Heirloom 2

Not the best composed of the various snaps, but one which managed a reasonable balance between enough light to see the detail of the candelabra and enough dark for the candles lit in it to look OK.

The book which can be seen left foreground is the mammal book from Argosy Books mentioned in the recent Dalhousie posting.

The wine is a rather good white Austrian from last year, something called Felsner Moosburgerin Grüner Veltliner.

Drink mats aluminium, with maple leaf design. No idea just presently where they came from.

Table and chairs by G-plan, popular in the sixties and seventies of the last century, now collectible. Candelabra quite possibly from the one before that.

Heirloom 1

Having been given an old brass candelabra, a souvenir of my mother's family and possibly originally from the UK, we wanted to get it home.

Carry-on would have been better than checked-in, there being a concern about rough handling of this last, but we were not sure. One could certainly have used the base of the thing as an offensive weapon; much less likely objects having done murders on ITV3.

Rather late in the day I tried to contact Air Canada, probably accounting for the now near zero balance on my Talkmobile account. Failing there, I sent an email to the airport rather than the airline, eliciting this helpful, if rather late, response.

Not having had this response in time, we opted for checked-in as being less likely to ruffle security feathers. Broken down across our two suitcases and carefully wrapped in dressing gowns, socks and what have you, I am pleased to say that it arrived safely. It is now candled and tested, with entirely satisfactory results.

Horton clockwise

Back on the road this morning. Light drizzle and threatening worse, so fully togged up in my stockman's coat and I carried an umbrella for good measure. Few people about, but plenty of autumn colour along Horton Lane, somewhat marred by the recent flailing of the south west section of the bordering hedgerow.

Since the council only seem to be able to afford this rather crude treatment,  perhaps they should be encouraged to do a deal whereby the Chainsaw Volunteers hang up their chain saws for the winter while they do hedging & ditching duties around the borough. On the understanding that they use no power tools, and certainly no tractor mounted implements. They might, on the way, learn something about what it used to be like to be a countryman in the winter, rather than a bourgeois in the summer. That is to say, not so much fun at all, especially when it is cold & wet.

I did pass one of the Volunteers' support vehicles, parked up while the driver grabbed a quick breakfast in West Ewell and dressed up in Lower Mole colours, but I forebore haranging the driver. Probably a simple employee and not responsible for either the flails or the chain saws.

Reference 1: http://www.epsom-ewell.gov.uk/EEBC/Leisure+and+Culture/Leisure+Listings/ConservationItems/Lower+Mole+Countryside+Management+Project.htm.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Volunteers.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Volunteers.

Shimano halloween

An entertaining end to all the bits and bobs from Shimano that one accumulates in one's shed, in this case a bike shop in Hull, Quebec. They might be French speakers inside but at least they are not clowning around with iron bars like the one's back in hexagonal France (according to the DT of Saturday just past).

The gent. half of the cool looking couple just pulling up at the shop on their bicycles was explaining to the lady half that this was the coolest bike shop in town.

There was also a very expensive looking Trek bike in the window, maybe a Superfly, very black and sporting what looked like motor cycle tyres, the sort of thing that might be used for scrambling, from Bontrager. However, perusal of their site this morning fails to turn up anything like what I thought I saw, so maybe I should have looked more carefully. But I have learned that Bontrager spell tyre with an 'i'.

Also that Bontrager tyres seemed to be a lot cheaper than the Continental tyres I have bought most recently - that is to say several years ago - from the cycle shop at Pound Lane, a cycle shop which does not do Bontrager. But google says I was unlikely to have paid more than around £50, not that much more than most of the Bontragers. Is memory defective once again, or did he see me coming? They are, in any event, very good tyres, with good grip and never yet punctured.

PS: unable to track down a receipt for the continentals with which to check for memory defects. Probably a cash payment and I don't keep bank records that far back, so no good looking there anyway. On the plus side, while attending to this, I suddenly decided that maybe I didn't need half a metre of Balzac on the shelf, unlooked at for a number of years now, having not got further than a picture book about Balzac in 2009 (see reference 2). So £1.49 buys the collected works from Amazon, just in case I take it into to my head to have another crack at it, and the half metre is on its way to the Oxfam skip at Sainsbury's. Will they just dump it in the waste paper or will they try to shift it?

Reference 1: http://www.cyclegmbertrand.com/.

Reference 2: first post at http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=hospice+charity+shop.

Ideal coffee

A shot which captures the feel of the northern end of Dalhousie quite well - but someone should tell the man from streetview not to wipe the lens with his fingers.

The all senior-needs-catered-for barrack run by the Catholics on Bruyère visible back right. Probably built at a time when the people of Lower Town were grateful for the work and did not fuss about heritage. Named for Élisabeth Bruyère.

Dalhousie

As chance would have it, we took a house in Cathcart Street, just off Dalhousie, a street which, given past tastes in such matters, is quite probably named for James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie KT, PC, a chap with Indian rather than Canadian connections.

Dalhousie is a useful street, maybe half a mile long, running north north east from Rideau Street, past the Byward Market and up as far as the Alexandra Bridge to Hull.

Amongst other attractions it took us to the excellent baker to the west on Murray Street and the neighbourhood bar called 'Chez Lucien', styling itself a bar restaurant but actually something rather like TB, to the east, also on Murray Street. The baker supplied us a lot of baguettes (we much preferred the one styled artisinale to the one styled parisienne) and some pastries, including rather good apple tarts and pear tarts, more variations on the Bakewell tart theme, these ones without the white icing overcoats. The bar supplied us with rather fewer glasses of Ontarian white chardonney.

Various coffee places of which Ideal Coffee took pride of place, in part because of coffee being roasted on the spot in a smaller version of the roaster which used to fascinate me as a child in the shop window of Mathew's in Trinity Street, Cambridge, UK. They were also, in common with Ottawans generally, very gluten aware. Otherwise the place seemed to function, in some part at least, as a senior drop-in centre. We fitted in nicely.

It also contained two secondhand bookshops, both rather more organised than the one on Rideau Street (see reference 2), both of which have been up and running for several decades, at least two anyway.

The first had a good stock, including a lot of English language fiction, and oddly for such a well stocked place, very few books that I owned already, unless we allowed different editions of well known novels than I owned already. Fell first for a book about Joan of Arc by Mark Twain, of which I had never previously heard and which will complement my existing biography by V. Sackville-West. From an outfit called Ignatius of which I had never previously heard either and much more nicely made than the average UK paperback. Fell second for a systematic dictionary of mammals of the world by Maurice Burton, a book published in 1962 which caught my eye in part for its large number of unpretentious woodcut illustrations, attributed to drawings by David Pratt. Perhaps he did the original drawings and Burton got them engraved for reproduction.

The second was a rather grander place, in a third floor (counting from one) suite in a building of indeterminate age but with nicely painted mouldings around the top. 1920s? Run by a McGahern whose father was said to have been the spitting image of the novelist one, who was probably some sort of a cousin. Again, a well stocked place but with few books which I already owned. Lots of Canadiana, militaria and stuff about the far north, with Franklin a speciality. I was tempted by some very reasonably priced Tomlinson which we did not have, complete with dust jackets, but in the end settled for a book about canoeing published by the shop itself, an edited version of P. G. Downes' apparently famous narrative of a summer's travel in northern Manitoba and the northwest territories, these last being somewhat depleted since the summer in question (1939) by the carving out of the first nation territory called Nunavut. A more respectable version of the sort of adventure stories I used to read as a child.

Just for the record, Downes was a Harvard boy who like, inter alia, to box.

PS: somewhere along the way, we learned that the durham wheat harvest is bad in Canada this year, which fact will push up pasta prices. We learned from the same place that the reason you use durham wheat for pasta is that it has a very high gluten content, which is presumably the reason why gluten free pasta is so bad. Or at least it was the last time that we tried it.

Reference 1: http://bennysbistro.ca/bakery/.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/warf-warf.html.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mcgahern.

Reference 4: http://www.idealcoffees.com/.

Trolley 12

Home yesterday through Ottawa International Airport which, like the railway station, was new, handsome and restful. Nothing like the crowds or bustle of Heathrow - to the point where there were no flights to be seen after about 2000, apart from ours, until the following morning. By the time we left, the place was down to one bar and no shops.

While waiting, once could stroll gently along more or less the length of Level 2, a clean, straight walk, taking maybe 15 minutes to do it in both directions, starting from a seat somewhere near the middle. A much better way to pass the time than sitting with the newspaper or the telephone. I was tempted to try the Airport wifi, but didn't, in the event, quite muster the energy, despite the thoughtful provision of power plugs all over the place.

Back to Heathrow, to discover that Terminal 2 was equally new and handsome, if rather larger and including at least one level below ground, visibly below ground in the sense that one could see up through the large windows onto the tarmac. It was even reasonably quiet this mid Saturday morning.

And there was a fine supply of very smart new trolleys, not from Wanzl of Warwick as far as I could tell.

And so home to celebrate being back in a kitchen with a proper supply of knives and saucepans, something which holiday houses rarely manage, with a split pea soup, having finally tracked some split green peas down in Sainsbury's just before we went off.