Oscar came running in to the kitchen while I was cooking tea:
Oscar: ‘Mama!’
Me: ‘Yurs’
Oscar: ‘That fly over there?’
Me: ‘Yurs.’
Oscar: ‘He is after me.’
Me: ‘Don’t be silly Oscar. Of course he is not after you.’
Oscar: ‘He IS. He likes my arse.’
Me: ‘Oh’
Posted in Uncategorized
For Mrs. Jones, who wanted to see how big the dinners really are here.
Item One. A birthday cake from the local Safeway:
Jason has left his hand in the shot to show scale, much like people do when they measure up against a new born baby.
Item Two. Aunty Lindsey’s dinner when we went out on Saturday night:
This plate is the size of one of those plates in a restaurant where the portions are all usually teeny weeny and come on massive meat dishes to show how dinky they are. Only they got it wrong here and just kept on filling the plate. By the time Lindsey had eaten her fill you could hardly see that she had made a dent in it. She had the rest of the portion boxed up to take home and it lasted her for another two meals. This one portion is three meal’s worth. Insane or what?
One thing that does make me happy here is the large quantities of coffee you get:
This is my own, personal coffee supply when we went to the diner for lunch yesterday. Now that’s one monster portion you won’t hear me complaining about.
Posted in Uncategorized
While I have been bumbling about collecting odd shops, Jason has been busily collecting rude food. He has only just downloaded all his photos, which is why you are getting them now, despite the fact that he has been assiduously amassing them ever since we arrived. These are the items which have taken his fancy so far.
In Walmart there is an entire range of these:
Bum equipment. Now here bum is not a fantastic word, meaning down and out, or broken. At home it means yer arse, or your bottom. So why anyone would want to name an entire range of products BUM is beyond me in anyone’s language. Perhaps it was someone like Jason who thought: ‘This will be hilarious….’ That would be the only acceptable explanation.
How about this?
The Randy Bag is both reusable and practical. Brilliant. Now here Randy is simply an innocuous bloke’s name. At home it means someone who is permanently up for sex. Marvellous. Always fecund ground for misunderstanding and general sniggering behind one’s hand.
With the size of the supermarkets here you know there is a product for everyone. Hence this:
Homosexuals have their own milk here. We have yet to find lesbian or bi milk, but it will come. This is progress.
And to show how open minded they are here, you can now get this:
It is actually powder that you put around the rim of your cocktail glasses. Unfortunately the word rimming has unpleasant connotations and seeing this made Jason snort down his nose quite a lot.
Although if you think that his scurrilous picture taking is confined to this continent be cheered when you think that he took this back in Blighty in the hallowed halls of John Lewis:
Posted in Uncategorized
Two more offerings for the collection.
Next to Russell Books on Fort Street in Victoria is a sign which says:
Yes. It reads: ‘BC Shavers and Hobbies’ what’s more, it has a website. It is established. It’s clearly not some fly by night vintage hot tubs and billiard emporium. NO. It is a shop with standards, and seriousness, and hobbies, and shavers.
It sells models, like Airfix models. You can make the Millennium Falcon on a micro scale, or Chartres Cathedral out of matchsticks. You can buy tiny pots of enamel paint and glue that makes your eyes go funny when you open the lid. And. And. You can buy electric razors, for your beard. Which you will clearly grow while you are painting nine hundred ten millimetre high orcs for the battle you will enact with your special friends when everyone else is out having a life.
Again with the ‘I do not understand this at all’ theme. Why would you put shaving materials with balsa wood? I do not understand. I really, really don’t.
Plus, it sounds rude. Vaguely pornographic. Shaven maidens etc. Imagine the disappointment if you went all the way there thinking it was going to be a feast of smooth ladies in their nuddy pants only to find a man called Chet wearing thick glasses and a cardigan trying to sell you the Battleship Potemkin rendered exquisitely in plastic. Noooooooohhhh!
And then this afternoon while Jason was taking the children for a swim in a place called Esquimalt, I went for a walk around and found this shop:
Which I guess may be French Canadian for ‘The Beautiful Potato’? What a great name for a shop. I am quite keen on potatoes and would happily go to a shop which proclaims their beauty from afar. The only problem was, when I got there it was a French Canadian greasy spoon which smelled rank and offered delights like the ‘World Famous Montreal Meat Sandwich.’ Now, as a citizen of the world, and someone with a keen interest in food, you think I would have heard of this sandwich, but no. Clearly I was away that day.
You may just be able to read the signage on the window to the left. It says: ‘Poutine Tuesdays’. URGGGHHHH! Now as Non Working Monkey was saying, there are some things which are very American and some which are very Canadian and some which occupy a grey area in between. Poutine though is very definitely Canadian. French Canadian. Poutine for the uninitiated is chips with curd cheese and gravy on them. I loathe it, and it explains the rank smell from La Belle Patate. It is, in my opinion, one of the worst things you can ever do to a belle patate, throw runny cheese lumps and gravy on it. Bleee.
Posted in Uncategorized
Today we were going to take the children to story time at Tall Tales on Fort Street in Victoria again. It’s a nice place and there is free coffee and armchairs aplenty for grown ups. Plus the owner’s daughter has taken a shine to Matilda and we get better seats and preferential treatment. Unfortunately everyone slept in this morning, except me. As previously mentioned, I am woeful, which meant I managed to spend large amounts of the darkling morn reading several hundred more pages of War and Peace. I am now on page 600. Only another 800 to go and I am home free. Bloody good job I am enjoying it.
So, we didn’t make it to story time. We did make it to Russell Books on Fort Street. Sidney is Book Town round here, which is why we make our base there. There are about eight bookshops in a town twice the size of Glenfield. Victoria does not have this smorgasbord, but it does have Russell Books. This is an enormous, tardis of a shop which sells new and second hand books and which goes on for miles, and miles, and miles. We spent an hour in there browsing around and accumulating more things. Our excess baggage bills are going to be insane.
After intensive bibliophilia (is that a real word?) we were hungry. Today we decided to try Teppanyaki. I have made an interesting discovery about the children. They are much more comfortable eating entirely foreign foods that they have never tried before than they are eating food which they think they like and are familiar with but which turns out to be subtly different from what they are used to. Hence our sudden exploration of Asian cuisine. I thought Teppanyaki would be fun because of the spectacle more than anything.
We went to a place called The Japanese Village Restaurant, which came highly recommended by someone or other who I have been chatting to on my travels. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this style of cooking it is Japanese, but it is not raw like sushi. It is cooked, on a hot plate, in front of you. You sit at a raised breakfast bar type affair around a rectangular metal hot plate. The waitress takes your order and then the chef arrives to perform. He chops and dices and slices and fries and twirls the food around, cooking it at great speed and all this without chopping all his fingers off. This place was fairly sedate in its cheffing, but I have been to places previously where the chefs chop the food in mid air and juggle their razor sharp knives in front of you. As it was it was still pretty nifty:
This picture does not show it in all its glory, but I was seated between Tallulah and a Japanese man with no elbow room and can’t move around due to my old war wound, so this was the best I could do under trying circumstances.
We had fun. I had chicken and shrimp, and the kids and Jason had beef and chicken. You get it with Shobu green tea, veg, sticky rice and lots of dipping sauces. Oscar was the only dissident, and during a hush in the proceedings commented loudly: ‘I wish this was McDonalds’.
Jason, who lived in Japan for six months, was trying to teach the kids to say thank you in Japanese, which I believe is Domo Arigato. Oscar went up to the lady and said: ‘Don’t know Madagascar’ and gave her a huge smile. It worked just as well.
Posted in Uncategorized
Oh woe!
I am still in pain.
It blows, it sucks, it does other things that indicate pain. Here is me. In PAIN:
Yes. I look slightly hungover, cross and tired. I am not hungover. I am cross, and tired.
I did sleep better than the day before, but not brilliantly. I do have a little more mobility in my neck and shoulder, but just enough so that I sometimes forget how much it hurts, reach over to do something and then remember when a white, hot jab of pain shoots up my neck and leaves me feeling sick.
Gah!
Today I went to the drugstore, which is Canadian/American for chemist. I lay on the counter and whimpered. I made small snuffling noises. I begged for these amazing Canadian drugs they keep sending me spam about via the power of the interweb.
They gave me something called: ROBAX: Platinum. It has a picture of a small, golden man walking athletically about leaving zoom marks behind him like Billy Whiz. It looks like the sort of packet which is advertised by a man in a deep brown voice saying: ‘ GET RO BAAAAXXXX NOW!!!!! IT WILL BE LIKE HEROIN ONLY NICER AND YOU WILL BE ABLE TO CONTINUE YOUR CAREER AS AN AWARD WINNING PENTATHLETE AFTER ONLY TWENTY MINUTES. YES! ROBAX! RO BAAAAAAXXXXX IS SO GREAT.MMMMMMMMM’
It cost me $19 dollars for the packet. That’s over ten quid in real money. Thank god we are on holiday and still only spending that pretend Canadian stuff.
I read all the instructions. It looked like the real thing. It contains a muscle relaxant as well as ibuprofen. It says things on the sheet like:
I thought this was a good sign. This was the sort of serious drug I was looking for. I took some.
Half an hour later I was still going ‘AARRRGGGHHHHH!’ every time the car went over a twig on the road, or a breeze looked at me the wrong way.
Still, the pills are blue, which is a bit quality.
And I got a badge today which says Twit. I love it. I am wearing it.
Jason said. ‘Why are you wearing that badge? It says you are a twit.’
I said: ‘I can’t help it. I’m a twit.’
There is no answer to that.
Posted in Uncategorized
I have already showed you the back of Oscar’s head, and the back of Tilly’s bum. Here is the back of Tallulah:
I can promise you, she is even more gorgeous from the front.
Posted in Uncategorized
While I was being manipulated earlier in the day, Jason took the kids to the park to tire them out. It did not work. I met them for lunch at the Stone Street Cafe and they were all looking remarkably chipper and untired, and then they refueled on jam sandwiches, which meant that if we didn’t try to wear them out again they would be sticky and hyper, which is a bit of a bother.
We took them to the new aquarium which has opened in Sidney. It is called the Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre because it is clearly trying to be quite posh and in the moment, and full of education and not like those freak show aquariums where you can go and watch octopi having tea parties and taking part in television advertisements or something.
I liked it because it was arty. Even before you got inside they were coming over all arty:
And in the bit where you pay they had this wall of starfish:
and this beautiful stained glass (it is one of my long felt wants to order some bespoke stained glass), which is supposed to look like a bed of Bull Kelp. Never having seen Bull Kelp in the wild, I cannot comment on how realistic it is, but it is lovely:
It’s arranged in huge rectangular sections all across one wall, and looks spectacular.
Once you have paid you have to go towards a kind of giant, space age airlock, which swooshes open while jets of blue coloured water bubble through panes of glass. A robotic voice invites you to enter into the airlock space within, where there are columns of water with sparkling bubbles swooshing up to the ceiling. I actually thought Oscar was going to pee his pants with excitement.
When the doors shut the voice tells you you are about to go to the sea floor and judders downwards while video panels in the roof show the water whooshing above you. It was very wonderful if you were three, and quite good if you were 38.
The actual aquarium itself was quite compact, but well designed, with lots of stuff to do, and some really knowledgeable local guides who were there to help if you wanted, but kept out of the way if you just wanted to do your own thing.
They had one of those funky interactive floor displays which looks like a huge rectangular puddle of water that you can jump on, and which when you do, splashes and ripples round your feet. We had quite a good time with that, although my jumping was below par thanks to my shoulder. Still, the children made up for my lack of enthusiasm.
The whole point of this aquarium was to highlight creatures found in the Salish sea which is the body of water that surrounds the island. I liked that it was local. It was cool, because you can see tropical fish and the like everywhere these days, but some of the things here I had never seen before, and they were wonderful. Take these for example:
aren’t they amazing? They’re a type of jellyfish called sea nettles:
Apparently they infest the waters round here, and are called sea nettles because their tentacles deliver hundreds of nettle like stings should you have the misfortune to brush up against one. It puts the case for local swimming pools quite strongly I think.
The thing that amazed me about what we saw today most of all, was the variety of colours of creatures. This is a strawberry anemone:
And here is a very psychedelic purple starfish:
to go with your more regular coloured ones:
These were just babies, but in later tanks there were some huge starfish. One of the helpers showed us a starfish which had four regular arms and one stump. Apparently the crabs in the tank with it will eat the odd starfish arm if they’re peckish and the staff are slow to put dinner on the table. Apart from the agony the starfish takes it all quite well and just slowly grows another one. Under the sea beats a savage heart and all that.
Here is a lovely green anemone to soothe you:
and some scary, white space age ones from the moon:
There were some crazy sea slugs too, some the size of rolled up carpets, which were mainly black but with huge flashes of gorgeous bright colours, reds and blues and yellows all over them. It was bizarre and fascinating.
At the very end of all the exhibits there was a touch pool where a lady helped you to stroke star fish and tickle the sea slugs and get down and dirty with the hermit crabs. It was very good fun, although I couldn’t get to the sea slugs for a prod. There was a huge queue for those because they’re all slimy and the kids like that best apparently. Fancy.
Anyway, we had jolly good fun. There was lots to do, even in a quite small space and if we weren’t leaving in a fortnight and had a million other things to fit in, we would definitely go again. I want a pet jelly fish in a sky blue tank. People say fish are soothing to watch, but not half as mesmerising as the jellyfish, I promise you.
Posted in Uncategorized
Today I went to visit with Jim.
Jim is a wonderful man. I love he. He is an ace masseuse and all round whiz at making you go; ‘Ooohhh! Ahhhhhh! Eeeek! and Owwwwwww!’ but in a good way. He tended to my frozen shoulder for an hour and a half of semi masochistic agony, after which I paid him a large sum of money and went away wincing, but with more mobility, and looking less like Quasimodo.
I am not cured, but it is more manageable. I might for example, be able to sleep more than an hour tonight, which would be good. I could not though, for example, hurl javelin in the 2012 olympics. Not that I could have done that before, being singularly unfit. Jim asked me if I did any exercise. I tried French Canadian on him, saying: ‘Hein? Quoi?’ He looked at me severely through his eyebrows and I said: ‘No Jim. My name is Katy and I am a sloth.’ He was o.k. with that. Plus he does not do French Canadian. We are in B.C. now. It is bilingual, but only on paper, or papier.
Jim, it turns out, is actually Scottish. His mother and father emigrated to Toronto in the early fifties with Jim, when he was two. When he grew of age to have a beard he headed to B.C. and has been here ever since. He used to be a chemist but when he moved to Toronto he moved out of chemistry and into making people go ‘owwww’. I for one, am profoundly grateful.
Jim is going back to Scotland next year to visit his grandmother who is alive and kicking at the age of 105. Apparently she has all her own teeth and the only thing that slows her down is the fact that she broke her leg badly when she was 98 and is now in a wheelchair. Other than that she is as sharp as a box of nun’s pencils. That’s wild.
Jim’s wife, who is something big in the provincial government, originally hails from Barrow in Furness. While I was shopping at a local supermarket in Cadboro’ Bay I bumped into an elderly couple who wanted to chat (everyone wants to chat. It is very wonderful. I love random gossip). He was from Leeds. She was from Manchester. UE’s mother, who has lived here for the last fifty years, came from Kent. Her husband was from Glasgow. It seems that most people from this part of the world have fled England. Or at least the ones I have met anyway.
No wonder the Native Americans got a bit pissed off when Jason parked on their shore line. They probably thought: ‘Here comes another bugger claiming to be on holiday from Glenfield. Before you know it he’ll have opened a holistic therapy centre and have been here for twenty years. Let’s off him before he gets comfy.’
Anyway. I don’t really care where Jim came from. To me he came from Heaven on a cloud, bearing strong fingers and non stinky massage oil (hooray). And his room wasn’t too cold. And he had a heat pad on the couch. It was all very civilised.
I am still sore, but I can now wave like the queen and sit down and open my book without crying. This is good. Jim has given me exercises to do, but bless him indeed, for he has taken on board that I am the world’s laziest person, he has given me exercises that involve me lying down and moving my head gently from side to side. That’s the sort of exercises I like. I may even enter myself into the 2012 olympics for gentle head rolling if I get really good at it.
He agrees that it is probably not my slothfulness that has caused my frozen shoulder. I described to him the beds and chairs in this house and he pulled a sympathetic face.
Posted in Uncategorized
Yesterday we visited the Butchart Gardens. Wherever you go on this island people try to send you to the Butchart Gardens, or ask you if you’ve been/are going to the Butchart Gardens. For fifteen years I have been resisting the lure of this mecca of tourism. Yesterday we caved in.
It is, as you would expect, gardens. Because we are in Canada, and everything in Canada is enormous, it is 55 acres of gardens. I do not like it as much as Kew Gardens, but I did like it. Jason had absolutely no interest in looking at gardens, either his or someone else’s. Especially when he found out that for an adult to look at the Butchart Gardens it cost $27. You have to be really keen on gardens. Weirdly, given that it was so expensive for me, the girls were $1.90 each and Oscar was free, so that was slightly less horrifying. If it had been $27 dollars each I could have lived my whole life without seeing them.
They are called Butchart Gardens because the land was bought by the Butchart family, who clearly had more money than sense, and were as obsessed as Percy Thrower by the subject of gardening. They bought the land in about 1903, and then set about reclaiming the wilderness. I think it was turned into a tourist attraction in about 1970. Judging from the font on all the signs anyway.
The gardens are rather beautiful and very, very formal, which is odd, given that the land that they were carved out of includes a giant, disused quarry, some forest, and some arable farm land. The platoon of gardeners work all year round to plant and tend it, and make sure it is all very seasonal. There are themed areas of the garden, and they are very strict about you not going on the grass, which irked the children somewhat. It reminded me of an upmarket 1970′s municipal park.
There were some spectacular bits. Like the sunken garden. Now for most English people of my age, if you mention the fateful words sunken garden, you will undoubtedly be thinking of the Blue Peter Italian Sunken Garden, which looks about as Italian as I do, and seemed to consist of a lot of crazy paving and a pond;
See my doppel ganger swishing her fingers suggestively through the algae.
Now Butchart Gardens sunken garden is vast. Here is a tiny bit:
When they got to the edge of the quarry and were wondering what to do with it, they just thought: ‘Ah! A sunken garden’ and went for it. It’s huge. And the series of pools that are dotted around may look like Yvette’s two foot deep crazy paved monstrosity, but they’re actually bits of the quarry they couldn’t fill up with soil because they were too deep, so they just filled the with water. In places it’s forty feet deep:
There is a carousel which you can ride on:
For a reasonable $2 per time. Although it is all very Canadian and Health and Safety. Hence I had to stand on the ride with Oscar in case he fell off, but I was not allowed on the animal with him. It was also very Canadian because they didn’t just have horses, they had killer whales too. Oscar was very impressed and went on a killer whale. There are lots of instructions at the beginning and end of the ride, and instructions on what to do if you get scared on the ride and how not to sue everyone, but it is very pretty and the kids loved it.
There are also Totem Poles:
which are like this, only taller. I cannot show you the whole thing because the kids were milling about at the bottom.
My favourite bit was the Japanese garden which was very beautiful, and would have been very peaceful if it hadn’t been for us;
and:
The kids loved this bit because of all the little hidden paths and summer houses, and lots of bridges. Amazingly not one of them got wet, which was entirely unexpected and made me believe that they might actually be growing up.
The rest of the garden was a riot of spring planting (I’ve always wanted to say that. Get me Monty Don on the phone, stat) with banks and banks of hyacinths that made the air heavy with perfume, gorgeous tulips, including some pale lilac ones with cream freckles on that I’ve never seen before, and drifts of narcissi. We were very impressed when we found this tiny green frog on a leaf:
I don’t know if you can see it clearly. It was as Oscar so excitedly pointed out, in camouflage.
Then there are lots of attempted arty shots of flowers which I shall bung together here at the bottom in case you have lost the will to live and just want to go home for a cup of tea and a lie down:
I believe this is called a Fritillaria, or checkered lily. I love these. Charles Rennie Mackintosh did a glorious series of watercolours of these. I want one.
I have no idea what this is, but the bees loved it. I call it bee crack.
Bluebells, probably. I am rubbish at flower names.
green bells undoubtedly.
Purple and yellow bells. Latin name bellendimus
Wait, wait. I know this one. It’s magnolia blossom.
It’s amazing that it’s still there, frankly, or any of the gardens. The deer decimate everything round here. I expect the nearly $30 entrance fee was to pay for 24/7 trained snipers to sit round the lip of the quarry picking off stray deer so that when you visit you’re not just looking at some chewed stalks and deer pooh.
Or it could be for this magnificent object which amused the children so much they begged me to take a photograph of it:
Yes. It’s a bronze snail with wee coming out of its eyes. Let’s end on a high note for goodness sakes. It can’t all be cakes and botany.
