I have encountered a paradox. It’s not an enigma or a puzzle. It is more a frustration, a seemingly inexorable contradiction or an uncommon incongruity. Today the weather, with its ideal temperatures, light breeze, azure sky and endless variety of small white clouds, is of unparalleled absorption. Normally nothing but deliberate misadventure would challenge the perception. It is a most lovely day. As generously of late there have been a lot to compare. It thus displeases me to comment in any way unfavourably about today’s trifling episodes which have so irritatingly infected the rhapsodic account.  Yet were it not for the parade of annoying features which have interrupted and plagued me from the moment I awoke this morning and retreated from the lair, I would instead wax enthusiastically upon the glimmering river beneath the brilliant dome.

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The Ivy Restaurant at 61 Shipman’s Lane, Lansdowne, Ontario on the parkway adjacent the St. Lawrence River was today’s Sunday drive destination. We were anxious to scope the joint at the start of the season.  The place was open and operational though not as yet accommodating its usual crowds. In any event we were not interested in dining. Instead we contented ourselves with a visit to the Coach House for a coffee and espresso. We sat outside at a small patio table overlooking the river and the passing yachts.

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While not everything today is functioning as it should, neither is the inconvenience overly disturbing. It is no doubt just another of those trifling matters requiring stock maintenance. I’ll deal with it on Monday next when the office opens for the business week. I’ve sent an email requesting an appointment. The rest however is unequivocally ideal – the winding corridors of tree lined country roads, blue sky with mountains of white clouds, the river a majestic shiny blue, the air breezy, dry and cool.

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America dubiously occupies the world stage by the discredited virtue of its widespread wartime aggressions and international hostile manoeuvres; while at the same time provoking (and attempting to dilute) the appearance of violent internal civil conflict. When remarking both currently and historically upon Americans, it requires little effort to uncover the perceived threat of communism, socialism and the so-called Radical Left. Everywhere there is a manifestation of the invasive effect of difference, toleration and unrestrained democracy. Often the only palpable warning of the infection arises from political ambition, separated from a logical deductive consideration of the premises.

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Notwithstanding the current withdrawal of Canadians from the United States of America, after having spent 6 months of the year there for the past decade, I continue – as though by irrepressible habit – to remark upon the domestic differences in the two latitudes.  As mundane as it may sound, one of the primary differences relates to my driving habits.

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My stockpile for idle amusement is admittedly finite. Inexplicably I hesitated this morning – an unparalleled springtime day – before launching onto the county roads for a routine but undetermined dawdle about the local countryside. There were however conditions precedent first to be fulfilled. After our conjoined and modest constitutional in the exercise room on the stationary bicycle and treadmill – and upon afterwards having sponged up the invigorating Vitamin D while briefly reposed on the balcony – the outstanding weather at last communicated its irresistible magnetism.

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It isn’t often nowadays that we inhabit the ranks of the skilfully employed even peripherally; nor that we commence our daily wheeze early in the day.  Today however was an exception.  We were underway sharply at seven o’clock this morning, preparing to break the fast at the golf club at nine o’clock with our friends B&G from along the Rideau Canal southwest of Ottawa. Last evening we telephoned to arrange the impromptu foregathering.  Fortuitously they were both available. The weather today was ideal, a summery day of balmy air and sparkling sunshine.

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More as an accreditation of the universal limits of modernity, an indifferent blotting up of the history of the locale surrounding the nation’s capital (including our beloved Town of Almonte) discloses a number of pungent similarities, among them waterways, railways, grist mills and woollen mills. That – and the fur trade – constitute the underlying commercial development of our country so far as I can recall. It illustrates too that the identity of the United Empire Loyalists was a chart not entirely determined by the unsettling events of 1764 in the United States of America. Indeed, one occasionally stumbles upon archival fragments whose very language discloses the breadth of the British imperial world: “Sundry Negroes on Nichola Town Estate late the property of George [?] Esq. now belonging to Charles Spooner Esquire … Port of Grenville in Grenada.”

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Following breakfast earlier this morning and afterwards our constitutional exercise in the small downstairs gymnasium we began an uncertain pathway for a drive into neighbouring Renfrew County and round about.  The routine motive of a car wash was superlative in the Scotch mist. Equally evident was the traffic.  For a Sunday morning in particular, the number of cars (in both directions) was noticeable if not downright unusual. Where was everyone going? We speculated that it was the weather. The dank drizzle had apparently dampened the springtime partiality and instead inspired people to go shopping – or to do whatever else indoors – to avoid the wet and chill outside. Malls are ornamental parklands. Though earlier upon leaving town we saw more than one person dutifully and somewhat ruefully walking their dog in the rain. Barring that vested imperative, it is recognizably a choice day to escape the weather or to admire it from one’s drawing room desk.

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Today I revisited “L’Étranger” by Albert Camus.

Considered a classic of 20th-century literature, The Stranger has received critical acclaim for Camus’ philosophical outlook, absurdism, syntactic structure, and existentialism (despite Camus’s rejection of the label), particularly within its final chapter. Le Monde ranked The Stranger as number one on its 100 Books of the 20th Century. In Le Temps it was voted the third best book written in French in the 20th and 21st century by a jury of 50 literary connoisseurs.

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