Plus ça change

As I predicted when the election was called, we’ve ended up with another Liberal minority government. No Blue Meanies government, thank heavens, but definitely a waste of $600 million which could have gone to, oh, I don’t know, building some social housing.

I still don’t know who was elected as my MP on Monday. Too close to call at the end of the night with thousands of mail-in ballots to count. Not sure why that’s taking more than a day. The NDP candidate is a few hundred votes ahead of the (yuck) Conservative candidate, with the incumbent Green not far behind. Yes, the progressive vote split fairly equally. If it weren’t for the thousands of people (anti-vaxxers) who voted for the People’s Party, the Conservative would probably have been declared the winner on election day. A tarnished silver lining indeed. Now the question is were the bulk of the mail-in ballots requested by people worried about in-person voting during a pandemic (more likely to be progressive) or by older, more conservative voters? Maybe we’ll find out today.

Another disappointment yesterday. I thought it was D Day – Dental Day, the day when I finally get my expensive new front tooth. When I went to the dentist in town for a scan a couple of weeks ago, he said I’d be getting my implant yesterday. Silly me. I thought that meant my tooth. (Apparently a lot of people think the same.) But no. The “implant” is the titanium rod drilled into the bone. The actual tooth comes three months later. When he said that yesterday, I remembered the conversation we had back in January when the tooth was pulled and I remembered joking that all I wanted for Christmas was a new front tooth. More waiting. Sigh.

In case anyone was wondering about my Sunday dinner (I’m sure everyone was), it was on Monday this week, because I actually went out for dinner the night before.

It was my third dinner with Khurrum Rahman, Ride or Die being the final novel in his Hounslow trilogy featuring Jay, the reluctant MI5 operative, and Imran, the reluctant jihadist. Rahman has a delightfully tongue in cheek style (particularly in chapters which feature Jay as the narrator), but underneath everything – including a total rejection of random acts of violence – there is a reminder of quite how much shit Muslims living in the UK have to face on a daily basis. I do highly recommend these novels. 

When I posted this photo on Facebook, I also commented that this was probably going to be the last “Catherine” dinner of the summer. The oregano and chives will not be around much longer and the basil will soon need to be turned into pesto. Nor are there going to be many more opportunities to purchase delicious farm-to-table cherry tomatoes.  

This is what the garden yielded yesterday.

Three peapods, three green beans, three cherry tomatoes and a handful of blackberries. I did notice, going to the garden for the first time since it started raining regularly, that one of the yellow courgette plants has at long last produced a courgette, although it’s so small I can’t imagine it growing enough to be any use before the frost sets in. Ditto the many very green cherry tomatoes. Oh, well. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (Not that much has changed in the garden – or in politics – in the past few years.