things move around

Yesterday I was out on my after-work walk with the nipper strapped to my front, windmilling her arms a bit like Saruman in Lord of the Rings when he’s on top of his tower directing snowstorms, when she stopped her usual ra-ra-rahing and switched to a clear and distinct blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, she said as we stood waiting for the lights to change. And in the deli, she stood next to a pair of nattering Polish women and said blah, blah, blah; blah blah.

A couple of weeks ago a trampy old bugger lurched up to us as we waited to cross the six-lane Georgia St, which is like an artery conveying sports utility plasma to and fro the downtown heart of Vancouver and its suburban extremities. ‘Hey’ he grunted. ‘You look like the guy in that Arnie movie. Total Recall.’

‘Doug Quaid?’ I said idiotically.

‘Nah, not Quaid. The guy with the little guy on his belly. The mutant. Kuato.’ And then he ran off. I can see what he means. But my daughter does not resemble the mutant leader of the Martian rebels from Total Recall.

Peter Manor grew up on a farm in southern Guatemala, the only child of the British ambassador and his mistress. His father was kind and provident, and wrote frequently after being reassigned when Peter was six. Peter was a naive boy whose nose was full of the humid scents of earth and fungus, whose nights rushed past like bats fluttering against a moonlit window pane, and whose days were idled away in the shade of a spreading mango tree.

Today Peter is debonair in a double-breasted charcoal business suit, a yellow silk tie and tiny yellow cufflinks setting off his pin-bright, watchet eyes. “Peter Manor” he says, “pleased to make your acquaintance”.

He has a crush on Paul Plaza, yet for some reason he feels as though he oughtn’t.

Cows grazing on the mountains:
the intermittent ringing of bells.

Bicycles on the seawall:
the intermittent ringing of bells.

Buoys in fog:
the intermittent ringing of bells.

A shire on Sunday. An abandoned office. A drill.
Ringing of bells.

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Had dinner at the Elkford golf club last night. After looking at the menu I was sorely tempted by the “Chicken Gordon Blue”* but someone at work had recommended the “Greek and Steak”, a Greek salad with strips of steak on top. It was perfect: the cucumber thick and crunchy and verdant, the tomato the colour of a very expensive sports car, and juicy without being a bleeding heart, the onion garrulous, tinged purple, the tang of the feta in proportion with the soft, cohesive oil, the steak reposing on top of all like an idle potentate.

*I assumed this to be a clever reference to the notoriously foul-mouthed chef Gordon Ramsay, but that’s because I am a cynic for whom the glorious innocence of a malapropism must be doubted as long as the possibility of deliberate and cunning wordplay remains undispelled.

I’m in Elkford, B.C., this week and next. Just south of here is Montana, gay cowboy country. I saw a couple of gay cowboys frolicking on the hillside this morning actually. This evening I walked up some wooden steps, tugged open a flimsy wooden door and looked around. The reception room smelt like backpackers, but I knew very few come through here. A bell sat on the wooden counter, and I rang it. While I waited I looked at the boundary map on the wall: bright red blooms denoted the coalmining areas, green the provincial parks, and a large splodge of blue a designated hunting zone. I picked up a flyer for Queen Donair and Pizza: “Donair is the creation of extensive research resulting in a flavor so unique and mouth watering that you will want to have it as often as possible.”

After a while I called the extension written by the bell and summoned the bloke. A minute later an old Chinese guy arrived, wearing a wide-brimmed khaki hat. I said hello, and he said “Hello! First,” and he bounded out from behind the counter and across the room and pulled a stack of papers from next to the TV, “have you completed this? Census?” He looked a shade sad when I said I had. Then he took my name and spent five longer than average minutes filling out the lesser part of a form, which he presented to me for completion. Then he gave me my (genuine metal) key and said “Is this your first time here? Yes? But not your first time in town? It is? Lots of nice places to eat in Elkford. Over there is the restaurant, Chinese and pizza, very good, but it’s Monday, maybe it’s not open, so check first, if it’s not open you go the gas station, they serve breakfast and they’ll pack lunch for you too. My name’s Jay - if you want anything, just call”. Jay later proved true to his word by locating a corkscrew for me.

Jay’s recommendation for dinner was closed on Mondays, so I ate at a dingy (but warm, it was seven p.m. and still summery) cafe, where women came and drank coffee and nattered and went. One of the women had just had her first day on her new job on a road maintenance crew - she’d been twirling the signs. She loved it and said it was way better than the mine. She savoured newly-acquired lingo like “target-jacket”.

Then I went to the cold beer and wine store next door and bought a bottle of Cedar Creek Pinot Noir, 2001, which as I write this is revealing a mulish tartness and a body like a stubbly Clint Eastwood chin; the nose as prickly as a porcupine, the finish luxurious yet predictable, like a last minute 30-yarder from Steven Gerrard. The young woman behind the counter said she was only going to be in Elkford for a couple more weeks; she’d been lured up here with the promise of a bar job but had ended up working in this cold beer and wine store. And am I from Australia? Yeah.

Elkford is a quiet town, and the quieter for the first immodest flush of summer. Just North of Elkford you come to the end of Highway 43. You’re driving North and a sign says “Highway 43: End”, and then it ends, just like that, in a cul de sac near the top of a valley guarded paternally by two lesser ridges of the Rockies, inhabited by deer, who crop the lawns in the towns and flit in front of your car, and elk, who stand and stare at you and dare you to drive your car into their antlers, and people who are coal miners or whose husbands are coal miners or who work at one of the five vast open-cast coal mines for which Elk Valley is famous.

There is a poem on the wall of my room entitled “ABOUT THE HEATING SYSTEM”, which I reproduce verbatim:

In floor hot water radiant heat
Should be most comfortable 18°
Adjust thermostat 2-3° at a time
Takes about 20 minutes for floor to heat up.
Too warm, open door or window.

My favourite episode of the classic sitcom “Father Ted”, I think it’s from the third series, is “Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse”. Having lost the annual football game against the neighbouring parish, Ted’s forfeit is to kick the awe-inspiring Bishop Brennan up the arse. Dougal suggests that the best strategy for gettng away with this outrageous act is to kick Bishop Brennan up the arse, and then act completely normally, as if nothing had happened, in the hope that Bishop Brennan will be incapable of accepting the reality of his being kicked up the arse, and therefore convince himself that it never happened at all. Ted does this and amazingly manages to pull it off (for a while, anyway). There is a moment immediately having been kicked up the arse by Father Ted where you can see Bishop Brennan grappling with the sheer incongruity of what has seemingly happened; his face flickers from bewilderment, to anger, to humiliation, and veers between astonishment and apoplexy before circling back to abject epistemic doubt.

This morning my baby daughter was standing propped against the sofa, busily devouring the glossy magazine I’d managed to persuade her to accept in lieu of newsprint. Just as I was re-tying the cord on my dressing gown, she attempted a pirouette and fell flat on her back on the carpet. Evincing no disquiet, I righted her immediately and she resumed her activites, but just for a second there, while she lay on the floor wondering if it could really be true that she had fallen over and no-one had caught her, I saw Bishop Brennan in my daughter.

Yesterday I walked home in bright sunshine and pouring rain. Two colossal rainbows bestrode the North Shore and the sky was a chaotic mashup of corn-yellow sun and clouds the colour of basalt. The rain looked like quicksilver as it splintered on the streets. In my umbrella, under my shades, I splashed my way from block to dazzling block until I stood wet-legged in my home, which was full of the warm khaki smell of fresh pea soup.

South Yorkshire medical terminology.

I realise this is “cheat blogging” and no substitute for original content, but everyone else is doing it and to be honest it was just too tempting. Here’s how it works: I switched my iPod to “shuffle” and wrote down a line or two from the first 20 songs it played, (ignoring really embarrassing songs and my motivational hypnotherapy audio book). After encrypting the lyrics using an elliptic curve cipher, I shredded them, mixed the paper with a liberal dose of Maui Wowie and got thoroughly scruebed. At the height of my reverie I produced this symbolic picture.

Your job is to name the bands.