It’s Sunday afternoon mid-winter in Canada under a brilliantly blue and glimmering sunny sky and as vividly cold. Rumour has it that the traditional new year Super Bowl football match is scheduled on television today. We do not have a television.  We abandoned it for our laptop computers instead – though, for my part, I haven’t any ambition or expectation to submit to such a boob-tube production. Competitive sport has never been an amusement of mine. I am as usual riveted to my desk overlooking the white frozen fields and iced upriver view.

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Wind gusts up to 45 km/h are making the temperature feel like -26°C.  Driving along the Appleton Side Road earlier today would have been tolerable had not the wind irreligiously blown scours of blustery snow from the adjacent stubbled field across what might otherwise have been clear, dry pavement but which now were parallel arctic rivers of packed and hardened snow. Nonetheless I refused to abandon my Canadian resolve, a pertinacity to the erstwhile familiarity of childhood and teenage years, building snowmen and tobogganing, skating the Rideau Canal, skiing Mount Temple, bravely succumbing to its restraint, its modification, oppression and opportunities, to winter.

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Almonte, Ontario
February 6, 2026

Dear Reader,

Today – a dismal winter day – I obliged myself as usual to go for a drive in my automobile.  Initially I was hesitant, given the dull weather and the forecast for snow. But I persisted. I was pensive – even remorseful – so I had a lot to consider. I was feeling sorry for myself, off the map.  I summarily pondered past friendships and acquaintances, including those that one might romanticize with love and affection, feelings that I once had for others; but I quickly succeeded to translate the ambience to displeasure. It is, I find, relatively easy to denigrate past relationships that have dissolved.  There is psychiatric recommendation to do so, “Let bygones be bygones!” Nonetheless it is more abrupt than I prefer.  Which perhaps explains why I lingered upon the subject, as though there were some recipe to revive the nutrition. Yet once I convinced myself of the impropriety of the relationship, I fell upon it with a thud.

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Though I don’t now qualify – nor indeed have I ever qualified –  as a regular at a coffee shop, I recall my favourite hangouts. My introduction to roasted coffee beans began when I learned of cappuccino. It was 62 years ago. My family – parents, sister and I – were staying at a hotel on the Italian riviera on the Mediterranean.  As my sister and I passed through the lobby on the first morning en route to the beach we stopped at the bar where we seated ourselves and asked for a coffee.  The bartender (or, now, barista) asked whether we’d like a cappuccino.  I had never had a cappuccino.  In fact at that point – in my 16th year of age – I seldom drank coffee of any description. So we ordered one each. The espresso must have hit me.  I was smitten for life. Now whenever I attend a coffee shop it is always a “double espresso” – which invariably the barista informs me is already doubled so I must in turn ask for a quadruple to overcome any misunderstanding. It has become a predictable and repetitive – and somewhat flat – crosstalk.

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Making money is not something that directed me in the way you hear someone on the television proclaim that they intend to go out and make money, to fulfill the so-called American Dream, as though it were the only lifetime objective.  By contrast I am far more acquainted with the talent of spending money, not bargaining, rather knowing where to spend it for desirable return (which usually means perfection of some description).  But making money was always for me survival, getting by, but aligned with value (in the same way I spent it).

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Anything – including me – eventually needs a bit of polish.  Polish is what brightens things up, maybe straightens the parts or removes a scuff or scratch. Everything material – and perhaps the immaterial – occasionally requires a moment’s attention. The undertaking, while not wasteful, is guaranteed to be deliberately indulgent and more dutiful than restorative.  We know that wear and tear is expected.  Indeed the more romantic description of age and oxidization as patina is commonplace. Having a jeweller “buff” a trinket of gold to restore its original sheen or gloss is a fleeting remedy. Soon further polish will be de rigueur. Again the need will arise to discharge the dust, the film; the need to reanimate the initial scope and attraction, to put things in order, the detailed car in the garage, the accessories in the walnut box with the velvet layers, the cameras and binoculars in their soft leather cases, the rest can go back on the desk or the shelf where they will gather more from time and the air, as we do ourselves after a shower or an evening in fancy dress.

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Early this morning, only moments after having thrown off the duvet and having resolved – admittedly dithering – to get at it, I knew that my topic of conversation (for that’s what these entries are) was going to be “Wishful thinking,,,” I am obsessed with almost plaintive absorption in pleasantries and impracticalities.  It is the fertility of pure amusement, seldom having any basis in more than conjecture at the outside, more likely tumidity on the inside. Wishful thinking is the source of meandering thought, unshackled contemplation, vivid characterizations void of the reality of space or time or a physical nature.  There’s a reason it is called wishful thinking!

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Earlier today, while driving my car, a moment developed which, in its most colourful camouflage, is best entitled “road rage”. Normally I do not react to such encounter. But today I did. Nothing serious (I honked my horn at the perceived culprit).  But it’s more than I should have done (the horn blast may have lingered a trifle). And now I am here to crawl, to expiate my guilt.

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The first of the month, the second of the year, 2026. I purposively iterate the year lest I mistake it for another. Reanimation after exhaustion of the new year’s rigours. Our drive home south of the city was along the old highway through tiny farming communities. Muffled in our cabin, listening to Beegie Adair, The Mantovani Orchestra and Baroque music, streaming along dry roads, passing endlessly white fields glistening in the slanted blue mid-afternoon sunshine.

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For the past decade and a half I have avoided reflective surfaces.  We previously had a full-length mirror in which I routinely glanced at my overall appearance from top to bottom, particularly when wearing a suit in preparation for an outing to the office.  But when we sold the office building and the law practice, then precipitously sold the house and suddenly had no place to live – forcing us immediately to downsize to an apartment and get rid of tons of stuff, my regard of the corpus withered to a square look at whatever confronted me in the bureau mirror from just below the chin to the top of my thinning silver hair. In retrospect it was Nature’s evolutionary way of affording a digestible and less superfluous image of self without the added gall of the declining – and expanding – fuselage.

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