The quest for a new compass

As I mentioned on 19th October, I had mislaid my compass, a Silva compass I must have had for near fifty years. All very sad, so I went as far as to go back to Enterprise to see if anyone had handed it in, which they hadn't, so I now needed a new one.

Other peoples' telephones seem to include a compass, but I have not found a compass button on mine, and, in any event, I would rather have an old-speak magnetic compass which was not part of my telephone and so dependent, inter alia, on the vagaries of its battery.

So not finding an outdoor store in central Ottawa, I tried a department store. The first young lady I spoke had no idea what a compass was but smilingly suggested that perhaps I should try the men's department. The second young lady, in the men's department, did know what a compass was but could certainly not sell me one. No-one had ever asked her such a thing before, in all her years in the men's department.

Next stop a store selling odds and ends near the Byward Market. The chap there knew what a compass was, did not have one, but was able to suggest a store on the Richmond Road, some miles away. Consulted google to find that there was indeed an outdoor store on the Richmond Road and so started to make plans to be there, hoping that the suggestions on their web site that the only compasses that they sold were electrical gadgets costing $100 or more were untrue. Plans which were suspended for a few days while we were in Montreal.

And then yesterday evening, quite by chance and quite late at night, we come across an outdoor store in Rue St-Denis called Atmosphère, a store which looked like a grander version of our own Millets, or perhaps Cotswold, the people from whom I have bought my last few pairs of trainers. Outdoor clothes, boots, bags and such like. Not only did they know what a compass was, they had a selection of the very thing that I wanted and we rapidly came to an agreement on the A-10 model from Suunto, very like the lost Silva. Mine for $17.24 including tax, about the same, I think, as Amazon would have been for something similar.

As part of the patter, I learned that the French for this sort of compass was boussole while the French for the other sort of compass, the sort for drawing circles, was compass. All very odd. Also very odd that I cannot recall coming across the word before, despite the occasional involvement of boats in the sort of French novels that I read. And they even had the grace to smile when I explained that we would now be able to find our way back to the hotel.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/trolley-11.html.

Reference 2: http://en.atmosphere.ca/ seems to deny the existence of the store at 1610 Rue St-Denis. But plenty in western Canada and one in the far east, aka Nova Scotia.