What a bunch of stuck up, twee prissies we are!

A lot of people are talking about how much they'd like to go off into the woods and carve out a farmstead in New Hampshire (or something) and I have to admit that there are certainly days here in Toronto when, wiping the smog-grime off my glasses, I'm inclined to that temptation myself, but I long ago came to the conclusion that I am a city girl. Always have been, always will be. I'm one of those who think that city life can be made to be pretty good. I grew up here, after all. I am of the opinion that the reason city life is so horrible now, is that we have allowed it to become so. My home town is so wonderful that it is a rare thing to meet someone who was born there anywhere else in the world. Native Victorians are acutely aware of how great their native city is and love it fiercely. There is a native Victorian accent (something of which I was unaware until I went out into the Big Land Over The Strait and heard the weird way everyone else in this country talks). There are native Victorian attitudes, particularly about travel (generally: "Don't go out there. It's where they keep all the Bad Stuff."). The birth rate in Victoria was never high, and since when the city was founded it was treated as a retirement village for English oddballs and artistically-inclined remittance men, there are very few actual native Victorians around. We are a rare breed and I think are now nearly extinct.

You see, we made a fatal mistake. We allowed word about how wonderful our town was to get out beyond the confines of the Saanich Peninsula. By the time I was ten, tourists were swarming all over the place and sizing it up as a potential home. It filled up with foreigners, mainlanders and other riffraff n'erdowells and the natives were already becoming a minority by the 80's. Now, the developers have paved most of it over and sold it off in tiny, very expensive increments to outsiders. All of whom brought their cars, of course.

I haven't become a traditionalist all by my lonesome. I was inclined to it from the time when I could be made aware of the degradation of All That Is Good by greedy and short-sighted opportunists.

Well, I could go on all day. But this is to say only that it is not city life that is at fault. It is what we have done to city life. John Muggeridge told me about Toronto in the 50's. It sounded like the sort of place where a Native Victorian would feel right at home.

Now look at it. Not the sort of place for a nice white Christian girl who has been properly raised. Full of foreigners and lesbians.

I just think that we do not do well to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Even if we have to wash the baby all over again because of the dreadful condition of the BW.

So, OK, here's a few things about modern society I like (a lot):

Ska.

Universal literacy. (Despite my reservations about the results, which I think were more a function of the post-modern collapse than the idea itself).

Monty Python.

The internet (kind of goes without saying, I suppose).

Painkillers. (I get migraines sometimes and I had a toothache two months ago that would have turned a charging rhino into a whimpering welfare cheat in seconds).

I believe I've mentioned how much I like foreign food.

Being able to fly to England from Toronto in a matter of hours. I read a thing once about the journey undertaken by the Mormons to get to Utah in the 19th c. Gosh! You really don't appreciate airtravel until you've driven across North America a few times.

...

the list will go on as I think of stuff.