What a mixture of enthralling events we’ve had today! Awakening to the studied and prolonged cooking of spare ribs (a culinary enterprise and yearning temptation pursued since the early hours of the day), an invitation to a 9th decade initiation (with the customary attention to the celebratory gift), a local hunt for the perfect honey (and the unwitting discovery of a new and exotic nut butter), a tricycle ride in the late morning mist, a chance encounter with an ancient friend and business associate, the routine car wash and drive into and out of the urban veil, an afternoon drawing room chat with Bunny, and now the picturesque image of the still-burgeoning river glistening beneath the thin film of wispy grey cloud and the lingering enhancement of the vernal equinox.
There were naturally other minor interruptions to that already sufficient account; namely, notice of a medical appointment, emails from friends (and replies thereto), composition of literature, playing with AI image production and searches on the internet for the MS Aleandr Pushkin.
In 1965 the production of the Soviet ocean liner the MS Aleksandr Pushkin was completed. The ship was the second of five large cruise/ocean liner ships that the Soviets had built in the 1960s and early 1970s. These ships, which were known as the “Five Poets”, were all named after famed Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian writers. They were the Pushkin and the Ivan Franko, Taras Shevchenko, Shota Rustaveli and the Mikhail Lermontov. All were built in the German Democratic Republic and were seen as the jewels in the crown of the Soviet merchant marine.
As you might rightly expect it wasn’t long after researching both historical and anticipatory ocean voyages that the larger realm of travel rose to the fore. This was in turn conjoined with what is now accepted as diminished travel to the United States of America – notwithstanding the assertion today by the US ambassador to Canada that Canadians should get over their president’s threat of acquisition and his unsociable address of our former Prime Minister. I think not.
Outside the political sphere of uncertainty and equivocation, it seems from the broad perspective that both old age and youth are confined by their separate capacities and capital. As with so much of Nature’s imperatives there is a path to accommodation. Yet as I proclaimed to Bunny during another of my windbag monopoly moves, the psychology of the binary ambitions of travel also persists – the test of the pudding so to speak, that telling moment of recognition in which one questions the obvious. Is it indeed a distinction without a difference; is there a ship to take you away from yourself; is the globe flat or round?
Having crested these imponderables for the time being – we rejoiced at table in one of chef’s finest culinary concoctions. Meanwhile the atmosphere has magically evaporated, the dinner jazz tumbles and rumbles, more emails arrive – and there’s always the reply, leaving me uncertain whether it’s reading or writing that counts the most. It was enough today nearly to fill the void; once again I hit upon Michel de Montaigne for temporary relief from ignorance (as archaic as he is).