A Catalogue of Things I Neglected to Mention:

• seeing a pickled giant squid in the storeroom of the Natural History Museum

• meeting one of wizards from the upcoming Harry Potter movie

• the gift of a Maltese guidebook from a dying man

• unwrapping Abdu’l-Baha’s reading glasses

• a newfound addiction to scones with cream and jam

• eating humous and carrots with an actress from Atonement

• the scent of boiling candied peanuts

• a sudden poke from a patient and the comment, “you’re very white!”

• backseat driving on the other side of the road

• Golder’s Green on a Saturday morning (you might as well be in Israel)

• discussing George III’s blue urine with his doctors

• galloping Yorkshire hares - they were the size of dogs!

• BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 3, BBC 4

• having a patient yell at me when I told her the date

• minding the gap. Always minding the gap.

• strolling above the tree-tops at Kew Gardens

• attempting to cure loneliness by a hearty walk and finding myself hopelessly lost in Hampstead Heath. In the rain. “I was molested there,” my co-worker told me.

• crossing Abbey Road at dusk

• James Herriot’s picture books come to life at a Yorkshire country fair

• looking like an idiot because I don’t understand British terms

• looking like an idiot because people can’t understand what I’m saying because of my Canadian tongue. “It’s a shark’s tooth” “a shrik’s what??” “a shark’s tooth. the tooth of a shark.” “what’s a shirk?”

Hungry for Heritage

A young Kentucky man once told me, “You don’t have an accent, you sound like the people on tv”.

I felt cheated. A bird robbed of a song.

I thought I had come to terms with being a Euro-mutt, a world citizen, grafting instead a family tree which blooms both apples and guavas. Hibiscus and thistles. My coat of arms would bear a narwhal and warthog. Or those mythological creatures that used to border maps to represent what had yet to be discovered.

I hadn’t realized how hungry I was for heritage until I was in a Welsh gift shop with my parents, mesmerized by a spoon. Welsh suitors would give their sweethearts spoons with intricately carved handles which bore different messages such as "I shall look after you" or "let's go away together". Even though I don’t carry any Welsh blood I fiercely wanted it to be mine.

I'd also felt this pang of hunger when I stood on a train platform in Newport and heard Welsh spoken for the first time. I had to pick my jaw off the floor; the unexpected sounds of the greyhound consonants all racing after a lone rabbit vowel. Hungry too when I flipped on my little black and white tele for a bedtime story and came across the story of St. Kilda and its lost island inhabitants -- men whose ankles thickened and toes curled in order to better scale the cliff faces and hunt sea birds. Until these moments I had never truly realized that white people, English people, were once primitive too. And we have all been colonized by brand names and parking lots.

When I arrived in Edinburgh for a weekend with Alison, I thought “now this is the Mecca and Medina of my ancestry -- I know part of me is from these hills and crags!”. But Edinburgh was expecting me, with family tartans and clan crests in every shop, its pipers and plaid-pantsed museum guides. Signs hollered “Family histories here! 10 pounds!”. Alison said she wished she had a clan to cling to, but as I bought a tea towel emblazoned with Frasier familial pride, I might as well have picked any of them.

But one thing did fit. The Frasier motto. Je suis pret.

People say “I’m ready” when they distinctly aren’t ready and they just want to convince you that they are. My mom says it. All. The. Time. Once in a hotel, I badgered mum about the tick tock time as she was getting out the shower and she looked at me as if I was being totally daft and said, “but I’m ready!”. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing.

I'm here...

I've been absent from writing this blog because I've finally -- FINALLY -- gotten into the wards. It is terrifying. It is electrifying. Watching someone grasp a 500 year old Egyptian figurine of the goddess Bastet, look at you piercingly and demand your views of death and the nature of souls is not a boring experience. I've experienced St. Elmo's fire.

Late at night, with Mrs. Andrew's homemade bead spread pulled up tight to my chin, my brain burns and sleep is hard to come. Last night they aired a three minute documentary on channel 4 about a man who lived in a flat with 100 birds. One still frame showed him sleeping in his armchair, splattered by bird poop, snoring to the symphony of his pets and the constant fluttering of wings. That's what my brain's been like; inspired by the patients I've visited, my thoughts are a flurry of questions I thought I had long laid to rest. I wrestle with myself.

One of my loan boxes contains a crescent, icelike piece of agate. My notes tell me that in some traditions agate was believed to heal scorpions stings and snake bites. And even still thunder and lightning. At first I could imagine it, a brave silhouette grasping the rock to the crackling sky, pleading for the war of the heavens to stop. But perhaps it stills a storm of another kind and would be best held, clutched against our breastbones.

Yoda at the Opera

I went to the opera.

No one cried.

But while waiting for the balcony to open I sat next to an older lady who highly recommened the production of Der Rosenkavalier.

"I'll try to go," I said.

"Try!" She shrieked. "You don't try! You do it!"

And now I am a operatic Jedi master.

Bones

I saw a grown man weep at a musical.

Last night I sauntered off to Queen's Theatre, sat in the "stalls", and waited for Les Miserables to begin. I had been waiting since I was 14. Behind me sat bickering, giggling teen sisters, their mother and their grandmother, whose running commentary erased my loneliness. "One of the actors is from S Club 7!", one shrieked, divulging valuable information I would otherwise have never learned because I hadn't bought a program (and I thought of you, Yolande & Lise!). Soon a mumbling man sat next to me and proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes talking to himself while he texted someone at the speed of smoke signals (I can say this because my texting abilities are even slower -- I might as well tie a message to a tortoise!). As the curtain rose, he began to hum. This went on throughout. the. entire. play. A little bar of music here, a little there.

I wanted to smack him.

"I haven't seen this before!", I held back from hissing.

Several songs later it dawned on me. He wasn't humming because he wanted to piss off the young, Canadian, unpaid museum studies intern who had emptied her pockets to be here. No! He was humming because he simply couldn't contain himself. When a stark white light shone on Jean Valjean to indicate that he had given up the ghost I heard a sniff and turned to see the raccoon of his eyes silver and iridescent, like the inside of a sea shell. He was weeping.

To see a stranger so moved makes them hardly a stranger. Like stealing a look at another’s x-ray.

It’s been a week of seeing the bones of things. On Friday, mum and pops arrived, their new gortex jackets crinkling. After a hell-raising train ride to York (hell-raising simply because my family is too used to traveling in chaotic places that we don't know how to behave in industrialized places; picture my mother and I running, RUNNING, down the platform to the last car where we were forced to leave our luggage, frantically trying all the doors we could find -- well I was trying different doors, mom was stuck unknowingly trying to get into the engine -- and then picture suitcases being thrown from the train and us wiping our brows, so proud we had gotten our bags before the train continued on to Scotland. Picture the locals laughing. And the train staying on the platform for an additional, relaxed 5 minutes, our panicked hurry completely irrational and unnecessary) we arrived in our refurbished stable of a cottage and stared at the James Herriot landscape. And sighed.

The following morning we trekked down a cliff to a beach for fossil hunting, my parents’ blossoming passion. It’s like a game of Where’s Waldo, only Waldo is a few million years old. We sat on a rock and ate our sandwiches and I drank my dandelion and burdock soda. And after sitting still long enough, the fossils started to appear. I’d never found an honest-to-goodness fossil before and then I stumbled upon one the size of a fist. I held in my palms the marrow of time. I can’t even conceive of how long ago my fossilized ammonite had been fleshy, alive and breathing - I have a hard enough time imagining life before the internet.

Skin tight from salt air and sun, we drove to Whitby, a veritable anthill of tourists, to seek out the ruins of a hilltop abbey we had seen from a distance. Neither discouraged by the staircased hike, nor the admission price, nor the “salty sea dogs” event that was encouraging children to scream and whack each other to smithereens with foam swords, we stood there, in the remaining ribs of the abbey. Staring through vaulted windows stain glassed with blue skies. And it felt like we were amidst the bones of a prayer.

War and Heavy Boots; Put the Kettle On

I have spent the last few days thinking about death and war. And it gives me heavy boots, as Oskar from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would say.

The National War Museum in Ottawa is the worst museum I’ve ever been to (ooh, don’t hold back, Sonjel!). When, back in blustering March we trekked out to Ottawa to check out their museum scene I thought that maybe I didn’t like it because it was cold. And I was tired. And I hadn’t eaten all day. This weekend I visited the Imperial War Museum and I spent more time there than in any of the other museums I have visited to date. And I didn’t see even get to the special exhibit about James Bond! With what’s-his-face’s “bloodied” shirt from the last 007 movie!

Under the guise of being overwhelming, traumatic, and confusing, like war, Ottawa’s museum bombards you with text, images, artefacts and interactives. In their defense everything they said in one official language, they had to repeat in the other BUT I think that in their urgency to their visitor everything all at once, they left me wanting to read/watch/listen to nothing. And to just get out. And never, ever come back.

The Imperial War Museum is also overwhelming and traumatic but the interpretation is simple, slim and digestible. And I (who am probably the world’s worst museum visitor because I hate reading text panels) read. A lot. Through the use of lighting and colour, massive blown up photographs, age restricted exhibits, and few words, they say little and in doing so, say a lot. Perhaps most striking were the black rooms describing the Holocaust and the sudden appearance of a bight room and a large model of Auschwitz that was completely, blazzingly white. My heart was wrenched.

My theory is that maybe if war had occurred on Canadian soil, then perhaps our war museum would be more effective. Every year when Remembrance Day rolls around there are countless editorials and news stories about why we need to remember, and how we are going to remember, the Canadians who have died. Our artefacts of the first and second world wars are an absence, a loss, a hole. To paraphrase Michael Ondaatje’s words, Canada has been “wounded without the pleasure of a scar”. And so the wars, especially the Great War, are distant, the material of history textbooks, and barely relevant to our lives and we spend out time sidestepping the subject in order to be politically correct and inoffensive.

Britain has a scar. Mrs Andrews, my landlady, distinguishes her anecdotes with what was before the war, during the war, and after the war. And maybe it’s because I just watched Atonement and I can’t get it out of my head that I think war has affected this country more, and is therefore in greater need of telling that story effectively. Am I being ignorant and arrogant?

All the really well-done exhibits I’ve seen recently are about dying. At the British Museum is a fabulous patchwork exhibit called “Living and Dying”. In one big room they display themes such as “sustaining each other”, “coping with death”, and “diving the future” by placing artefacts from all over the world in juxtaposition of each other. At the Wellcome Collection (which was the most bizarre museum I have ever been to, take a look http://www.wellcomecollection.org/) I saw an exhibit of large black and white photographs of terminally ill patients. Side by side are a photograph taken shortly before the moment of death and taken shortly afterwards. No one said a word. We all had heavy boots.

“I’ll put the kettle on”, the Brits would say, as their cure for every malady. Mrs. Andrews checks on me constantly, “are you alright? are you lonely?”, she asks. I keep busy, I tell her. And I drink a lot of tea.

Weekend at Oxford

I have been seduced, I have seen the Disneyland of higher thought: Oxford.

No where else have I seen a “new” college that was “only” 600 years old, grandiose buildings around every corner, lawns that are precisely manicured into checker-boards for sheer aesthetics (tut-tut if you think about walking on them), and lush green spaces as wide as a smile. Oh, and people having sex in a public park. That was not expected.

Sex in broad daylight in the middle of a park aside, it was a weekend of refinement. Lita and Geoff took me out for tea. Not tea like a bobbing bag in a paper cup but for real loose-leaf tea at tea time. There were scones, light and warm. And jam. And clotted cream. A ceremony I would repeat every day of my life if I could. They were delicious, not just the scones, but Lita and Geoff.

I’d never met Geoff before and I hadn’t seen Lita since the wedding, “seen” being a massive misnomer because I didn’t really get to see much through the chaos. And yet once I met Geoff, it felt as if I had known him because he is such a perfect compliment to Lita. Like jam and clotted cream.

A visit to Oxford was exactly what I needed. Because my work is very self-directed and because I’ve been spending a good portion of my time at my desk, amidst drawers of taxidermied mice and amber-coloured jars of “pickled” specimens, reading until my eyes roll back into my head, there has been ample opportunity for quarter life crises. Am I doing the right thing being here? Am I doing the right thing pursing my masters degree in museum studies? Will I be sufficiently qualified to work at the Baha’i World Center? What am I going to eat for lunch? Oh look, a pickled bat!

Yes, a pickled bat. My boss is a dual citizen; she lectures in the biology department of UCL (University College of London) and is also the deputy director of the campus’ museums and collections (they have three public museums and about 14 departmental collections). Her office is in the biology department. And so is mine. And I won’t lie, I love it.

The trip to Oxford was an affirmation. Believe it or not fellow M.MSt-ers, even the masters students at Oxford sometimes complain bitterly about their programs. After walking along the commons (which makes the Halifax commons something to ridicule and spit on) barefoot with Lita, things began to feel much better. And she and Geoff fed me such good food! And they took me punting! I thought punting was kicking a football -- not exactly what I’d like to spend a morning doing -- but it’s not. Think of the gondolas of Venice. That’s punting. And I’m not very good at it; the boat would have moved faster if it was being towed by a minnow. Lita, however, is a master punter. She can outmaneuver river-hogging boats, dodge branches and parallel park.

I calmed down too when we watched Geoff’s team row, zipping down the river like a water bug. The highlight of the weekend was definitely watching an ignorant punter idle in the middle of the river and do nothing about the oncoming water-slicing boat. It was just like America’s Funniest Home Videos. The rowers “braked”, time moved like molasses, the two collided, and the shirtless punter was sent into the murky, green river. He was fine. At least for the time being. Maybe in a month’s time he’ll discover a third nipple. And on the topic of third nipples, I say goodnight!