Art's Blog

The ‘Orient Express’ is no match for the service, elegant dining and comfort of VIA Rail’s ‘Continental’ from Toronto to Vancouver. Not the Eurostar with its flashy style and high speed nor the Trans Mongolian Express for sheer distance nor the efficiency of Japan Rail can compare with VIA’s Continental. As for excitement, ‘The Polar Express’ has to go a long way to beat the Continental.

Leaving Edmonton in the early hours of day, travelling to Vancouver to spend Christmas and New Year with my daughter, Kate, the carriage attendant delivers a note in unfamiliar handwriting. It reads: Mr. Cockerill: There is a surprise for you on the train. Look for the girl with dark hair.

‘Where is this girl with the dark hair?’ I ask. The attendant cannot tell; he doesn’t know. As it is the breakfast hour, I enter the dining car and decline a seat with three other diners because I spy, at the far end of the carriage, the seated rear view of a young woman with dark hair. She is alone and might have written the message, so I pass between the diners clutching the note in my fist to question her. I cough a slight cough to attract her attention.

She turns, her face wreathed in a delicious smile. No! It is more than that. She has the fabulous grin of the Cheshire Cat. Eyes glistening with delight, she flings her arms about me and says, ‘Hello, Dad.’

She is Kate, who flew to Edmonton the night before and, with VIA Rail’s collusion and connivance, boarded the train undetected. She had her note delivered by the stone-faced attendant who was in her confidence. Her surprise is complete – and so is my day.

Pavement bollards at Royal Hospital, Belfast

This photograph showing bollards installed on the pavement of the Royal Hospital, Belfast, to prevent nurses from parking their vehicles reminds one of the plague of bollards that infests the Town of Cobourg. One wonders how long it was before the workmen in Belfast realized how they were to get home.  

Cobourg owes its pestilence to an over-enthusiastic council with more money than sense. Bollards of the same design and appearance as those in the illustration are installed throughout Cobourg, overrunning the side streets, back streets, main traffic arteries. They are anchored at intervals to lumps, bumps and projections from the sidewalks into the roadway and superciliously referred to as ‘traffic calming’ devices.

Traffic calming may be the clever intent of the Works Department, but they are hazardous to drivers and induce in them a fury of frustration. As a result, calming traffic is the last thing bollards do. To Town bus drivers and tractor trailer operators making deliveries they are pestilential nuisances that add to the perils of negotiating tight corners and parking.

Bollard sales representatives have done a sterling job of selling these monstrosities, for they crowd the thoroughfares of North America and Europe alike. There is no stopping their spread.

A letter to the local rag referring to ‘those bollards on council’ was rejected, one presumes, for the perceived obscene insinuation regarding their parentage when all one meant was they had the same brainless imagination as bollards.

For many months now, the Town of Cobourg, Ontario, has honoured fallen servicemen and women flown from Afghanistan to the RCAF airbase at Trenton. Following  most solemn ceremony, they are then transported to Toronto for return to their families for burial.

Fire trucks from communities along the Province’s main 401 highway, join the flag-bearing spectators who congregate on the overpasses to honour the dead and to witness the motorcade from Trenton pass by. The stretch of highway from Trenton to Toronto was recently renamed the ‘Highway of Heroes’.       

To honour the fallen is commendable, laudable and entirely fitting. This gesture of respect goes back to the most ancient of civilisations and is one to be endorsed and deeply respected in our society.

Anyone venturing censure to the mildest degree the homage paid to the fallen does so at their peril. This said, I find aspects of the panoply of these ceremonials disconcerting. As a soldier with eight years  service (1943-1951), I find nothing heroic in being blown up by a bomb or shot by an unseen enemy. That is what soldiers risk.

This is not to disparage, ridicule or denigrate those who die doing their duty. Soldiering is a dangerous profession and those who operate at the sharp edge of battle risk death or serious injury by one means or another. Our concern should be for the wounded, the maimed and the injured, for they are of this world and the dead are not. The wounded and traumatised need all the nation’s medical and  therapeutic resources put at their disposal and, when they are healed or sufficiently recovered, they need after care and attention, often for the rest of their lives. It is society’s job to make sure they get it.

Let us be all means honour the dead, but know, too, that they died doing what they were trained to do. That does not make them heroes. That stretch of highway is by all that is just and right the ‘Highway of Warriors’, but not, I am bound to say the ‘Highway of Heroes’.  We should reserve the word hero  for those who perform deeds of heroism beyond the path of duty.