Conventions of British TV Mysteries

We like British mysteries in this house – both in literature and tv, although I should write telly when talking about British … um … telly. As much as Sue and I like British mysteries, and we most certainly do, there seem to be guideless that the writers and producers follow when making them. Sometimes, they get tiresome because they are so predictable and even silly. 

The British mystery guidelines of which I write are the ones that I am sure the writers follow and use relentlessly.

1. Almost without fail, every series must leave the friendly shores of home at least once to solve crimes in other countries or even continents. I think it has happened four times in our current series – Silent Witness. Mind you this is over 13 seasons. It is an excellent series, but we groan when we realize that the episode is taking us abroad because those episodes never seem to be as satisfactory to us.

It is true that American series go AWOL too but America is such a huge country that the heroes usually just go to a different state where the culture and language are not totally different. However, the American series, Bones, that we also watched recently, did go to England for one episode. There they took over from the hapless Brits and solved crimes while the local police stood by and watched the Yankee heroes show them how it is done.

Quite a long time ago, there was an episode of Criminal Minds that crossed the border into Canada, supposedly to a location perhaps 10 miles downriver from where we were living at the time. While we knew that area to be farmland, in the program it became backwoods, bushland. Canada: you know – full of forests, eh. At least they didn’t show any moose.

2. In many series, the protagonist becomes under suspicion and must work like the dickens against all odds to exonerate themselves. I don’t love those episodes, but I sigh and watch regardless.

3. There will be frequent foot chases. Americans love car chases, but Brits love foot chases. For example: Inspector Frost, an older man, hotly pursued many perpetrators who foolishly tried to flee. The chase seemed to be the climax of many a Frost episode.

4. Speaking of foot chases, countless times, police going into a house will result in flight and a chase, and they seldom think to cover the back door.

5. When the cops walk up to a suspect on the street, they always call out his name when they are far enough away for the subject to bolt. They never learn to get within grabbing distance before they announce their presence.

6. Guns are not such a staple in British telly, but when they are drawn, it seems to be most often that the criminals will be aiming their weapon at a vulnerable victim while the police are aiming at the suspect. The officer will always meekly put his or her weapon down when they could have just pulled the trigger.

7. When a captive escapes their abductor, the car that they flag down will always belong to the evil person who captured them in the first place.

8. In other situations, the fleeing victim will always run down the centre of the road so that they can either be run over or captured with ease. They must not be permitted to have the presence of mind to dodge or head off into the trees or fields.

9. In a foot chase involving the pursuit by a criminal of a victim, the doomed victim must always always trip and fall. This must occur whether the chase in in the woods or in a house.  Falling on the stairs is particularly favoured.

10. When there is a noise in the house or possibly in the bushes, the unwitting subject must always go to investigate on their own. She, for it is most often is a woman, must not think to step out of the house to call for help. No no. She  must proceed into the unknown letting her presence be known with loud, "Who's there?" calls so the perpetrator can know exactly where she is. 

11. When victims are told to get into a car with the perp and then told to drive somewhere, they always oblige. Apparently, they have never heard of the advice to never go to a second location. Once they are in the car, it is certain that will never bother to deliberately cause the car to crash although accidents are allowed to happen by accident, as it were.

12. Most series will involve gypsies/travellers at least once, preferably adjacent to an amusement park.

13. One episode must involve smuggled immigrants who must work to pay off their debts, and you know the gender of most of whom I speak and  what kind of work they are mostly required to perform.  

14. Although it is not a rule, protagonists are allowed to meet untimely ends. Offhand, I can think of this happening in George Gently, Silent Witness, Waking the Dead, and Cracker. It is not always the main character although it can be, but it can be an important good guy character. You just never know if and when this might occur.

15. The final point is de rigueur but not in a bad way. It is tea. There must be tea, lots of it, and very very sweet tea when a trauma has occurred.

British mysteries are pretty darn good and, in my opinion. for the most part much better than what  we produce over here. But I have watched enough of them that I have become aware of the standard devices. Some of them bother me, especially the foreign adventures. I don't really mind some of the foot chases although they can be overdone. Others such as tea, gypsies, or enforced immigrant labour are not generally a problem, especially the tea.

Oh ... I have thought of one more.

16. A single evildoer will be able to effectively tie-up whomever he has managed to capture. In record time too. They never show us how this feat is managed. The phenomenal dexterity completed within minutes is almost magical. I wish we could see it unfold.

Darn  . . . another habitually used device came to mind but quickly left the premises (of my brain) while I was finishing the previous point. I hate it when that happens. And it happens a lot. Sigh.

Now I have it . . . many minutes later.

18. When the heroic detectives realize that someone is in danger, they will rush to he scene which may be somewhere across London. They never contact the local police. When I say never, they sometimes do, but always, somewhat miraculously, arrive for the climax before the local police arrive.

19. Oh ... and surely this is the last one ... when someone is waiting for help, whether medical or police, it must very often take an interminable amount of time.

20. And . . . one more. When someone is in grave danger and desperately requires help, the phone won't work. Either the battery will die or they will be in a dead spot. How there can be so many dead spots in such a small geographical and populated area as the British Isles is beyond me.

OK. I am done. Even if I have more, unlike John Donne, I am done.

It's All I've Got Today

What passes for my mind is pretty vacant of thoughts and topics this morning. But while it may be time for a blogging pause to rest my old brain, I do have something very little to post in the meantime. It isn't much for sure, but here it is.

Daily, I see on FB, Word of the Day. They can be pretty obscure, and I confess to not knowing most of them. I do notice, however, that I manage to pronounce them correctly much of the time. I know that the pronunciation guide is there on the graphic, but I promise that I said sumpsimus correctly without looking. I am pretty confident that you also did or could do.

I probably looked it up at the time, but if I did, I do not know the meaning of sumpsimus. I will now look for it . . . and . . .  now that I see it, I know I won't remember it.

Sumpsimus definition, adherence to or persistence in using a strictly correct term, holding to a precise practice, etc., as a rejection of an erroneous but more ..

I have two more for your viewing pleasure before I trundle off to do other things. It's a big day — grocery pickup. Woo hoo! The action never stops. 

Addendum. After hitting Publish. I saw this. It fits.

The Passing of the Lifesaver

This post started as one thing and morphed into another.
Please excuse the resultant, disjointed excursion into memory.

I found this graphic on FB; it is something else that, once again, takes me back to my childhood church days.

I never received lifesavers in my stocking, so I guess my childhood wasn't awesome. In fairness, it would have been hard to get them into my Christmas stocking for I didn't get a Christmas stocking. Later, in married life with Sue, the stuffed stocking did become part of my Christmas experience.

Back to the lifesavers: Mom would pop out one for me in church on Sunday mornings. I do mean pop; she would slide her thumbnail under one to lift it and make it easy for me to take.  I expect this occurred subsequent to the march-around [Jericho] offering and before the sermon. I liked the Wild Cherry best or Five Flavors if I could nab the red one, but I think I can remember mint and butterscotch too. Anything was fine, but some were finer than others.

This would have been once I graduated from Junior church at the age of 8 to be part of the adult service. I was not a squirmer, and even at that young age, I could listen to and understand the grown-ups sermons. So, I would have been fine without the sugary sop, but it was something that I did look forward to.

Speaking of sermons, I remember one illustrated sermon by Pastor Argue. The title was something like, Why Not, You've Got it Made. As memory serves, he would pull out props to make his point. I think one was probably a new car flyer. But also, if memory serves, one was a bottle of booze.

Now, this was a non-drinking, holiness type of church. My mother later told me that some folk were rather affronted by the presence of the bottle, which I expect was empty. He didn't leave it out long, quickly putting it away saying something like it was too odious (my word) to leave on display. That's the only sermon that I remember from those days, or any days really, although I do recall another when the same pastor visited our church in Toronto, perhaps 10 years later. He preached from Psalm 84:6: Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain also filleth the pools. 

I recall that one because our church was going through troubled times, and he brought an appropriate message about digging deep in the faith in difficult times. How interesting that the only two actual sermons that  I seem to recall in my whole life were by the same preacher.

As my mind continues to wander disjointedly, I now I remember another pleasant passing of candy  related to our offering march that sometimes occurred. A man by the name of Danny Pazutto would, on occasion, offer me a treat when I marched by him as he sat adjacent to the centre aisle. 

Pazutto was a taxi driver and once drove us to our destination for a holiday week, so I had had a little extended contact with him. I was a nice boy, and he probably took to me. Who knows? He may have even felt sorry for me because we did not exactly live in the lap of luxury. 

Now another memory surfaces that involves Mr Pazutto.

One night he drove my parents and me to a little church on the Indian* reserve. Danny played the accordion, and my dad delivered the message, or started to. I can't remember if my mother did anything in particular although she sometimes tried to sing** a bit or even play the piano. While my dad was still in the middle of his sermon, a lady had a fit, and the evening was brought to a premature end. We piled back into My Pazutto's taxi cab and drove home.

I think that will probably be a wrap on my church recollections from those early days, but who knows for sure.

* In those times, we used the word, Indian, to refer to native or indigenous peoples.

** When we were in our little church, Mom sang one or two solos. I remember her voice breaking once, which embarrassed her. I think it was Stranger of Galilee. I once sang a solo at our little young people's meeting: When the Roll is Called Up Yonder. As an adult, I can appreciate how awful it was, especially unpractised and in any random key. They certainly didn't ask me again and were likely wishing that I would be called to yonder long before the trumpet of the Lord might sound..

 

Springing

Spring flowers are in bloom. Even the tulips have begun to flower. Of course, this means that others have peaked or are even in decline. Weather hasn't been kind lately. It has been too windy or too rainy to photograph the flowers, and I have been late to the spring flower party, which has largely gone on without me.

Even on the day when I forced myself out, it was completely overcast and still windy, but I ventured forth regardless, intrepid soul that I am.

My first stop was to a nice setting on a nearby street. To tell the truth, the blossoms were either in decline or just having a bad time in the conditions, so I did enhance the colour. Photography can sometimes be like painting where you paint what you want a scene to look like.

I really like this setting and have photographed it before and may again someday.

From there, I drove to the park where I had to lie down on the job, so to speak. The ground was still wet from the rain of the previous day, and I had just put on clean clothes. Oh well, needs must.

After driving home, I checked the neighbour's garden across the street. I isolated two orangy tulips against the heather in the background.

It was good enough, all things considered.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

I came across this photo of the Montreal Canadiens team photo from 1957-58.

I was 10 and hadn't yet seen much hockey on tv. In reality, if we even had a tv by then, it hadn't been for long. And yet, I could recognize more than half of the players. Of course, this is also partly because I did follow the team, and therefore any number of those players, in subsequent years.

Only on Saturday nights were the games televised. In those early days they weren't shown right from the 8 o'clock start but picked up the feed at 9. Saturday night was,and still is to a great degree, Hockey Night in Canada from coast to coast to coast, as the cry goes.

At first, I wasn't allowed to stay up for the whole game because Sunday loomed, and that was a big and important day. I think for a few years, I was only permitted to watch the second period and be in bed by 10.

We had to get up early on Sunday to catch the bus although in the very early years of this church trek, it had been a streetcar. We would have to transfer from one bus (or streetcar) to another to get all of the way to church. I expect that we were out of the house by 9, and probably earlier, to get there by 10. Both of my parents were Sunday school teachers, he of the men and she of teenage girls. I received a diploma for 7 years of close to perfect attendance.

I kept the diploma for many years, even into adulthood, but then it disappeared from my life. However, you can find anything on the internet, and this is what it looked like.

You would receive the diploma in the first year and stickers for the next 6 years.
I could purchase that diploma on Etsy for $24.39CDN if I were so inclined.

Sunday school was followed by church, which likely ran from 11 to 12:30. It was a Pentecostal church after all, so it must have lasted for an hour and a half. After then, there would be some time for socializing, so we'd probably begin to wend our way home around 1 o'clock.

Then it was the hour long bus (or streetcar) ride back home. Usually, Mom would have put something in the oven and timed it to cook while we were away. That means that we probably were not having lunch until at least 2 clock, close to 6 hours after breakfast.

Those bus rides were not a lot of fun, particularly in summer. We'd be sweltering in our Sunday best, carrying our big bibles while the rest of the crowded bus would be thronging with noisy, casually dressed older teens and young adults (if memory serves). They were on their way to the amusement park a few miles farther on. Talk about feeling out of place.

Permit me to interject, that we thought amusement parks were sinful places to be avoided.

I guess my parents grew tired of the trek, for when I was about the ago of 12, they opted for small startup assembly that we could walk to. That lasted for a few years until we moved all of the way from Montreal to Toronto and found ourselves back in a big church. But times had changed, and we had a car.

Aside from those summer bus rides whilst porting our big bibles, I don't have bad memories of those long church days, and, if I recall properly, even the bus rides were not too bad in other seasons. As is true of everybody's life, it seemed natural, for that is all that I knew. Overall, I rather liked the church experience as a kid.

It is strange what that one team photo brought to mind, which turned out to be more about Sunday Morning than Saturday Night.

Swept Out of Bed

To say the least, that was weird!  We were watching tv when out of the corner of my eye I I thought that I saw strange lights out on the street, and they seemed to emanate from trucks turning around and around. What the heck?!

This was around 7 o'clock. Full of curiosity, we paused the program, went to the patio door, and confirmed that, indeed, there were trucks turning around and around. 

With this better view, we soon discerned that there were 4 street sweepers plus a little truck to guide or follow them. What the heck?! Four? Sweepers? In the evening?

They went south, down the street, past the traffic lights. Thinking that was the end of the weird show, we settled back into our program. 

Lo and behold! A few minutes later. we were caused to spring from out chairs yet again. They were back, heading north this time. They drove out of sight; surely they were done.  

And they were done, but only for a few hours, as it eventuated.

As usual, Sue trundled off to bed early, and put in her earbuds to listen to a podcast. Shortly thereafter, ~10 o'clock, alerted by quite a racket she heard above her podcast, she jumped out of bed, thinking that she was hearing a helicopter passing over. This does happen from time to time as the hospital's helipad lies just over yonder.

Somewhat incredulously, she notified me that the same four trucks, plus their minder, were passing yet again. Apparently, they made one more subsequent pass, but I missed that one as I was then elsewhere in the house doing other things.

Four sweepers! Turning around! Going up and down! For several hours! In the evening!

I have never seen the like.

We Fight On

I know, I know. COVID, ugh. But it was time for me to have a look at the present situation and trends in Ontario. Therefore, I jot it down for you but will understand if readers choose to avert their eyes. 

The COVID situation in Ontario remains alarming, but there may be hope. 

As for the alarming part, according to this article (a short read), "875 people with COVID-19-related illnesses [are] being treated in Ontario's ICUs, with 589 of those requiring a ventilator." Those are current  ICU numbers only. Who knows how many genuinely active cases there are, for tracking must be problematic. However, there may be up to 47 000 cases still ongoing in the province in some way. Looking at it that way, the percentage of those needing acute care is less than 2% of total unresolved  cases, so that at least is somewhat encouraging.

A concomitant of these ICU numbers is overcrowding so that some patients have to be moved to other hospitals, and they can be far away. For example: some Toronto patients have been airlifted to Ottawa, an hour's distance by plane and 4 hours by car. This is a hard thing: "As we're loading ambulances to leave, we're finding family members lined up on the sidewalk, shouting goodbyes and taking photos — trying to catch a glimpse of their mom or their dad."

In the same article, there is a 1 minute video of a patient being moved into an ambulance. I find it both sobering and emotional.

On a somewhat positive side, the lockdown plus innoculations seem to be having an effect. Just a week or so ago, the provincial new case numbers had skyrocketed to almost 5000/day. Lately, they have fallen to under 4000 with only 3480 yesterday. While that number is hardly an only, trends are relative to what has preceded them.

The red trend line at the very right show that new cases are declining.

There is more positive news. More than 4.5 million or 30+% of us have had the first jab, and it is projected that 80% of age 16+ will have their first dose by June 14. It is important to stay the course for the next two months..

It's not so good everywhere, India is in dire straits, gaining 1 million more cases every three days. It wasn't so long ago that some nitwit on social media was saying how wonderful that country was doing with hundreds of millions not wearing masks. Alas, it was too early for that COVID-denying anti-masker to crow with a juvenile post. 

As this sad scene transpires, I understand that India continues to allow super-spreader, religious events. I will bite my tongue and not offer further comment on that point.

If all of this isn't sobering enough, I leave you with a photo of the cremation pyres burning. Apparently, they can hardly keep up.