The ending to, an otherwise,  damn difficult day was on The Rings.

The Rings are also appropriately damn difficult, but I make slow progress and it’s exhilarating.

Someone shot some funny video on a phone that I’ll upload forthwith.

Was there any foreshadowing that singing The Beegees Stayin’ Alive would be a requirement of motherhood?

Somedays I think I could give up most pleasures in life in exchange for the consistent smell of sweet peas, especially the purple ones.

I did not know before 7.50pm this evening that field hockey was popular in India. A man sprinting along beside me informed me of this curiousity. Field hockey brings back muddy memories of getting the ankles hacked off me in the pissing rain. It wasn’t an experience that inspired nor is treasured. The trick I learned was to stay at the other end of the field where-ever the ball was not and have a chat and believe me I was a keen athlete at the time but that’s how much I loathed the sport. The fella, late 50’s +, explained he’d competed here and that his father too had played the sport. Then he told me a story about competing at 6am and drinking martinis til 4am and we both agreed that tea after 10pm was unlikely in these days of our respective lives.

Such as it is.

Hack, hack, hack.

I do not want to have conversations about cheese knives.

Just watched a few youtube instructional vids on the baritone ukulele and might be scaling things back to the kazoo ..  Blimey some gal on the CBC radio doc claimed you could basically learn something on it in an afternoon.

Just listened to some mad spoon playing a 100 metre sprint of Raglan Road on it, which was very funny. I think it might be more interesting watching these characters …

Working hard with Lori on our performance art piece for Chaos at Open Space in Victoria next month.

We are, it must be said, having a riot.

I am looking for a Ukulele to use for it, if you’ve got one that’s abandoned or ignored in the corner.

Finally got a translation on this term “mikes”

“It’s acid.”
“mikes are micrograms of LSD”

Eh voila, vital 21st century vernacular clearly…

Looked up some pictures of The Burrard Bridge in the archives, I cannot see how or where said walkway could have been situated. There’s some hutchy looking construction that goes up and across it.

I wonder now if I have my bridges confused. Or if my imagination constructed something bigger from the description in the conversation.

But examining les photos reminded me how interesting the construction of bridges and tunnels is. I found the history of the sandhogs tunnelling in NY fascinating some years ago. Plus have always had a hearty affection for viaducts. The history of the railways and the industrial revolution were two of my favourite segments in secondary school history and one of my fave books ever was the navvy book that Ultan Cowley wrote.

Needless to say there are a bunch of bridges here to get intrigued by that hitherto I’d overlooked in prioritizing of local meteorology. Bridge obsession on the menu! But only particular bridges, I am selective ….

We may be making progress on the houses mentioned in the Jane Rule novel. They may have been houses along by the bridge on the left hand side, or they may have been removed for the building of the Aquatic Centre. I am settling on that stretch because in the novel when they move, they move up to Beach Ave (is it?).

The last part of the novel was virtually unreadable, verging on Enid Blyton territory, except for a very interesting moment (a paragraph on p216) when Ruth returns from Galiano to the city and her description could have matched any number of “looking up” moments in the city since the five ring bling behemoth arrived and left and continues.

I especially liked these concrete legs:

“there above her head were giant legs of concrete growing up out of the soil that must have been her garden. The road would lift up on them and flow over the bulbs, the bones of birds and Willard’s blood, just as she had dreamed it, just as it had happened before.”

A few lines later we read:

“Ruth did not go on to the beach, nor did she buy anything for Clara. She took a bus to the terminal and sat there on a bench to wait the hours until she could catch a bus to the ferry.”

There’s always something remarkable when the ordinary and unremarkable is appropriately captured. The hundreds of disappointed legs who’ve taken a bus to a terminal and sat on a bench, all there in that sentence. Or for that matter the ones who’ve been left waiting on a bench.

In any case much to be said for an uneven novel, since you can pay attention to the parts that matter or interest and investigate them closely. Bookcases need to even structurally, books less so.

***

I am struggling co-incidentally with a most unreasonable shelf who refuses to go onto my kitchen wall.