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/.
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