Wisterious

As the temperature rose so the day became more surreal.

The wisteria in the morning sunshine exhaled the scent of sweet peas, a raft of perfume that followed me.

Walking along the road to work, I remembered a snippet from yesterday on the radio. A substitute teacher had shown a class the movie 'Brokeback Mountain' and for some reason, in spite of having some kind of degree, seemed unable to anticipate that this would result in a half million dollar lawsuit. A truly, humongously stupid thing to do but pulease, spare me the whole,
'I'm scarred by the experience,' claptrap.

The first group of the morning was interesting. In my group there were only girls. There is an activity where they have to use their sense of smell to match a sample they have been given to one of two parent 'bees'. Usually this involves a huge amount of dithering. But the group of girls, seemingly with no communication on the subject, all took the lids off their boxes and compared them with each others before going en masse to one parent or t'other. I was stunned.

By the afternoon, I was wilting. I warned Rob that from here on out he was going to be understanding why the Aussies call us whingeing poms.
The teacher had forgotten name tags, so I had to learn the group's names straight off. The only boy I couldn't understand was supposed to be English. His accent seemed completely Canadian to me. By the end of the programme, his original Derbyshire seemed to have resurfaced.

Later, I had reached the point where I had put off going to the toilet as long as was humanly possible. I had been confusing Sleepy by e-mail from my desk, using my work address. I was writing some teachers' notes for the new programme.
I got up and made towards the loo, but i was stopped by a deaf woman in a panic. The receptionist had ignored her. She was lost, she needed to get back to Chilliwack (about 100 km away), she had panicked because the traffic was at a standstill on Westminster Highway - there had been several sirens during the afternoon so possibly an accident - and she couldn't work out which way to go. She was on the verge of tears and quite literally flapping. I squeezed tighter.

But the reason the receptionist had been unable to help her was that she was having an even more surreal conversation on the phone.
'Can you send me a Park Ranger?'
'We don't have Park Rangers,'
'But you're a park,'
'A small one,'
'In Surrey they'll send out a Park Ranger,'
'That surprises me, but anyway, this is Richmond,'
'I know, I'm stuck in Richmond,'
'Stuck, in what way?'
'I've run out of gas, in Surrey they will send a Park Ranger with gas.'
'Well we don't have any and I'm sure we wouldn't send them out into the city with gas if we did. Where are you exactly?'
(Names a location about two blocks away from a petrol station.)


As I walked back across King George's park, the park where you see at various times of the day, Pakistani boys playing cricket, Chinese seniors doing Tai Chi, Sikh men playing cards and at night, teenagers smoking pot, there was a young woman, slender, long dark hair, a patterned top, plain skirt and sandals. She had a leather bound book in one hand, in the other a lead that when I followed it down, was attached to the collar of a rabbit. The bunny would hop two steps then stop, the woman would then resume her reading. I would have liked to photograph them, but how do you broach that? Please may I take your photo because.....???

Surreal is good. Tomorrow I have to drive to downtown Vancouver in the middle of the afternoon.
Then see how bitter and twisted I become.