Serendipity is a wonderful word. And we owe it to the eccentric Horace Walpole who coined it in a letter on January 28 of 1754. It is a hard word to translate, perhaps because it speaks to an unexpected and obscure but encouraging facet of reality.

Serendipity loosely means a fortunate discovery. Walpole himself, the reviver of Gothic architecture in his Strawberry Hill House and practitioner of Gothic writing in The Castle of Otranto, derived his neologism it from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the heroes were, Walpole wrote, "always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of". But it doesn’t just mean blind luck.

It means that when people are engaged in a worthy quest, in a suitably hopeful frame of mind, they often come across something even better than they were seeking. It reminds me of a maxim I acquired from an in-law’s publisher (an example, I think, of serendipity in that I was not expecting to gain wisdom at the book launch where it happened) that in life you must be ready to be lucky.

It sounds silly, perhaps. But it depends on the important truth that, except at the extremes, the difference between lucky and unlucky people is far less the mix of good, bad and ugly that fate sends them but their alertness to the good things. "Unlucky" people often fail to notice breaks they aren’t expecting.

In my view serendipity goes further still. It speaks to a certain beneficial substructure to a universe that often seems on the surface to present precisely the paradoxical mix of indifference and hostility that H.P. Lovecraft devoted himself to depicting graphically. And it justifies a joke that comes from the unlikely and superficially undesirable source known as Woody Allen, that life is like two old ladies discussing the food in their retirement residence.

It’s awful, says one, bland, pasty, salty and lukewarm, really just horrible. Yes, sighs the other, and such small portions too.

There really is something good here, although to find it we often need that elusive and surprising quality given such an oddly fitting name by Walpole. Serendipity. It rolls off the tongue and, I hope, into your life.

"Nothing has been worse than the modern notion that a clever man can make a joke without taking part in it; without sharing in the general absurdity that such a situation creates. It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one’s soul." G.K. Chesterton, "The Flat Freak," in Alarms and Discursions, quoted in Gilbert! Vol. 4 #7

In my latest National Post column I condemn the whole concept of food trends and "cutting-edge flavours" in favour of the retrograde notion of liking things that taste good.

While I’m on the subject of St. Leninsburg it is fitting to note that today marks the end of the brutal 872-day Nazi siege of what was then Leningrad between 8 September 1941 and January 27, 1944. Whatever one thinks of the regime and the name, it was an astonishing demonstration of tenacity under circumstances that literally defy belief.

It cost an estimated 580,000 German and three and a half million Soviet military casualties and a million civilians, over 600,000 during the siege and an astounding 400,000 in the evacuation (which gives you some idea of the efficiency and compassion of Bolshevism). The inhabitants were menaced, obviously, not only with death by bombardment or bombing but also and primarily by starvation.

Among the siege tales of horror were several thousand arrests for cannibalism, mostly of those already dead of natural causes although more than 10% involved deliberate killing of humans for food, and literally thousands of cases of murdering people for their ration cards. Not that there was much to be had even with a card; during the siege people ate their pets, often touchingly trading with a neighbour so as not to eat their own. There are even statues to two hero cats from the siege, Elisey and Vasilisa, though they turn out to be celebrated not for being food but for what they ate, being part of a shipment of cats delivered from Yaroslavl to help deal with the overwhelming plague of rats in the shattered city.

There are two stories I find uplifting about the resilience of the human spirit under such ghastly conditions. One is that the authorities had created an air raid system involving a metronome broadcast over the radio that speeded up if German bombers were approaching. After air raids became less frequent the radio station often broadcast music instead. But during breaks in the music the metronome resumed to assure listeners the city’s resistance had not collapsed, and apparently hungry, cold, lonely, frightened people would huddle by the radio and draw strength from the steady unquenchable tick tock tick tock. And the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad includes an underground museum whose only sounds are emergency broadcasts and the ticking of a metronome. (Horribly, an earlier Leningrad Defence Museum and many of its exhibits were destroyed in a fit of Stalin’s jealousy that saw the heroic siege declared a myth and many who had led the defence of the city purged by kangaroo courts and sent to Siberia or shot.)

The other is a soldier’s story. Kenneth Adelman, a top U.S. arms control negotiator under Ronald Reagan, tells of meeting Soviet Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev at the 1987 Reykjavik summit and learning that as a young man Akhromeyev had been tasked with defending a road outside Leningrad during the siege and that for 18 months including harsh Russian winters he never set foot inside a building. "'Never?' I asked. 'No. We were told to stay there. We stayed there.'" (Akhromeyev also told Adelman that only two of 32 boys in his high school class survived the war and that indeed eight of 10 males born in the Soviet Union in 1923, as he was, died during the conflict.)

Such heroism deserved a better cause than Stalinism, even in opposition to Naziism. But it is heroism all the same. And while I wish it had never been necessary, I do recognize and am inspired by their capacity to persevere through conditions unbelievable even to hear about, let alone endure.

"the sweet humiliation of organic life." C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength

In my latest National Post column I argue that Justin Trudeau's recent refusal to answer an English question in English "since we're in Quebec" is neither an innocent mistake nor a harmless reflex.

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Albert Einstein

To return to the topic of weddings that bring tears to your eyes, and again a royal one, would you cry if the king insisted on marrying you without telling anyone? Or might you just flee instead?

I have a feeling Anne Boleyn did neither on November 14, 1532 when she tied the knot surreptitiously with the dreadful Henry VIII. Anne was clearly in over her head, an ominous phrase in this context. But the young woman (we aren’t sure how young; she may have been born in 1501 or 1507) appears to have been a clever and confident schemer who wrongly thought she knew exactly what she was doing.

They were publicly married on January 25, 1533, leading to a ruckus of which you may have heard. The new Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, formerly the Boleyn family chaplain, declared the marriage null and void on May 23 of that year and, five days later, mysteriously changed his mind. Henry VIII could do that to you.

And to himself; when Anne proved unable to give him male heirs he had her convicted of high treason, as well as adultery and incest and perhaps witchcraft, by a jury that included her own uncle who lived to tell the tale largely, one suspects, because she did not (along with five men framed as her lovers). Cranmer then conveniently realized Anne’s marriage had been invalid after all. Gosh.

Henry had married Anne secretly because the Pope was still trying to figure out whether to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. (And when it became public excommunications flew.) So he wanted to have things both ways. And Anne ought to have realized that when Henry VIII thinks he’s using you and you think you’re using him, he’s right.

So I don’t have a lot of wedding advice to offer women other than don’t make the bridesmaids wear seafoam green. (They don’t have to look awful for you to look nice and nobody will ever wear that outfit again.) But I would urge you to reject any suitor who proposes that you marry him and move into his bed without mentioning it to anybody.

Especially, and I cannot stress this too strongly, if his surname is Tudor and his title is King.