Building on Bowen

This week we have mainly been building houses on Bowen Island, a little chunk of paradise in between the mainland and Vancouver Island (‘The Island’ as the locals have it). There’s a great website over here called Craigslist which is full of adverts both professional and private. We’ve bought bikes from it (Dotty & The Diggler are currently resting out in the back garden), Em’s found a Samba band to join and I’m writing for a new arts magazine through it and we’ve both become builders (of a sort) through the mighty list of Craig. We could also, if inclined, furnish a house with free stuff, get jobs in ‘adult’ entertainment or just simply have some random sex with bored strangers from the same site.*

Anyway Ted & Heather posted looking for some labourers and as it turns out we are them. To catch the 7am ferry from Horseshoe Bay we have to leave our house in East Vancouver at 5.30 and catch the 257 express from Downtown. This means it ain’t practical on a daily basis so we’ve been camping out in Ted & Heather’s backgarden, waking up to the ferociously loud dawn chorus and getting the water taxi from Snug Cove out to the site. Now I’ve worked on building sites in the UK but I promise you’ve never seen anything quite like this. A rich bloke called Kim has bought a plot of land on the side of the Island that isn’t accessible by car, there only two ways to reach it. The water taxi, which docks at the property’s quay, about 80 feet (or around 100 steep wooden steps) below the house itself. The other way is through the woods, full of massive pines and firs, and along a cliff path so narrow there are ropes tied along it to hang on to with a massive drop on one side. The house itself is massive, made of wood and the view is of the the Pacific ocean and Vancouver Island. Must start buying lottery tickets.

Em’s unleashed a formidable new talent for pointing, essentially tarting up walls with rocks embedded in it while I have been putting up wire mesh and plastering cement scratch plates on the side of the house. And doing a lot of old fashioned picking-up-heavy-objects-and-putting-them-down-in-different-places (usually places that are much higher up than the original pick points) as well. We’re now in the perfect position for doing crime since we’ve been using a lot of cement and the corrosive properties of that substance is great for removing your fingerprints. I’ve gone pink while Em is browning nicely. We’ve got to move out of our splendid house in July and August since George, our landlord and an artist, is back from New York for a show so we’re looking for a couple of months work either on the Island or in the interior with accommodation thrown in. In the meantime we’ll do owt for peanuts so Em’s been a receptionist and I’ve been in a film with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley (pretty much every film you see set in New York seems to use Vancouver instead).

*incidentally and sort of unrelatedly I suppose, I was approached by a middle aged lady the other day who wanted me to show her how to put on a condom. So, using my fingers, I did. ‘Thank you’ she said, and wandered off. Odd.

Sophie's Cosmic Cafe

Right, it's Emma this time, to tell you about my triumph in the wonderful Sophie's Cosmic Cafe. Jan is a Sunday Lunch addict and Canada has its own version of the English classic in the form of Sunday Brunch. As a special treat, we went over to Kitsilano to Sophie's, where we'd had a lovely brunch on our honeymoon last year. The menu mainly consists of the many things you can do with eggs, but my, what a lot of things you can do! I plumped for Eggs Benedict, whilst Jan went for some other egg-y dish. And huge lumps of potato. And bread. And hot spicy sauce. Yum. There's an awful lot of food between us and we are suffering by the time the plates are clean. Jan pops out for a post-prandial fag, leaving Em on her own with the Sunday paper.
Whilst Jan is outside, the eponymous Sophie appears and asks the entire diner for quiet - it's Sunday quiz time. Not that Jan and Emma noticed, but that morning it had been the Vancouver Marathon and so the quiz was based around this. The first question was "What was the distance of the original Vancouver marathon?" Emma, with a complete guess at 26km, gets it bang on and is rewarded with a chocolate ice-cream sundae as a prize - hurray!

Jan then walks back into the restaurant after having missed Emma's triumph completely. Ooops.

Emma and Jan are feeling very very full but there's still a prize sundae to eat, which appears just as Jan nips out for yet another fag. His timing today is somewhat off. The photos below should tell the story.



Emma and Jan then wander off for the rest of the day's fun, a few pounds heavier but with grins on their faces.

Now, the classic stereotype of the Canadian may involve large trees, checked flannel shirts and the Monty Python team finding things to rhyme with OK but Vancouver is a different kettle of poissin.
The Arctic Monkeys were in town yesterday and we caught up with Geoff, the manager, for a beer in the afternoon. Nice to see a friendly, familiar face out of context. The show in the evening was fantastic, I hadn't seen the band since October 2005 at The Plug and they've put on some serious muscle musically. The crowd did what crowds usually seem to do at their shows. Anyway, we popped backstage to say hello with our new chums Geoff and Silvana and left with with some rider gifts including a bottle of Canadian Red Wine from the Tinhorn Creek vineyards. I will just copy the blurb on the back of the bottle and leave you to draw your own conclusions.
"If this wine were human, it would tip-toe up behind friends and give it a start. It would be just as happy barefoot as in Italian leather. It would fill every room in its home with yellow roses - and black and white photographs. At the bookstore it would comb every aisle.
This wine isn't human. But you are. So enjoy it with chicken, turkey or pork. And be sure to fill your home - and your glass - with what you love."

Hello folks. Here's our blog. It was going to be a diary, minutely recording our doings, but that would have bored the tits off all of you. So, here are some lumps from our adventure. So far the defining moments our time in Vancouver have been the moments when we’ve ascended, rapidly.

Split Level City

Everyone says they want to live by the sea. I’m sure there are pasty, undernourished Vancouverites who dream of moving to Vladivostock or Sheffield but that wet stuff is a killer. It’s even better when the bottom of those seas rise up to become the living quarters and continue upwards to thousands of rocky feet. Mountains and oceans are a damn plucky combination.

We got fortunate with the weather the first few days we were here. The first Friday lucked up a little golden, spring-y and a little fresh. You can’t see the mountains at all here when the weather is shit, but when it shines those buggers glow, snow and all.

Friday 20^th May: 1pm: We take the sea bus, the moderately sized ferry, mercifully song free, across to North Vancouver, nip round Lonsdale Quay and buy food. Across the bay Downtown Vancouver is all glassy and tall; impressive but brittle. 45 minutes later we are kneedeep in snow. I’m not sure how she does it, it may just be love, but a short bus ride at an interestingly vertical angle takes us to the cablecar base somewhere on Grouse Mountain.

“You’ll like it,” she says, in a dimply lady way, knowing full well a stand on a kitchen chair brings me out in pale terror.

This bloody woman is the A-Team to my B.A.Barracus. Held up on cables which look like the veins on thin men’s arms who’ve done a little weightlifting with just a touch of supplements, a sodding great glass shopping basket swings up to 3720 feet, out of the fake sultriness of the spring, over the thick green pines and into the Alps. This is just one of Emma’s many ideas. I’m not keen on heights but it was a good one.

There are moments in life of sheer, surprised joy and this was one of them, the pair of us gobstruck and enervated by the altitude, enjoying trudging through the unexpected winter we’d just found. Leaning over the balcony, immediately below us is the man-made and vast, but normalised by sheer height, Capilano Dam, beyond that, filling the eyes, is Vancouver stretched out like a dissected city, beyond that and to the West is Vancouver Island, to the left of that and stretching south is America. Who could get bored of this except for those who only know this?

Friday 27^th May: 11pm: A small bar in Gastown with the Canucks flicking and thumping their way round an ice rink. It’s busy and we can’t see the big screen and struggle to pick up the little points of interest on the tiny screen above the bar. We fancy food, and some kind of antidote to the heavy, chippy, meaty Canadian food we’ve been filling up on since we arrived. Outside, and Em spies the rich pinky glow to the west, a sunset, a right proper sunset. A drift down to Canada Place but the big buildings just get in the way. Taxi!

English Bay is like a broad polite introduction to Stanley Park on the map and is somehow English, but a Riviera English, wide and safe with the sun sinking slowly, not like the Cape South African version which legs it into the sea without so much as a goodbye. An arm-in-arm promenade is not so much in order but called for. Good eats in a Greek restaurant and warm with wine Robson Street is headed up. Robson is like the central strip on the sea-surrounded lump that is Downtown. Around half way up that street Em points directly up. Bim! 42 floors in twenty seconds and we enter the revolving Cloud 9 restaurant at the top of the Empire Landmark hotel. If it was at ground level it would be a cheesy overpriced bar but at [at least] a million feet directly above our peers it is a noble, slowly turning moment of regality for the Kings and Queens that we truly are. Whiskeys and White Russians as we spin so sedately we’re unsure which way we’re moving but at least we know we are in Bladerunner.

It’s that thing with cities; they’re so crammed with everything bad and good in turn but stick on a few high altitude fairy lights and stand above it all and you want to weep with joy.

Next!