Editorially speaking…
It’s the dog days of summer so please forgive me if I begin this week with a ramble; specifically, a quote from immortal Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery who obviously was a lady after my own heart:
“I am simply a book drunkard. Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotees. I cannot withstand them.”
Canadian literary giant Lucy Maud Montgomery. —Wikipedia
Lucy Montgomery, the author of 20 novels, most famous of which is Anne of Green Gables, has achieved literary greatness of undying and international stature almost beyond measure. As a guy, I’ve never read any of her works but I was struck by her sentiment about reading books while surfing online on another subject altogether.
You know you’re famous when, even as someone is in the act of typing your name on Google, you pop up.
The point of this ramble is that I, too, am a book junkie. Mostly books about B.C. and Canadian history, but also biographies, war, industrial, social and labour history, literary classics and some modern fiction. 1000s over the years. I’ve not tried audio books yet but I’m going to out of curiosity. A friend who commutes between Duncan and Victoria each day listens to audio books instead of music so I’m intrigued.
Perhaps some Chronicles readers are ahead of me on this score. Perhaps there’s an audio book in the Chronicles’ future?
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For some years now some parties have been lobbying to change B.C.’s name, arguing that British Columbia isn’t inclusive enough, that it’s too “colonialist,” that it doesn’t recognize the province’s Indigenous and multi-ethnic cultures.
Maybe so, but I’m going to dig my heels in on this one.
Some of the revisioning of our collective past—the good, the bad and the ugly—that’s become fashionable lately has also, in my humble opinion, become somewhat tedious. This one, a proposed change of British Columbia to whatever in particular.
Ergo, I’m heartened by a news report of a week ago in the Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadow News to the effect that popular support for such a monumental change has declined since the previous survey of last November. 60 per cent of British Columbians polled “disagree with changing the name of the province to recognize the province’s Indigenous roots”.
I’m sorry that number isn’t much higher but so be it.
We’ve come a long way in the few years of Truth and Reconciliation and we have a long way to go to try to correct, or at the very least acknowledge and learn from, the sins of the past. But removing British from British Columbia is, in my mind, the equivalent of throwing the out baby with the bath water.
There’s much about our collective past that dismays me but being of British descent isn’t one of them! The fact is that, were the British contribution removed from our provincial provenance, we’d be Americans today.
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I tip my hat to John Richard Bishop, Lt.-Col. Ret., who passed away last month after an extended stay in Veterans Memorial Lodge in Victoria. I met John years ago when he self published his memoir of serving in the Canadian Army and participating in one of the most famous battles of the Korean War.
The battle of Kapyong is one of the most illustrious in Canadian war history—and hardly known to modern-day Canadians who, if they know much about Canada’s participation in the world wars and in United Nations peacekeeping operations, have probably never even heard of it.
Readers might wish to check their local library for a copy of King’s Bishop.
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This week’s colourized photo/postcard by Nigel Robertson is captioned, ‘Hello, girls.” The “girls” being the B.C. Telephone operators working in the Chemainus exchange, likely in the 1950s judging by their hair styles.