2026 - Looking forward and back

Photographs, Granny Kay’s birthday and The Order of Nova Scotia

Happy New Year all! I hope your holidays have been as peaceful as this youngster’s. Thank you to whoever knitted this masterpiece and whoever snapped this glorious photograph in Rebecca’s 1940s knitting magazine. In the words of Window Inn subscriber Ryan Watt, “Does it come in men’s large?”.

While I am very much looking forward to 2026, I’ve spent the last few days looking back. I’ve just put a couple of posts up directly on the Window Inn site and you can click through the links to see them:

Photographs and recorded music from November’s joyous shows at the Avening Community Centre in Ontario are here.

My many photographs and comments from the FUN night Dad and I had at the legandary Gavan’s in Quyon, Quebec are here.

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What a busy, surprising and fortunate year 2025 turned out to be for me.

Back in April when I turned 50, my intrepid manager/magician, Sheri, along with many musical friends, floored me with the Songs From the Gang tribute album. The summer gigs flying on the wings of that energy, both solo and with the Emergency, were some of the best we’ve had in years. In early November my mind got melted again when Creative Nova Scotia awarded me the Portia White Prize.

Then a few days ago, a third surprise came down the wire - I’ll be receiving the Order of Nova Scotia in the spring (along with Darrell Dexter, Carolyn G. Thomas, John George Flemming and Rankin MacSween). It’s an honour to receive this acknowledgement but I have to admit I feel a little overwhelmed. So much of what I do is informed, inspired and helped along by my family, friends and collaborators that a large bracket is needed after my name on the Order that says (with the help of Mom, Dad, Rebecca, John Candy, …).

While I don’t think of what I do as exactly fringe, it’s always felt like a self propelled and precarious musical meander. It brings a smile to my face to know that this disorderly path has somehow led me an actual Order. The Led Zeppelin inspired occult ceremony we held in the woods of Camp Wapameo as teenagers appears to working.

Right before I received the news about this, I was reading Czeslaw Milosz’s ABC’s. It is a book of short entries arranged alphabetically, and I had just finished reading this entry titled, ADMIRATION. It seemed to resonate while touching down in the holiday season.

“ADMIRATION. I have admired many people. I have always considered myself a crooked tree, so straight trees earned my respect. Indeed, we should remember what happens to us before Christmas when we set out to buy a Christmas tree. Rows of lovely trees, and all of them look terrific from a distance, but close up, none of them really meets our desire for an ideal tree.

One is too thin, another crooked, the third too short, and so on.

It’s the same with people; no doubt some of them seemed so imposing to me because I did not know them better, while I knew my own defects only too well.

Not only my own, but also those of my circle of poets and painters. The link between art and a genetic flaw, a disability, deviance, or illness is almost axiomatic. The biographies of writers and artists reveal this link, and looking around, I could find confirmation in the life histories of my friends and acquaintances. One may suspect this supposed connection derives from an error in perspective, however. If one were to subject the most ordinary mortals to just as serious an examination, it might turn out that “normality” is as rare among them as among individuals who are famous in the fields of literature and art. The lives of famous people are simply more often on display.

That is how I comforted myself, but my thinking did not interfere with my search for individuals who were superior to me because they were not deformed. In the final analysis, whether I was mistaken or not, I must record my capacity for admiration as a plus, not a minus.”

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Thanks to all of you who’ve tuned in here online, come out to the shows and kept in touch. And a special thanks to the paid subscribers- your monthly support helps cover the film and developing at Friend of a Friend Film Lab.

Slowly hatching some plans for 2026 and beyond but I’ll save those for another time.

Here’s to the New Year!

xx JP

PS: January 1st was my Granny Kay MacDonald’s birthday. Today she would have been 111. Every year we’d celebrate at her house by ordering Chinese food and gathering around my grandparents dining room table. A missionary’s daughter, she was born in Taiwan in 1915 and spent her childhood there so she grew up learning a dialect of Chinese as well as English. As a kid in Lunenburg in the 80s, my best friend was Vi Tai (now Richard). He and his family are Chinese but had come over from Vietnam in the late 70s along with so many other families. I hung out at their house almost daily. I have a very vivid memory of my Granny Kay visiting Lunenburg and talking with Vi Tai’s dad in a dialect that his mother couldn’t understand. Happy Birthday, Granny Kay!