open house at a local yacht club, because the friend’s boyfriend was a member. I bristled. I had learned to sail at school, fancied myself the old salt, not my wife. While she and her friend were gone, I went online and found a 22 foot mini-cruiser with a drop-keel for $5000. I’d bought it before they came home.

I joined the yacht club they had visited, and went down the lake 30 miles to pick up my new purchase. I had learned to sail on a relatively small lake, and Lake Ontario is rather a large lake, but that didn’t stop me. Youngest brother and I drove down the coast with two five gallon containers of gas, and picked up the boat. We then proceeded to motor off to Toronto, 30 miles as the crow flies, at about 4 knots, with a 9 horsepower motor we were completely unfamiliar with, in a 30 year old boat we didn’t know. Years later, I thought I’d never do that again if I know what I know now about what can go wrong on the water. A few years after that, I did it again, only on a much grander scale.

I kept that boat, the Katherine Rose, for 7 years. It slept 4, but that meant one adult and 3 kids.  I slept on it occasionally, but it was mostly used for day-sailing, and I did that a lot. In season, I’d go out about three times a week, far more often than the big expensive yachts that surrounded me in the anchorage. I had a succession of crew. Cameron used to come after his afternoon shift as a restaurant manager, then he got too busy. I met a wonderful man on Facebook called Patrick, the most polite person I’ve ever encountered. We sailed for two years. He was the perfect crew. He was mostly unemployed, all he wanted to do was sail, and I could turn the tiller over to him with confidence, because he was a much better sailor than I. He let me do what I liked best, which was to let someone else do the sailing while I enjoyed the view.

Patrick died after two years, of stomach cancer. We had his memorial at the yacht club, and a few weeks later, in the early spring, we sailed out and sprinkled his ashes on the lake he loved so much. He had done a very fancy ropework handle for the ship’s bell, and I had that to remember him by, but his wife gave me a small portion of his ashes to bury in the keel of the Katherine Rose, so he’d always be with the boat.

My friend Jamie started to ride his motorcycle in from Niagara to crew with me. He loves two things, riding his motorcycle on the highway and sailing, so the combination was perfect for him. We sailed two or three times a week and had some adventures. We got caught out in a line squall that laid her over on her beam ends then rocketed her to 6.3 knots by the GPS, the highest speed she ever achieved. We got squeezed coming into harbour by a big steel schooner, which was on our weather beam and kept pushing us to leeward into the seawall. The skipper sat on top of the wheelhouse laughing at us. We played dodge’em with the ferries in the Inner Harbour.

Jamie and I settled into a routine that lasted several years. Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sail off the mooring (never using the motor unless absolutely necessary), sail out into the wind on a close reach, turn around after an hour and a half, sail back with the wind on a broad reach, and sail to the mooring, no motor. “Rubber band” sailors, out and back. We had, improbably, turned a passion into a routine and a routine into a rut. Time for a change….

Acting Out

 Acting Out

I’m a Boomer, and on the day I was born, Song of Saskatchewan, starring Allan Ladd and Shelly Winters, was playing at Loew’s Cinema in Toronto. That night,  tenor Jussi Bjorling missed his concert at Massey Hall (probably, in fact almost certainly, because he was too drunk to sing). These were the Canadian theatrical highlights in Toronto when Boomers were being born.

Among the many jobs and careers I’ve pursued, acting is the one that has lasted the longest. I got my union card in 1982, more than 30 years ago, and I’ve kept it up ever since, even during the 90s and 00s, when I was far away from the biz in corporate purgatory.

I was a spotlight hog at high school and won drama awards. I went to a college with a good drama program and a state-of-the-art theatre, modeled on Stratford’s (they all were in the 70s). I played some good roles there including Tom in Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, a role just designed for a pompous post-teen. I did a better job as MacDuff in the Scots play, learning how to be still and silent on stage.

I left school without a degree, because I was working at acting jobs in the city, and didn’t see the need to study in the abstract what I was doing in the here-and-now. I did a small part in a terrible Canadian tax shelter film starring Kirk Douglas when he was at a low point in his career. This was (although I didn’t know it at the time) my first round of Six Degrees of Stanley Kubrick (who of course had directed Douglas in Spartacus and Paths of Glory).

I did an episode of an old chestnut, Family Court. It was live improv TV. They gave you the first line of the scene and the last line and you had to improv the middle. The day it was broadcast, I brought home a girl I fancied for tea. I casually turned on the TV, and the timing proved to be propitious, because I got lucky. I was sold on acting from that day on. It was also the easiest money I had ever made.

A few years later, I found myself in Mexico, out of money and almost out of ideas. I ended up in Cuernavaca, a beautiful holiday town in the hills with a substantial expatriate population, most of them either retired CIA field officers or superannuated socialist veterans of the Spanish Civil War. They used to drink together in the Zocalo. This was fertile ground for an actor on the make.

I got a job with the local Canadian/US expat arts centre. We rented a church hall and made our own stage lights. We had casting calls. We produced about a dozen plays in two years, all starring and put on by the expatriate residents. I put together a one-man Shakespearean show with a girl I knew, a guitarist. I did the spoken bits, about a dozen of them, men and women, funny and dramatic, and she sang Shakespearean songs to her own tunes. Very refined, and actually pretty good. We toured that all over Mexico, playing Universities and getting honourary degrees in return.

By the time I was back in Canada, I had decided to be a struggling actor in Toronto. It turned out I didn’t have to struggle much. Five months in a long-running play, then auditioning for lots of commercials, many of which I got. It got to the point where casting agents were asking for my “type”, but not asking for me.

I worked on that icon of Canadian TV, a rite of passage for every actor, The Littlest Hobo, playing second banana to a German shepherd. I worked with Keenan Wynn, another degree from Kubrick (Dr Strangelove). I got one US commercial that ran nationally for a year. That’s a BIG payout and I lived off the residuals for that year. When that came to an end, I turned to camera crew stand-in work, a little-known job in movie-making that can earn you a CEO’s salary for just standing around. A recurring role as a policeman in a cop thriller rounded out the fat years.

After a corporate hiatus (when we got married, my wife and I flipped a coin to see who would give up show business and get a real job, and I lost) which lasted 20 years, it became clear to me that I would be a better older white male than most of the older white male actors I was seeing on TV. I dusted off my union card, got an agent and started auditioning again.

Work came quickly. A worldwide Mcdonald’s commercial that kept playing and playing and paying and paying. I’d get cheques for runs in Australia, Thailand, England. My commercial traveled more than I ever did, and I traveled a lot. There is a definite niche for male actors in their 50s and 60s - erectile dysfunction aids, walk-in baths, reverse mortgages, no-medical life insurance, you’ve seen them all.

When I was working 30 years ago, I was described as brash. Now I’m 60 I get creepy roles. A motel manager nastier than Norman Bates, a syphilitic murderer, a shapeshifter in an alternate universe, a sketchy horse trainer, a mad presidential advisor.

The work isn’t steady, a few times a year. But it’s always fun, and I enjoy doing something I know how to do well, like remembering my lines and hitting my marks. I wish life were more like that.

Good Eats

 Good Eats

I’m a Boomer, and when I was growing up, brown bread was exotic. My mother was a child of the depression and cooked everything she made from the basic ingredients. They weren’t always premium ingredients, either. We kept guinea pigs, and they lived in a big cage in the kitchen where they happily whistled all day. Mum talked the grocer into giving her the lettuce leaves they stripped off the outside of the heads of lettuce when they arrived at the store. For the guinea pigs, she said. Soon, she was taking home boxes of it, because she was feeding it to her family, too. Not because of need, you understand, we were quite comfortable, just because she was, well, cheap. Good food, just not fine food.

My dad would bring home Brie and Boursin and Stilton, and he actually dined in restaurants (which my mother rarely did) because he traveled, but he drank plonk, proudly. He kept the jug (always a jug, that kind of wine) at his feet, and dispensed it to the table from there. Dinners at our house were always loud, happy, raucous and full of disputation, and always delicious (although you might find a twig in your stew). One evening, at Christmas, my dad and a couple of us met a school bus full of long haired kids in the city, and he asked them all out for dinner at our farmhouse in the countryside. He gave my mum about 2 hours warning. She made a huge chili, warmed crusty bread in the oven, and I don’t think she even thought it strange.

I had to develop my own taste for fine food after I left home. I couldn’t afford to eat fine food, but I always ate good food. Homemade chili with lots of veg, lots of Bolognese sauce and fresh pasta, wokked veg in soy sauce, health food store bulk peanut butter, fresh rye bread from the Jewish bakery (boy, was that a revelation for a goy from the country like me).

When I lived in Mexico, I ate on the street as most city folk do, because the food is so good and fresh, and cheap. Liver and potato tacos with a glass of tamarind juice, fire-roasted onions from a grill in the Zocalo, rice and beans with fried fish and lime, refried beans and scrambled eggs, all of it healthy and fresh.

When I started making money, I started buying asparagus, steak, and going out to restaurants. I started to learn about Japanese food (not sushi, even the Japanese don’t eat much sushi, they know it can be toxic), Greek food and, especially, French food. Not Cuisine Minceur, either; fully sauced Escoffier cuisine. It's remarkable when I think about it how recently it was impossible to get a real French meal in Toronto.

I moved into steak in a big way in my 30s and moved out of it in my 50s. I’m not a vegetarian, ethical or nutritional, but the prospect of a big ol’ slab o’ meat doesn’t tickle my tastebuds anymore. I like the way meat is used in Mexico, as a dressing on the main meal, rather than the main meal itself.

The best thing in the world, I’ve decided, though I’ve never eaten Ortolans, is foie gras. It’s basically a cross between chocolate and filet mignon and utterly decadent. I like its self-sufficiency, it comes in its own fat, and cooks by itself, nothing else is needed. Other things I like are oysters, steak tartare and snails. None of this will my wife eat, and she barely eats chicken.

One thing I believe strongly in is Michael Pollan’s abjuration to “Eat food, not too much, mostly green”. I don’t use nutritional supplements or vitamins (and my long suspicion that they’re useless is just now being confirmed by researchers). I don’t believe in breaking food down to its constituent parts. If you want Beta-Carotene, don’t take a pill, eat carrots.

The other thing that’s changed is the amount I eat. I used to pack it in hoping to stave off future want. Now I like my dinner airplane-sized. In fact, I always liked airline food (at least in business class). The tiny steak, the petite potatoes, the little brownie, loved it. But back then, I was drinking cognac with dinner and smoking after. It’s been a while since I flew business class.

On my 60th birthday, I took a few friends to a French bistro which serves both foie gras and steak tartare. The foie gras was cold, and too small, and the steak tartare was middling, but dinner was fine, because of good company. Next time, I’ll sear my own foie gras and chop my own sirloin and have company over to my house, where we’ll be raucous. Maybe I’ll buy a jug of wine, not for me, just to keep at my feet.

Flying High

Flying High

I’m a Boomer, born long enough ago that the first time I flew was on a TWA Superconstellation, a sleek propeller plane with triple tails. I wore a jacket and tie, so did everyone else. The Superconstellation has been gone for half a century, so has TWA and no one wears a tie to fly nowadays except the pilots. That was the first adventure in a lifetime of flying.

I have exactly one item on my bucket list (a package actually); I want to fly First Class on an Airbus A380 to Paris, take the Chunnel to Southampton and return on the Queen Mary 2. Some A380s have separate individual cabins in first class, each with a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom with a shower.

I always thought the A380 would make the ideal flying cruise ship; big enough to accommodate about 100 passengers in luxurious comfort. With its 2 decks, dining rooms and lounges could be upstairs and bedrooms below. The plane would travel at night and park on the tarmac at exotic locales by day. There must be enough people with enough money in the world to make at least one of these flying cruise ships possible.

This harks back to the real golden age of air travel, the late 30s. This was the era of the Zeppelin Hindenburg, with it’s first class dining room, ranks of private cabins, catwalks inside the envelope, an observation deck on top and a smoking room - yes, on an airship filled with flammable hydrogen gas, they had a smoking room. It had an ashtray on a table in the middle of the room with a vacuum in it, designed to pull all sparks out of the airship. The Hindenburg came to its explosive end in 1937.

Around that time, Pan Am was flying the Pan Am Clippers on the pacific route to Manila and China, and to Rio in the south. The original Clippers, built by Martin, later by Boeing, were commodious seaplanes filled with luxurious comforts. A dining room, a galley, private sleeping cabins and, once again, a smoking room.

If there is a through line here, it is that I like two things while flying; smoking and sleeping, neither of which are really possible anymore. I’m a champion sleeper, I can sleep anywhere, even the dentist’s chair, so sleeping on a cramped airplane isn’t a problem. Staying awake for 7 hours without smoking, though, isn't fun.

Here’s the deal. Apart from the dreadful fire on the tarmac in Cincinnati in 1983, when Air Canada flight 797 burned, killing Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers, smoking on airplanes has not caused any fatal incidents. In the 70s and 80s, air was circulated about 20 times more frequently than it is now in aircraft; it’s expensive to do. That’s why you get headaches now, and didn’t used when flying 20 years ago. Smoking wasn’t a problem when air was circulated that much. Another factor that led to the end of smoking was the time it took to empty the ashtrays between flights - a definite money loser.

I can’t complain; I did a lot of flying in business class in the 80s when it was still a premium service and smoking was allowed. My usual routine was a Bloody Caesar as soon as the drinks cart rolled, red wine with what was usually an exquisite little dinner, then lots of cognacs and cigarettes until we landed. I still have a complete Air Canada dinner service I occasionally set out for meals I eat alone. This libidinous approach to business class has its dangers though; I once arrived at Edmonton (Nisku International Airport, it's called) to find I was drunk, had a large rental car waiting and a 30 km drive into the city ahead of me. I took a cab.

One of my other early flying adventures was my first trip to Europe, in 1966 when I was 12. I went with my best friend, an older girl, and we flew Icelandic Airways, at $170, the cheapest transatlantic ticket before or since. They flew Bristol Britannias, lumbering old four engine turboprops, and they had to stop in Iceland to refuel. The plane was deafening, and it was full of recent immigrants returning home, babies, goats for all I know. Because of the noise and discomfort, the brandy was free and plentiful, even for me. Thanks to this trip, I can cross Iceland off my bucket list, having deplaned and eaten breakfast there.

I don’t fly anymore. The whole exercise has become cattle-transport, demeaning and dehumanizing. I’ve been most of the places I wanted to go, I'm happy at home, and the cooking's better these days.