IN PRAISE OF NORA EPHRON

A POLYMATH OF WORDS

After 53 years in journalism, I have no idols but some great favourites. I have interviewed some of the most famous people in the world, but have never asked for an autograph. I treasure my memories instead, but I have just been reminded that memories can leak through the holes of your nostalgia like bathwater leaving the tub.

Some of that, of course, has to do with seniors' moments, which apparently expand as old farts age. I have just read that one of my great favourites, Nora Ephron, who is only 69, also can't remember some of the more notable events of her life, like meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, Cary Grant and Dorothy Parker.

Now I am at the melting Swiss cheese stage of my anecdotage, where if I had had a drink with Parker at the old Algonquin in New York, I may not remember that repartee but would still be able to quote some of her great lines. Like "women and elephants never forget." Or "you can't teach an old dogma new tricks."

I remember interviewing an explorer who says he found Noah's Ark but not his name or anything else. (He gave me what he said was a splinter from the ark, which is lost somewhere in my home along with a mummified finger (don't ask) and my first wedding ring.)

I remember interviewing Sir Edmund Hillary and remember that he was a bluff genial sort, but apart from asking the predictable question about whether he or Tenzing were first to the peak of Everest in 1953, I can't recall anything beyond the reply that they climbed as a team.

For 15 years I was a member of the prestigious International Press Institute which met in difficult foreign locales for press freedoms and always attracted the cream of national leaders plus a smattering of Nobel laureates, former PMs etc. Most of them are a memory blur, and only if I refresh myself with old notebooks from the basement does their voice and thoughts come back...a bit.

Ephron's latest book of musings, I Remember Nothing, deals with how seniors' moments have become the Google Moment of our time, because of the irrevocable forgetting of names and faces. One example for her? She no longer knows anyone in People magazine. That resonates with me. Thank heavens, I'm not the only one who finds its people and facts to be baffling trivia.

Ephron has been making the rounds of the arduous book tour. She was on the final show of the season for Bill Maher and didn't talk enough. She was interviewed in the National Post by a fan, Nathalie Atkinson. who writes and edits, stars allegedly in that weird comic strip The Posties, and is a great cottage guest.

Let me borrow her quotes, where Ephron explains that it's not because our brains become wise enough to realize that it's not important to recognize the latest 15-minute celebrity in People.

That's just a rationalization, she says. "But the truth is when you're young, you are in a desperate need to accumulate friends and information. And you clock it all. You file it all. If you meet someone at a party, there is no chance you won't recognize them if you bump into them several days later ... That stops in a way that you have no idea. You think you have an idea because every so often something slips your mind and you go 'oh my god, am I losing it?' But you don't. But you will."

I was rereading the interview, wondering whether she was stretching it when she said she couldn't remember meeting Eleanor or Cary, when the phone rang. My friend Ted Aver wanted me to come to the Tory holy-of-holies, Toronto's Albany Club, to hear a former colleague. And Aver reminisced about politicians he had invited me to interview over the years.

"Remember that Tory from England that you wrote about. He's doing quite well. I see him on TV all the time, "Aver said. I said I had never interviewed anyone from the British Government at the club. Aver is older too, and he blanked on the name but remembered the wife had a unusual name.

So I resorted to Google, which has replaced our memories, and after 10 minutes or so, determined that yes, I had interviewed a British Tory whose wife's first name was Ffion. To my embarrassment, it is quite a famous Tory, the former party leader who is now Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague.

Maybe it's just Tories who blank out most for me. A Tory friend, Jeff Lyons, who is in disfavour due to City Hall shenanigans, once asked me to interview a western friend who was running for leader. So I had breakfast with the friend, and we talked for three hours. I drove him downtown, and thought he was a bright agreeable politician without a chance. And I forgot about him. Then when Joe Clark became leader and then PM, I couldn't find my notes and there was this black hole in my memory space.

It wouldn't be so bad but I used to be consulted when reporters needed a fact in a hurry. (I didn't remember their name but I remembered the fact.) I was the institutional memory for some organizations. I never had the photographic memory of prominent people like Senator David Smith or Conrad Black but I could hold my own in trivia contests.

Then Google made recall irrelevant. I phoned a friend, Ralph Pohlman, the psychiatrist, trivia maven, and former Sun columnist, and lamented that Google had replaced us. (My example to him is that at a party we were arguing about the height of Conan O'Brien because of his Jumping Jack style of physical humour. Within 15 seconds and Google, I knew he is 6' 4.)

Dr. Pohlman's comment on the erosion of memory is that some of his older colleagues end up with patients who know more about their conditions than the doctors remember because they've been surfing the Internet.

Fortunately, I don't have to Google many of the great Ephron lines from her romantic comedies, books, plays, articles, musings etc .... The orgasm line from her Harry Met Sally movie. The line about her second husband, Carl Bernstein, in the movie Heartburn, after his fictional double was caught in an affair with a mutual friend. He was capable of "having sex with a Venetian blind."

I once interviewed Bernstein and introduced him as a banquet speaker. I really wanted to talk more about Ephron than Watergate, but I was afraid he would stampede. He had threatened to sue Ephron but never did.

Ephron says her love affair with journalism is over, that her "pretentious days" as a scribe writing "the first draft of history" are over, just as her illusion died of reaching objective truths. "Eventually, when I started writing about what you might call fiction, it became clear to me that there was no such thing as the truth. That, except for a very few things for wont of a better word we call facts, everything is a story, a point of view. And that was a kind of revelation."

Yet she says she loved journalism, that there's no better job when you're young.

Now that is something that I will never forget.

ROBBING ONTARIO AND THE WEST

CONSERVATIVES ARE AS BAD AS LIBERALS

Woe Canada, the land where rural voters have more clout than big city voters, where squeaky activists get the grease of millions, where the "have" provinces give and give and give to the "have- not" provinces, where you better move out of Toronto or Vancouver or Calgary or Edmonton if you lose your job and are looking for help.

There's nothing new or questionable in my first paragraph. I wish there were. I wish someone in Ottawa could deny that last year the unemployed of Ontario and the West received only half the benefits per person that the jobless got in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, that the notorious financial cuddling of Quebecers has ended, that the failed program of bilingualism was designed only to benefit francophones and not anglophones who were also fluent in French, that the flood of billions continues to Atlantic Canada no matter how flush they are with new resource discoveries.

Of course our federal pols also are capable of discriminating within a province as well as with ridings that weren't smart enough to have an MP in government. Consider the bizarre discrepancy between all the millions that went to Muskoka for the G20 meetings, where everything went swimmingly, and the trickle that came to Toronto, which doesn't vote Tory, and was turned into an armed camp by the over reaction of cops to the jerk activists.

But let's deal with billions rather than mere millions. I was sitting on the subway during the morning rush and I had more time than I wanted to examine a National Post story about the latest study into what it called "stealth equalization."

Nope, it wasn't another story about the baffling transfer of equalization payments between the feds and the provinces. The idea is that the "have-not" provinces don't have enough economic activity to generate enough revenue to deliver adequate public services to their residents. So they get help from Ottawa's tax revenue. Politicians have been squabbling over this for years.

But there's a new wrinkle in the figures, as far as I was concerned. If you study how many federal employees each province has for each 100,000 residents, you find that Manitoba and the Maritimes have far higher levels of federal employment than if those employees had been distributed proportionally in the country.

Ironically, that is true even though the capital is located in Ontario. So you would expect to find more federal employees in and around the capital. Yet Ontario last year had 1,742 federal employees per 100,000 population while Newfoundland had 1,823, P.E.I had 3,657, Nova Scotia had 3,219, New Brunswick had 2,655 and Manitoba had 2,619.

Provinces with fewer federal employees than Ontario were Quebec, (1,378) Saskatchewan, (1,210) B.C., (1,187) and Alberta, (936).

So we know all about the gush of equalization tax money that takes from the west to give to the east. But why, for example, would Manitoba have twice as many federal employes as its neighbour, Saskatchewan?

I know figures lie and liars figure. Yet this is compelling evidence that all the salaries and benefits that flow to these extra federal employees in five provinces from the federal treasury is an additional transfer of wealth from Canada's most productive provinces to those that have failed to be successful at supporting themselves.

Some time I think we should worry more about the West leaving than Quebec.

NEW THOUGHTS ON KKK FIASCO

BLACKFACE ISN'T JUST RACIST, IT'S ILLEGAL

The pretty river town of Campbellford - the site of that Legion Halloween costume party where a KKK-cloaked man leading a man in blackface by a noose won the award - is a decent community where picking on minorities is not a sport.

The details, the fallout and the hysteria are well-known now and burned into the memories of the locals who feel betrayed.

As someone who has cottaged nearby for 30 years, and routinely walks and talks and shops there, let me offer some other thoughts.

First of all, it's illegal to paint your face black in Ontario, whether for a play or a party.

I find it remarkable that so many, including the ex-Toronto cop in blackface, didn't know that.

It is true that once upon a time, blackface was popular in vaudeville and in the minstrel shows that even churches staged to raise money. I'm sure there were minstrel shows, with blackface, darky jokes and great Stephen Foster songs, in Campbellford, just as there were in Toronto and throughout North America. I saw many shows that were jampacked with all my neighbours. Eighty years ago, two of the biggest stars in the world were Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson. In blackface! Amos 'n' Andy was still around in the '60s, a hit radio show by whites about supposed black comedy.

For a century, blackface flourished. But then, thankfully, changing times, freedom marches and politicians properly sensitive to insults to blacks and other minorities, not only made blackface shows rare, a law was passed at Queen's Park to make them illegal.

You would have thought an ex-cop would have known that. What he gave us instead was crap where he says they would have left if anyone had told them it was offensive.

The ban on blackface has strained the theatre community when it recreates old shows. I recall that at the venerable Royal Alex in Toronto that the restaging of the famous operetta, The Desert Song, had at one point actors wearing green paint on their faces.

I found it bizarre when I saw it but that was the law.

It's encouraging that leaders were so deft when they waded through the poisonous commentary afterwards. For example, Mayor Hector MacMillan said how sad it all was for the families who had lived there for generations. (He's mayor of Trent Hills, composed of Campbellford, a quiet town of nearly 3,000 - hardly the tiny place pictured by the Star - Hastings, Warkworth and some township.)

One example of why I know racism hardly burns through Campbellford is that as someone who has eaten several times at Rubbs, a local restaurant, and discussed its menu often with neighbours, no one ever mentioned that the owner was a Canadian from Jamaica. Unfortunately there has been some profane reaction against him for criticizing the costume stunt, but then racist idiots also are found throughout the world.

People who care about racism, as we all should, must look beyond Campbellford and the anguish of the smear on all.

We have just had a conference in Ottawa about the relentless increase in anti-Semitism year after year. We know from the unceasing turmoil at York University that militant Muslims are determined to fight Jewish students from classroom to classroom until Israel falls into the sea.

The daily emails infesting the Internet that slander Obama for daring as a black to become president is a festering sore. It dwarfs any racist costume mistake, but far less attention has been paid to Internet poison in the last two weeks.

One exception was a Sunday Sun column on Nov. 21 which lamented and condemned the vicious profane attacks on political web sides, one term for it is flaming, where sensible debate has been drowned in a flood of poison.

When I sit on the docks with neighbours for one of those afternoons where beer follows beer until you wonder what happened to the sun, the talk is not about blacks but corruption, gangs, native barricades, native land claims, the incredible mess of Caledonia, and the erosion of rights and common sense by politically correct activists.

Oh yes, let's not forget the annoyance in Cottage Country of the crammed fishing boats of Canadians of Chinese heritage. They certainly enjoy themselves, but they're ignored as they break every rule in fishing and safety as they keep every fish, even the babies.

There's a common thread from the petty to the obscene. And what links the issues bugging Canadians - and a racist costume is barely on the radar - is the costly and frustrating failure of our politicians and police to deal appropriately with anything larger than a pothole or a ticket. Let us not be diverted from our fury at how inept our authorities have become by a brief incident in a Legion, when our Legions, the social clubs of small-town Canada, are filled with so many who have served and worked to help the rest of us.

NOTHING'S OFF THE RECORD

REUNIONS ARE WONDERFUL FIBFESTS

It was a wonderful reunion. Seven journalists, who graduated from Ryerson an incredible 52 years ago, gathered in the pleasant North Toronto home of Terry O'Connor to talk a lot and maybe fib a bit, skip over ancient feuds, sing our irreverent version of a school song, and to wonder why we don't see each other.

In those 52 years, Ryerson has evolved from an institute known to critics as Rye High to a respected university that wouldn't understand our anger at U of T in the song written by Don Hawkes and belted out by our Road Apples chorus in a closet we commandered from the authorities in a vanished barracks building.

We were a tiny class, but we went on to make an impact. And here are my classmates, all retired. Pictured from the left is Hawkes, Sun editor, with Barrie Zwicker, iconoclastic critic and Alby Sokol, jock writer, at the right rear. O'Connor, Ryerson information officer, is in front with our ladies, Shirley Gilbert, a major exec at HP, the computer giant, and Miriam Zylberberg, the anchor behind her doctor Bernie.

In the middle of our buzz, Sokol, known to generations of Telegram and Star readers, unveiled an ancient grievance.

"You know," he confided, "you gotta watch Downing. Years ago I picked up his column and read what I had told him the previous day at lunch. I had had to go out and do one of those Man On The Street surveys for the Star, and I hated them. This guy was coming down the street and I got out my notebook and as he came up, before I could say anything, he put a coin in my palm and kept on going. And the Star photog says to me, Alby, you got to dress better."

And all of us hooted. I said defensively to the panhandler for quotes that I thought then that it was the funniest thing I had heard in months, and I didn't really think it was off the record. And Alby said something like he didn't think he had to say off-the-record to a friend.

Boy, did that take me back. I was writing five columns a week, and occasionally six, and there were weeks when I wrote the daily editorial too. If anyone said anything interesting within 100 yards of me, they appeared in print. My neighbour out back, the chiropractor, said one weekend that he wanted to tell me something over the fence but it was off-the-record. I do believe I muttered something like I didn't know he ever said anything interesting enough to print, which is my normal line in such situations, but I hope I refrained.

(I loved writing columns. But I did think occasionally of Lewis Grizzard, who at his peak appeared in more than 400 newspapers. He wrote: "Being a columnist is like being married to a nymphomaniac. It's great for the first two weeks."

The engineering students at U of T used to steal a Sun every morning and then float it around the all-day classes. One day a chap across the aisle yelled at my son John Henry that "your father didn't have anything interesting to say today." John Henry demanded to know why he would say something rude like that. "Because he wrote about you," came the reply.

The family gently suggested that perhaps some of their life should be off limits, which I ignored because I found that columns about my family were considered far more interesting by many than anything I felt about politics. And my cottage retreat was right up there too.

These days I read and listen to a lot of media malarkey about off-the-record utterances. The rule that most journalists like me follow is that the person has to stipulate that it's off-the-record BEFORE he or she says anything, and the writer has to agree to that before the sensitive material is revealed.

All that really means is that you can't quote them specifically, or give revealing clues as to their identity, but there's no way you can forget what was said. So it will help shape the story, which probably is what the source wanted in the first place.

In real courts, and in what passes for courts in the movies and on TV, we have become accustomed to lawyers blurting out loaded questions with dubious details which the judges rule out of order and tell the juries to disregard. As if juries can scrub words from their memories.

The best way to stay out of the media is not to say anything. As for all those who claim they were misquoted, most are lucky they were quoted in the first place.

Maybe Alby was mad that I wrote it was a coin. After all, Star guys would expect bills.

I WON'T REFUDIATE DINGBAT PALIN

WE'VE ALL HAD SLIPS OF THE LIPS

Now that Sarah Palin is credited with the best new word of the summer - or was it the year - it is time to tell the critics to hush on this particular proof of her lack of knowledge of real English and confess that we've all been there.

When she used refudiate on a Twitter message, we all knew (A) there was a good reason the new fad starts with twit (B) what she really meant.

So the Palin that deliberately uses folksy language to talk to the conservatives, red necks and chuckleheads of the U.S. doesn't have to resort to arguments that Shakespeare used new words too. People understand. And my mind simply refuses to make the comparison with our greatest writer since the huntress who talks about mamma bears when she wants to shoot a vote is hardly capable of a real sentence - let alone a sonnet.

Today's great riddle in the U.S. is to try to figure out her IQ. Does she have hot flashes of insight to break up the expanses of dumb logic? Or is she just a pretty face who doesn't do her homework? The 50% who approve of her in polls are forgiving the gaffes, family scandals, lies, fibs, half-truths, and self-marketing, so what's a mangled word.

There isn't a leader or a pro talker or even a parent who doesn't occasionally trip over words and names. Generally they slur into the proper word. Consider how often loving parents call one son by another son's name, and they never get over it, or you use a word that is wrong but sounds right.

However, it's nonsense for some dictionary company to ordain a malapropism as some great new word. I love those year-end lists of the best new words, which often are clever linkage of words or puns - my own creation was anecdotage - but let's not get into mangled language. Besides, it's all just a PR gimmick to get some attention, like the worst-dressed list by a designer than no one had ever heard of before.

So I excuse Palin and understand her but pray she doesn't keep doing it. There are already too many screwing up good words and old expressions. For instance, I give a damn that so many write they "don't give a tinker's damn. " The expression means that something is as worthless as the temporary DAM that was used when a tinker soldered a kettle.

Another reason I'm not bothered with refudiate is I made a worst mistake in front of millions watching the main CBC news show. I was the guest expert on the National for the 1985 provincial election. Because the Ontario race was undecided for so long, there were three Nationals that night, one for the Maritimes, one for central Canada, and one for the West.

So there I was, bathed in hot TV lights for three newscasts in a row, knowing that my boss, Doug Creighton, would be furious that his new Sun Editor was out of the office for hours, trying not to look stupid when anchor Barbara Frum asked her insightful questions.

At one point, and horror has scrubbed the actual non-word and timing from my memory, I used a word that doesn't exist. It wasn't even close to anything. Frum, startled, looked at me closely and repeated my awful creation. So I bluffed and said it again, as if Frum should know. As a nice pro, she went on to another question. But at the next off-air break, she said: "John, there isn't such a word." I said, "of course there isn't, Barbara. But you don't have to try to point that out before millions."

I returned to the office where an irate Creighton lambasted me for my absence and insisted that I had to write the editorial saying the Tories should end their reign because they got only 52 seats and the Grits had almost as many at 48. I appealed to Paul Godfrey, arguing that if a newpaper backed a party, it shouldn't abandon it election night. So that's the way the editorial read, although Creighton was mad for weeks.

That election is famous at Queen's Park. And I had a ringside seat at the changing of the guard.

The Lieutenant Governor was John Black Aird, who looked like just another corporation lawyer, but he had been a populist success. He had the humanity to learn sign language and travel widely, even playing floor hockey at Variety Village with the disabled kids, despite excruciating back pain.

Aird, a former Liberal insider/bagman, sensed beforehand that the election would be close. So his adviser, the famed lawyer John J. Robinette, showed up at 9 a.m. the next day to review his powers as to who should rule.

Two days later, on May 4, Aird came to an honours luncheon at the Toronto Press Club. Knowlton Nash, the legendary CBC personality, whose famous voice is stilled by disease, knew Aird, and so did I. Without preamble, he dragged both of us off to a private corner, asked what we would do about the near dead heat, and explained his options.

Perhaps it was the rum. Perhaps it was the thrill of apparently being consulted before a major decision. But Nash and I said plainly that the electorate was vote-weary. If Aird was to allow or suggest that the 48 Grits join with the 25 New Democrat in some pact, most voters would accept that as better than another election.

After Aird left us, Nash, who had begun as a wire-service political reporter, and I knew then what was going to happen. "This is a scoop," Nash said. I agreed. Then I said that while Aird, the gentleman, hadn't said it was off-the-record, we were in a club and that was the normal rule, and I thought that Aird expected us to behave honourably. And Nash agreed.

When it was announced the Liberals and New Democrats had formed an "accord" that would last eventually two years, there were at least two journalists who weren't surprised at the change of government.

Yet Bob MacDonald, the vitriolic Sun columnist, poured his acid all over Aird for allowing his Grit cronies to rule. I never did confront him and refudiate his views.

HIGHWAY OF HEROES COIN

MINT BUREAUCRATS SHOULD BE ASHAMED

Trent Hills council, led by their mayor Hector Macmillan on Nov. 15, unanimously passed a motion requesting the Royal Canadian Mint to strike a coin to honour the Highway of Heroes, the stretch of Highway 401 that honours the passage of Canada's war dead coming home to their final resting place.

The council and Macmillan, encouraged by two Sun Media journalists, may be the first of the councils and mayors to say that a Mint that can honour whales and football teams can also honour dead Canadian soldiers.

But they won't be the last.

Macmillan is sending the motion to the more than 400 members of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. He is also sending it at my suggestion to Toronto council, which is not an AMO member. And just in case it gets lost in the shuffle of new business at City Hall, a copy has gone to Councillor Doug Holyday, who will play a major role in the new Rob Ford administration and has promised to back such a resolution with all his heart and skill.

The resolution from Trent Hills, a municipality of 12,000 that includes Campbellford, Hastings, Warkworth and townships like Seymour, says that the Highway of Heroes "plays a significant role honouring our fallen Canadian soldiers" and has become "a remarkable venue."

As Toronto Sun readers will know from the Nov. 6 column by Joe Warmington, his friend Pete Fisher of the Cobourg Star has led the way to get the coin. And he and Warmington and Macmillan will get the commemorative coin because honour and good sense will win the day. And if they don't, I would expect the Prime Minister and his government to order that coin.

As Fisher said in a letter to Macmillan after he and Warmington met him while covering the Halloween embarrassment at the Campbellford Legion, the Highway of Heroes crosses Northumberland County - where Trent Hills is located - on its way from CFB Trenton to Toronto.

The highway honour has universal support, and if it doesn't, the critics better keep their heads down. When the hearse and honour cars pass beneath the bridges with the latest victim of Afghanistan, Canadians with their flags and tears stand above. Fisher says that for the watchers, there "is a feeling of great pride, and sadness." He wrote that because of the vigils, the families of the fallen know that "they are not alone, and we, as a country, grieve with them, and support them."

It was on a family visit to the Mint last year that Fisher learned of how new coins are chosen. So he requested one for the Highway of Heroes, perhaps of mourners on an overpass with flags.

First the Mint seemed enthusiastic, then it said the design would be too difficult.

The Mint better be able to prove it is too difficult when the protest floods over them from councils and mayors and media like the Sun bulldogs. There is also an Internet link for a petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/hhyoh123/petition.html. It's a call to action for MPPs and MPs.

If we have to, we could probably find a suitable design from someone like Andy Donato, a cartoonist, artist and graphic artist who has done everything from catalogue illustrations to Sun symbols.

Because people like Donato care about those who were killed or maimed on the other side of the world.

So far, the Mint bureaucrats haven't shown that they do too.

A NICE POST SCRIPT

The Canadian Mint announced several weeks after I wrote the column on Nov. 16 that it will issue the coin after all. Congratulations to Peter Fisher, the journalist who began it all, and Trent Hills Mayor Hector Macmillan who had his council be the first body to support a nice tribute to those who have had to pass in tearful calvacade along the Highway of Heroes.

I guess Mint officials would say that it responded to public interest but isn't it too bad that it had to be whipped into this by council motions, petitions and angry columns.

SAILING THE DANUBE THROUGH GLORIES, COMMUNIST WRECKAGE AND POLLUTION

EIGHT COUNTRIES IN A TWINKLING VIA VIKING CRUISES

It does sound like that movie If It's Tuesday It Must Be Belgium. After all, we were in nine countries in 18 days, with a day at either end for flying - which daily grows more of a hassle.

The link was the Danube River stretching between Bulgaria and Romania and Germany and the Czech Republic. From swimming in the cold Black Sea to the great steps of Prague Castle.

Sadly, the Danube is not the blue delight of the song. Its waters more closely resemble dirty sock water. It's a river of the tugs and barges of commerce, the major artery through Eastern Europe.

A few days after we passed through Western Hungary, a reservoir wall gave way and the floods of toxic waste killed nine and injured 150. As the respected Economist magazine observed on Oct. 14, "the Danube basin is littered with accidents about to happen."

Still the trip through the the ancient glories and the modern curses left behind by communism was the "odyssey" promised by Viking (in the ancient name of Homer for an epic journey.) The scenery was often a picturesque movie, with the ruined factories and leaking storage facilities left by dictators obscured by the pleasant banks of a mighty river.

I would be happy to sail the Primadonna again, a giant catamaran accommodating 148 guests, and a tiny but efficient staff. It sailed so smoothly, you didn't know it had left the dock.

It was the key to the odyssey because we sailed the Danube in our cosy cabin and wonderful dining room, and were bused with guides chatting over our earphones to the major points of interest. If we had travelled instead by plane, train or bus, our nerves would have been as frazzled as the ruined countries left behind by the cruel and discredited communists.

The 40-year-old movie about Belgium - which has become the cliche condemnation of package tours -no longer resonates with me and other travellers, because we've done it the old way, searching vainly for hotels and restaurants with tattered guidebook in hand while night looms.

We prefer more of the comfortable cocoon, knowing where we're going to eat and sleep each night.

My wife and I have searched the lanes of Cairo and Jerusalem while sweat smarts the eyes.

We've spent a night in Brussels in a whorehouse with no bedroom ceiling and the toilet down the hall. The only bed we could find at midnight. Yet Mary wasn't about to sit in the railway station all night.

I have too many such stories about the perils of doing it on your own, even if you have rented a car and have a vague idea what part of the country you may be in.

A photographer and I once went around the world on a day's notice, with me carrying only a one-suiter for two weeks. I could do it again, providing I had a bathing suit and cold beer. But it's nicer to have company when misery creeps into the trip, and there's always some boring bit.

Our tour group called the Intrepids is based loosely on Humber Valley United Church members in Etobicoke led by the indomitable Cathy Wilkes. We adopted the name when we went to Turkey despite a new Iraq war along one border. They've also been to Egypt and other African countries, and Russia, China and Japan. We will continue sailing off into the sunset as long as airline security doesn't grow so tight, they will no longer allow any passengers at all.

Our river cruise displayed the glories of the past and the emerging good and the awful residue of communism and war. It included the usual tour stuff of lofty cathedrals and lowly old churches disguised to protect Christians. We saw the ancient houses of the rich.

We explored the grotesque rock formations of Belogradchik in Bulgaria, shaped by erosion, and the scenic stretch of the Danube in Serbia known as the Iron Gate. And we listened to the waltzes and classical music of old. (The best music for a Danube cruise is Smetana's Moldau . The Czech's most famous tune has the surges and flowing water of notes as brooks and rivers merge near Prague.)

There were hitches. One of the Primadonna's great engines failed for a day or so, so the excellent guides had to scramble to patch the schedule.

So we were packed off to a stud farm for the Lippizaner white horses of war. Not well done. Besides, there are too many places claiming to be the original home of the famous horses.

Mary and I know the truth because we once spent a great day and night on what's really the home, a stud farm at Lipica in Croatia. At least I got a nice shot in Vienna of three of the famous horses. It will hang on my wall to jog my memory, and my thoughts will be good.

Yet not all the memories of Eastern Europe are, not when the Balkans have long been one of the notorious trouble centres of the world.

We visited the Croatian city of Vukovar where 2,000 amateur soldiers held out for 87 days against the professional killers of Serbia - 36,000 soldiers, 110 tanks and dozens of war planes.

After the Serbs killed the defenders and demolished the port city and the war ended in 1995, 800 Croatians were missing and 22,000 killed or exiled. There had only been 30,000 residents.

So the dateline of Vukovar is a bitter reminder of the insanity of war between ancient enemies. The jagged walls of shelled houses still remain on too many streets, while the Croatians have left the huge water tower standing as a monument that was holed like Swiss cheese by artillery.

The hatred still festers in much of the disintegrated Yugoslavia.

In the giant church cave still under construction of St. Sava in Belgrade, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world, a Serb I was talking to cursed the Slovenians for departing the Yugoslav federation on Jan. 25, 1991, one day before the Croatians. The Serbs abandoned their war on the tiny pastoral country after only 11 days because of the stiff resistance where 67 were killed, most of them Serbs. The angry Serb's curses were drowned by the pealing of the bells above the huge white structure. The guide was mortified because all of their commentary as we floated from country to country was carefully correct and neutral.

As we idled down a street of restaurants, Mary asked a lounging maitre d' how the Serbs said thank you. Then she asked how the Slovenians did and explained her parents had come from Slovenia. Young punk waiters said they had never been to Slovenia, which is as close there as Toronto to the Falls. Besides, one sneered, Slovenians were lazy and murderers.

Imagine! Spewing racist hatred to casual tourists. And the Serbs wonder why so many hate them. Back on the Primadonna, the staff was embarrassed again.

Yet most of our travels were good, even if Bulgaria and Romania are filled with the derelict buildings and economic rust left by failed communism. Empty fields, or with just a few animals, closed factories and shops, and the unemployed sitting on corners. Bulgaria is the poorest Balkan member of the European Union and EU officials grumble that they allowed it and Romania in too soon. Now the European hassle is over the gypsies from Romania

Mary and I had a chance to return to fabled Cesky Krumlov, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We had a marvelous time there once with our son John Henry, when we still travelled on our own and came across a enormous bargain of room, dinner and beer for $20.

The great beer centres that gave us Budweiser and Pilsener are near the lovely Bohemian centre. I told my fellow travellers how the arrogant brewers of American Budweiser went after the brewery in Budvar over naming rights and were reminded that the Czechs had been brewing Budweiser before the U.S. existed.

Ah, Cesky Krumlov, one of the best preserved cities in the Czech Republic. The beautiful baroque, Gothic and renaissance architecture. The market square. The bridges over the curving river.

It often pops up when I think of travels. For me it's like the Brigadoon of movie musical fame which comes to life one night each century. I would love to spend years there.

There are many who rave about Vienna. I've found in three visits that it is too full of itself, from the imperial Ringstrasse that encircles the inner city to St. Stephan's Cathedral which is always being scrubbed. The Viennese boast of their elegance and romance, of their musical heritage and their food. Demels lives up to its rep as a great bakery of confections and cakes but on a previous visit I found the famous tort at the Sacher Hotel behind the restored State Opera House - one setting for the fabled Third Man movie - to be a dry chocolate cake that people would send back in Canada.

I much prefer the crowded streets of the people's Prague to royal Vienna. Our visit was a post-cruise extension. There were literally thousands of young people swarming the cobble lanes and compact medieval centre of the city of a hundred spires. Occasionally it seemed they were all on my street.

The Charles Bridge is unique in a world filled with great bridges. No visit to Prague is complete without seeing the grand pedestrian bridge that began in 1357 and is lined with 30 Gothic religious statues that artists use as backdrops as they paint their tourist patrons.

Then there's the 600-year-old Astronomical Clock which has had dials, facades and moving statues added over the centuries. Crowds of tourist worship its hourly wonders, carpeting the square underneath to watch.

A great walking city, and walk we did for two days, from Wenceslas Square to the Old Jewish cemetery, with time out for beer and sausages.

Nothing like munching and sipping a real Bud and talking about the wonders of past days, like the 900-year-old Melk Abbey perched on sheer cliffs above the Danube, with rainbow colours splashed on the walls and ceilings inside the abbey church making up for the arduous climb. And the twin cities of Buda and Pest with the massive hilltop castle and the lovely stonework of the restored Parliament.

A grand trip. One we would like to do again. And I will. Especially Prague.