Pencil in hand, a pad of paper on my knee, I am sitting in a beach chair as I write, pausing occasionally to look out over Lake Huron from the Bruce Peninsula. Will this be an army of words in search of an idea? Stray thoughts scroll through one’s mind. 1) It is 245 km across to the Michigan shore. That’s as far as from Toronto to Kingston on the 401! 2) When it all belonged to them did any aboriginal navigators make the trip straight across by canoe? 3) Who were the first Europeans to see this mer douce? 4) Could industry and tourism ever pollute this vast inland sea? If so, with what effect?

Other odd thoughts present themselves in this relaxed situation. I can walk along a town street without acknowledging the passers-by I do not know. Why, here, is it difficult to encounter strolling strangers on the beach without speaking to them? Where will they – or I – be a year from now? And as follows.

It is only three weeks until the 2010 CNE opens. It was there in 1951 that I first saw a television set in operation. That was in the old Electrical Building near the Princes’ Gate.

I know now that the British Broadcasting Corporation operated the world’s first public television service in 1936 and that the man who invented it died in poverty and obscurity. He was the son of a Church of Scotland minister and a graduate in engineering from the University of Glasgow. Born in 1888, he suffered ill health and was advised to live down on the English Channel coast.

In Hastings there is a plaque at No. 18, Queen’s Arcade: “Television first demonstrated by John Logie Baird from experiments started here”.

Needing money, he had advertised in The Times on 27 June, 1923 for “someone who will assist in making working models” of a ‘seeing-by-wireless’ apparatus. By 1924 he had succeeded in ’televising’ the image of a Maltese cross over the distance of a few metres.

In October, 1925 he ‘telecast’ the picture of a ventriloquist’s dummy from one attic room to another at 22 Frith Street, Soho, in London. He rushed downstairs and asked William Taynton to make the first personal TV appearance. Payment: half a crown (two shillings and sixpence).

By 1937 the Marconi Company developed electronic scanning to improve Baird’s mechanical method. The Coronation of George VI was seen on television within 150 km of London. Why am I thinking of this here on the beach? It is because evening television nowadays can be such a bore. Thank goodness, since 1995, for DVD.

My mind scrolls to Brother André, the dome of whose oratory on Mount Royal was visible from the upper windows of our house just below The Boulevard in Westmount. Why him? Well, I see that he is just about to be ‘sainted’. Alfred Besette, born in 1845, was another person with ‘iffy’ health. As a youth he worked for a time in a Connecticut textile factory. Returning to Québec, he was appointed porter (doorkeeper) and factotum at le Collège de Notre Dame in Montréal. From age 25 he held that post for 67 years, until his death in 1937.

Over objections from the college physician, André’s counselling and healing ministry attracted increasing numbers who sought his help and the intercession of St Joseph for whom he had a special devotion. St Joseph’s Oratory, built between 1924 and 1967, seats 15,000.

Its copper covered dome is second in size to that of St Peter’s in Rome. The 56 bell carillon was originally intended for the Eiffel Tower.

I look up from what I am writing to see kids playing beach ball. There are two ‘visible minority’ youngsters among them. Are they aboriginal North Americans? A large part of this beach belongs to a First Nations band that keeps lessees reminded of its proprietary rights. Fair enough. The 1805 Toronto Purchase, a sketchy transaction involving the land now occupied by the Metro area and its northern and western suburbs, has been challenged legally. The federal government is offering $145 million in compensation to the 1800 descendants of the New Credit First Nation.

That got me thinking about something I read last spring, entitled “If the World were a Village of 1000 People”. If so, it would consist of 584 Asians, 124 Africans, 165 Europeans, 74 South Americans, 60 North Americans. The other 7 would be Aussies and New Zealanders, I guess.

165 would speak primarily Mandarin Chinese, 86 English, 83 Hindi/Urdu, 64 Spanish, 58 Russian, 37 Arabic and the rest a variety of languages. In his book Globish (i.e. Global+English) journalist Robert McCrum says that English is fast becoming the second language of a large part of the world.

We have also globalised our economic system. In the imaginary 1000 person village, out of a budget of $15 million annually, $13.5 million is controlled by and benefits mainly only 90 of the 1000 inhabitants. The rest can vote for candidates nominated by the Top 90. Occasionally some will throw rocks and kick in shop windows.

I recall those figures only approximately. They beg correction, not the question. The point is that something is out of balance. By the time this column appears I’ll be back in town and can check my sources.

Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “global village”. Forty years ago, when we decided to live in Mono Township rather than return to Toronto from Montréal, a friend, Dorothy Marshall, who had grown up on a C Line farm that is now a garden centre, asked “Why would anybody move to Orangeville?”. Well, Mono wasn’t Orangeville (population at the time 6,700) but it was close enough to make the question relevant.

A university colleague, Professor Northrop Frye, used to say that if the world were actually to become a global village it would feature a typical village’s cliques, social barriers, life-long feuds and other fish-bowl problems.

That may have been what Dorothy thought she had escaped and knew that she did not miss.