July | 2020 | Jak's View of Vancouver v.3

Image: Carbonara

July 31, 2020

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Grandview 31st July 1920

July 31, 2020

Vancouver Province 19200731, p.5

All previous Grandview 1920 clippings

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Eid Mubarak!

July 31, 2020

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Night Music: The Kinks

July 30, 2020

The only British pop band that could genuinely compete with the Beatles.

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Grandview 30th July 1920

July 30, 2020

Vancouver World 19200730, p.15

All previous Grandview 1920 clippings

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Image: Two Cyclists

July 29, 2020

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Grandview 29th July 1920

July 29, 2020

Vancouver World 19200729, p.18

All previous Grandview 1920 clippings

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Night Music: Dat Dere

July 28, 2020

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers do the classic Bobby Timmon’s tune.

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Grandview 28th July 1920

July 28, 2020

Vancouver Sun 19200728, p.2

All previous Grandview 1920 clippings

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Grandview 27th July 1920

July 27, 2020

Vancouver Sun 19200725, p.32

All previous Grandview 1920 clippings

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Image: Library Exterior #1

July 27, 2020

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Poem: I Used To Be Homesick

July 27, 2020

I used to be homesick

for the smell of the old Sainsbury’s butchers shops, the sawdust, the red raw hands of the fat-armed butcher’s boys;

for the extinct pink Financial Times and the Sporting Life, for their columns and columns of incomprehensible numbers and symbols of form and potential, neither suitable for fish and chip wrapping;

for the smell of the Tube tunnels as a rushing train pushes warm stale air across faces and platforms;

for the hop skip and jump it used to take to keep drinking all day in the days of the mysterious licensing hours;

for the certainty of location in a spoken voice, always the region and often the very suburb or streetscape;

for the red squirrels in the parks and the water rats in the ditches and the horses that pulled the rag and bone mens’ carts on a Saturday morning;

for the hordes of rednosed rawboned hoop-shirted hooligans whooping it up on a Saturday afternoon, street level nationalists;

for the exciting stink of the Standard Wallpaper Company fire way back before the clean air acts when the thick smoke billowed invisibly within the choking smog;

for Toots & The Maytals and Cliff Richard & the Shadows, and the Yardbirds and the Uxbridge Fair, for Eel Pie Island, the Marquee Club, and the Orchid Ballroom, Purley;

for the taste of raw beer hoppy and alive in an alehouse more ancient than America where ₤100 is a busy night and the beer and the bread and the cheese are homemade;

for the rank taste in the mouth when the gasholders were full and leeching and the air smelled green;

for Prince Charles and Coronation Street, and Mastermind and Marjorie Proops and the Sunday Mirror and the Evening Standard and the Guardian crossword, and the suckers getting taken at Piccadilly Circus;

for eel-pie and mash, for meat-and-potato pies, for streaky bacon and fat-filled bangers, for two pieces of rock and six pennyworth o’chips, for Bisto and Bovril and Daddie’s Sauce, for Marks & Sparks Christmas puds, for hot runny custard, mushy peas, black pudding and kippers;

for the china chink of cup on saucer across the village green as your team takes to the field in whites and off-whites and green-stained creams, running and stretching and yawning off the dozen pints of the night before;

for the narrow roads and tiny cars and miniature houses and rose gardens and muddy resorts and back lanes where it is safe to walk.

I used to be homesick before you.

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Snacks Tonight #34

July 27, 2020

I got up at 5 this morning with an overwhelming urge to make a clafouti for the fresh cherries that we have. By 6:30 it was cooling on my kitchen counter. The aroma has filled the apartment.