HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2005-12-01, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2005. PAGE 5.
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Life can be a ditch...
He’s an almost painfully average bloke,
is Hugh Sawyer. A 32-year-old Anglo
Saxon bachelor who works as a clerk
in a large auction house in London, England.
He starts his mornings, Monday through
Friday, the way tens of thousands of other
office drones do.
He gets up, performs his ablutions, grabs a
quick bowl of cold cereal, slips into a business
suit and embarks on his dreary train commute
to work.
Well, there is one small difference between
Hugh Sawyer’s daily routine and the rest of us.
When you and I rise in the morning, it’s
usually from a bed in a bedroom.
When Hugh Sawyer gets up he rolls out of a
ditch in rural Oxfordshire. Really. Not even a
tent. He has a swatch of tarpaulin he strings
from the trees if it looks like rain. Otherwise
it’s just Hugh and the owls and other things
that go bump in the night.
He has a sleeping bag and -a camp stove,
some rudimentary supplies stashed in a couple
of garbage bags — and that’s about it.
Mind you, this is not a lifetime commitment
from Hugh.
He only plans to do it for one year.
Why?
“I want to make people think about how
much they consume that is not necessary,”
says Sawyer. “I am trying to prove that it’s
possible to do everything you normally do,
maintaining a full existence, while cutting
back.”
I too have slept rough in my life, but seldom
by choice and not for long. I’ve slept on the
beach in Barcelona and in fields and
woodlands through Scotland, England and
France - but I had good excuses. I was young
and stupid. And broke.
Later, when I became a working stiff like
Spin doctors need help
Premier Dalton McGuinty has called on
almost everyone but Debbie Travis to
help spruce up his government’s image,
but it needs more than a paint job.
The Liberals are concerned because they
have not done well in polls and in the most
recent were only slightly ahead of the
Progressive Conservatives under their
relatively new leader, John Tory. McGuinty
personally was barely a whisker in front of
Tory.
McGuinty has appointed an executive
director of communications, Jim Warren, who
knows a public relations nightmare when he
sees one, having performed the same role for
the erratic former Toronto mayor, Mel
Lastman.
Lastman’s gaffes included shaking hands
with a Hell’s Angel in full regalia outside a
hotel where the criminal gang was holding a
convention, deliberately trying to look as
respectable as the Kiwanis, and assuring him
the city welcomes tourists.
Lastman became a laughing stock when he
called in the armed forces after Toronto had
two feet of snow and offended visible
minorities by joking that his wife wanted to
travel with him on an official trip to Africa, but
he was worried the natives would boil her in a
pot.
McGuinty also has hired Leon Korbee, who
was a steady TV reporter covering the
legislature for many years and has seen
virtually all that can happen there, as his senior
adviser on communications.
The premier has recruited Ben Chin, another
former TV reporter who covered Queen’s Park
often, as media adviser, which suggests he
hopes to regain ground more through TV than
newspapers, which tend to be more critical.
The premier has a former newspaper
Arthur
Black
Hugh Sawyer, I went out of my way to make
sure I had a roof over my head each night.
But I remember running into a guy who
thought differently.
He was a producer at the radio station I
worked for in Thunder Bay, Ontario. His idea
of a good time was to grab a sleeping bag and
go out and sleep in the backyard, sans benefit
of tent. Just lying on the grass, looking up at
the stars.
I remember thinking how odd it was that he
was the only person I knew who would do that
voluntarily. I remember also marveling at how
soft I’d become in a very short time.
Most of us have become pretty soft. Just a
couple of short centuries ago, sleeping in a
warm bed in a heated house would have been
an uncommon luxury for the average Canuck.
And who among us can imagine surviving a
prairie blizzard or a 40 below cold snap with
nothing but animal skins and a feeble camp
fire for warmth? Indians did it for thousands of
years.
Times change. We all live in tents now. Big,
expensive tents - and getting bigger.
The average new North American home is a
bloated 2,230 square feet. That’s 55 per cent
bigger than the homes we lived in back in
1970.
Does an average family really need all that
space? More important - can the average
family afford it?
reporter, Matt Maychak, who has the imposing
title of director of the premier’s
communications unit, and worked for him in
opposition.
He is believed to have written such quips for
McGuinty as Pizza Pizza has a better system
for delivering pizza than Conservative premier
Mike Harris for delivering medicare, and
Harris’s idea of long-term planning is booking
a tee-off time.
But this talent is not much needed these
days, because McGuinty in government has
not had a lot to laugh about.
McGuinty also has a press secretary and
associate press secretary, who do the hard,
daily graft of handling calls to and from the
media. He has more media advisers than
previous premiers, but their party has made
their job difficult.
The Liberals’ biggest problem, which
overshadows everything, is they promised not
to increase taxes or run a deficit to pay for new
programs, but did both after the outgoing
Conservative government’s claim it balanced
the books turned out to be false, which they
should have suspected anyway.
The explanation becomes so tangled and
convoluted most voters simply see the
Liberals as promise-breakers and it is possible
no public relations skills will persuade them
otherwise before the next election.
1 live in a one-storey, well-insulated home
with a wood stove and a fireplace for
supplemental heating and 1 still smack my
forehead every time I open my monthly
heating bill.
The poor doofuses living in three-storey
suburban McMansions with four bedrooms
and a heated indoor garage - how do they
manage to pony up the dough to keep the place
warm?
Japan has come up with a housing solution,
but you’re probably not going to like it much.
Yamaha Corporation recently introduced
MyRoom to the housing market.
MyRoom is a shed, really. A customizable,
sound-proof box that the owner can retire to
when the need for a little solitude descends.
The original concept was to provide a
‘privacy chamber’ within Japan’s notoriously
crowded living quarters, but people are
actually moving into their MyRooms. The
units retail for approximately $7,000 a pop
and they’re selling like hotcakes.
It’s not much better in Hugh Sawyer’s neck
of the woods. There’s an ‘apartment’ in
London’s Notting Hill area that recently came
on the market. It consists of a kitchenette, a
shower stall and a closet - with a loft bed
overtop. Total square footage: 54. That’s right:
fifty-four square feet. And it’s just been
snapped up by a tenant eager to fork over
$1,300 a month to call it home.
There’s an old saying that a house is not a
home, but thanks to urban overcrowding,
rising prices and shrinking prospects
sometimes a home is not even a house. And
when the options come down to 54 square feet
in noisy Notting Hill, a Japanese privacy cube
or Hugh Stewart’s solution, I’d have to say
that ditch in Oxfordshire is looking pretty
good.
The Liberals could divert attention to their
biggest strength, which is they have done
more than any previous government to protect
residents from a wide range of dangers, but are
backing off, afraid they will be accused of
creating a nanny state, which has to be the
politicians’ choice.
McGuinty does not seem to be seized by, or
see the urgency of, some large issues such as
job losses and shooting deaths of young
blacks. He tackles them in bits and pieces and
shows no passion or outrage or grand design
that stamps him as eager and determined to
solve them and in control.
He and his ministers are prone to careless
talk that costs votes. McGuinty called the loss
of 3,600 jobs in auto manufacturing “a little bit
of contraction”, because employment is
increasing elsewhere, and sounded
unsympathetic. No public relations effort will
change that.
When ministers get snarly, like Finance
Minister Dwight Duncan calling critics
Neanderthals and Health Minister George
Smitherman labeling optometrists terrorists,
no PR will erase the feeling the Liberals are
arrogant.
The Liberals have used taxpayers’ money to
assemble an unprecedented team of spin
doctors, but it needs more co-operation from
the politicians.
Final Thought
The manner in which one endures what
must be endured is more important than the
thing that must be endured.
- Dean Acheson
Bonnie
Gropp
The short of it
Ho Ho Ho!
There it is, that look. Vivid wide eyes in
which one can see both naivety and a
secret wisdom, an understanding of the
magic.
That look can heat the coldest heart and
brighten the darkest day. I’ve seen it a hundred
times in many different places and it brings a
surge of warmth to each and every one of
them.
There is perhaps no greater look of wonder
than in the eyes of a child when they spy Santa
Claus. It’s not surprising, of course. This is the
man who promises to fulfill every dream, in
turn only asking that you do your best to
behave.
He is capable of feats of such impossibility
the magic is wondrous. Here, after all, is a man
who sees all, who knows the naughty and the
nice. His generosity is boundless and he
dedicates his time solely to the purpose of
bringing happiness to deserving children. His
home is a place of reindeer, including one with
a red nose, and elves tinkering away in a
workshop of candy canes and toys.
As well, he has a team of volunteers who
gladly substitute for him with abundant Ho,
Ho, Hos, at malls, parades and family
gatherings everywhere.
Then on Christmas Eve he and his reindeer,
with a sleigh full of toys, travel over the
rooftops of the world to drop off parcels and
packages, enjoy some cookies and milk, then
depart sight unseen.
There has to be magic involved or the story
quite simply can’t be real. Children don’t
question the magic for some time, but every
self-respecting adult, of course knows what’s
true.
Yet ... have you ever watched a group of
those same self-respecting adults when Santa’s
around? There are smiles and giggles, grown
people taking a turn to sit on St. Nick’s Jap.
And I’m not talking about folks who got
tipsy at the office party, but mom and dads, or
WI members or septuagenarians all quite
simply as delighted as any tot by the presence
of this somewhat tubby, rosy-cheeked fellow in
the attention-getting red suit.
You could see it Saturday night at the Santa
Claus parade in Brussels. As the sleigh
approached the smiles were not simply on the
faces of children but lighting the mugs of the
weary, the hassled and harried. While children
shared their lists grownups too teased and
chatted with the merry elf.
Probably some of the reaction can be
attributed to enjoying the pleasure of the
children, but I think it’s more than that. The
true meaning of Christmas is not about Santa
and gifts. That should never be lost. But Santa
brings something else to us, because when he
walks into a room every worn out parent, every
world weary adult, remembers the magic.
Jolly old St. Nicholas is an ideal of
everything that is right, of goodness and
generosity. But he’s also a symbol of
innocence, a grown man cavorting in a cheery
red suit, who gets into the hearts and minds of
children, who lives in a fantastical wonderland
of snow, elves and reindeer.
Once in awhile, it’s nice for grownups to
revisit the child inside. Santa lets that happen.
With Santa we can be silly. We can forget that
tomorrow is another day of grown-up
responsibility. We can think of this wonderful
time of the year, the beauty of love, the spirit of
generosity and simply smile.