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Bob Ramsay

Depression: The Good, the Better and the Ugly

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I was checking my Instagram feed one night three years ago when I scrolled past this post: “Where has my beautiful love gone? It’s been a mere week and the pain feels like it’s lasted a millennia.”

These were the first words of a friend announcing that her husband had died suddenly. His death shocked me no less than the announcement of it on social media. I was slow in viewing Instagram as the place to reveal great tragedies as well as luscious dinners and stunning sunsets.

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Books About Big Things

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Hostage books take up a tiny speck in the vast universe of books published each year.

The stories themselves may be harrowing, but their half-lives are short, as the news cycle moves on and another terror grips our gaze.

That said, Canadians seem to be punching above our weight, mainly because our hostages are mainly from the media, like Amanda Lindhout, or they’re diplomats, like Robert Fowler,

But maybe it’s also because we’re Canadians; we travel internationally much more than Americans do (63% vs. 40%), and we think our Canadian passport somehow protects us from being scooped up on the street.

Not any more.

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Amusing Themselves to Death

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So many people are dying of COVID in Alberta’s ICU wards that their passing is creating room for new patients. That’s the only good news coming out of what many have called its disastrous response to the pandemic, and which is actually ruinous.

In fact, doctors are now triaging COVID patients, making on-the-spot decisions as to who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t, and dies. Some of those choices will be made about children, age 5 to 11, who make up the fastest growing group of COVID patients. As one doctor said concerning these kids: “The curve is almost vertical.”

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How Will You Die?

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Likely from heart disease or cancer, which is what 52% of the world’s 8 billion people will die from, no matter their age or homeland. But most of us don’t believe that. We reliably underestimate the fact that cancer and heart disease will take one in two of us. We also chronically overestimate how many people will die via murder, auto accidents, drug and alcohol addiction, terrorism and even lightning.

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Terror Times Two

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I was in New York on September 10, 2001 to meet travel editors. I wrote a lot. I travelled a lot. So, I thought, why don’t I do both at the same time?

A friend got me an interview with the managing editor of Condé Nast Traveler, which was like talking with God. He casually said: “A place is not an idea.” His point was travel writing shouldn’t be an endless “we went here and then we went there, and this place was lovely and that wasn’t.”

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Five Royal Scandals

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My wife is the ultimate realist. But she’s always been a royalist too, which proves you can hold two opposed ideas in your head at the same time and still function.

But it’s getting worse. She used to glance sideways at the cover of Hello Canada in the supermarket check-out line. Now she subscribes to Quora Digest which gives her a morning fix of news and gossip from the Palace. She can barely keep up with all the scandals these days.

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