things move around

Calgary’s cooled from 20° to an evening 15° and I’m sat here in the almost altogether, listening to The Jam and drinking sunsational Pinot Noir from New Zealand. Every half hour or so there’s a shrieky bellow of brakes and buffers from the railway sidings ten stories down outside my window.

I went to the desk and asked if they had toothpaste. “Sure” said the guy, “you can get it from us or you can order it up from housekeeping”. He explained that if I ordered it up from housekeeping I’d get “like a tiny thimble or something, like this much”, but it would be free, whereas if I got it from him I’d get “a real big tube, you know, like this” and it would cost me “two bucks or something”. I was sold and paid $2.27 for the big fuck off tube.

Everyone’s enjoying the barbecue weather: all the women are in skirts and some of the men are in shorts.

I had dinner in a deserted Italian restaurant with a bloke called Grant. Grant told me that he and his father hadn’t seen eye to eye for a long time, but things were better between them now. I asked him what he thought of the painting on the wall and he looked at me uncomprehendingly. I learnt that Grant’s father is a dentist and an enviable sketch-artist.

Now I’m listening to Gavin Friday. “Take me back to ‘72, my coo-coo-choo” he leers.

The cry of a drunken prairie-boy finds a thermal and ascends to my ear in a lopsided spiral.

It’s a lovely Pinot Noir, I’m getting beetroot and barnacles and hyperbolic hexagons, but I’m a little stuffed up for some reason. Perhaps it’s the sunlight. I once met a savant who ascribed physical properties to sunlight. He saw it as a stream of minuscule spear-shaped butter-soft particles which infiltrated the brain and produced no end of deleterious effects. He recommended the wearing of sunhats by all who valued their reason or their intellect.

And now the sun is pulling the downy-white Rockies over its head and switching itself off for the night.