We’re well into Fall now, with the last peaches and the first apples at the markets. In the West End and out on English Bay, rain, wind, and then sudden sunlight. Fallen leaves, beginning to drift into piles. I’m back in my UBC classes. In Clinic, the class in which we work with clients for the first time, we are still making preparations because of COVID-19 disruptions. We meet as

As I write this post, I’m now entering the second year of my program. Things are unimaginably different from when I started. My class in Career Counselling will be online. What is called Clinic at UBC, a practice-based course where we counsel real clients for the first time, will meet at UBC, but our clients will be online, too. COVID-19 rates in British Columbia are still ticking up, after staying

In my counselling course, I’m one of the oldest students. One or two of my classmates have similarly grey hair, and I always thought before COVID intervened that we should have coffee and find out who actually was the oldest. Most of the time age vanishes, and then suddenly, out of the blue, returns. I was chatting to a classmate via Zoom a week ago about her parents, and slowly

Every few months, on a whim, I Google myself. There are a few other Philip Holdens who join me on the first page of my search results: the writer of hunting books from New Zealand, the managerial expert, the spirit medium who has been unmasked as a charlatan. But I’m always also present: I am not so very difficult to find. There was a time when most of the first

I’m making a briefer blog post this month than usual, partly because I’m in the last two weeks of a very intensive summer class, and also because I’m aware that what I should write about – something about Vancouver and Singapore, systemic racism and racial privilege, and Singapore, brought up by the recent worldwide protests after George Floyd’s death, and the perceptible uptick in anti-Asian racism here — still remains

Next week I start back at UBC again. My classes in the summer will be online, and I’ve loaded up on the number of credits, figuring that restrictions on travel are likely to persist here for some time. Spring has come and moved to what feels like early summer. The leaves are on the trees, even on the old Crimean linden outside our balcony, which is covered in moss, and

What a difference a month makes! When I made my last post on this blog, a month ago, I was looking forward to finishing my first regular academic year at UBC, and having the luxury to look back, and to see how far I’d come in this change of life. The two semesters of the normal academic year are now almost over, and I’m just about to attend my last

Early March now, and the beginnings of Spring. The first cherry blossoms on the trees, and even magnolias starting too open, surely too early. I also feel that I’m able to open up a little too, to get a greater sense of what I’m doing in the program at UBC, and how I place myself socially and politically in relation to it. I’ve been struggling for intellectual engagement since I

I’ve been here before. That point that you get to at a certain time in your studies, where in one way you are confident you can make your way forward. I’m coping quite well in my classes: I can write assignments that get me through fairly effortlessly, and I’m also trying to push myself to do more than just get by. At times I feel I’m doing well in practice:

I found coming back to Vancouver from Singapore quite an adjustment. The same, persistent rain, but now over twenty degrees colder. We’re past the winter solstice, but my new January 4.30 pm classes still begin in darkness, a contrast from September, when they finished just in time for sunset as I cycled back. I was talking to a friend last week, and saying that Singapore and Canada are still incommensurable