There is so much to see at Butchart Gardens that I thought the gentle reader might indulge me were I to share another batch of images from last Saturday evening. Hope you don’t mind…
You are currently browsing the archive for the Life in BC category.
Last Friday was not the first Canada Day that I have enjoyed in the country (I arrived for a visit on July 1st back in 2012) but it was the first such that I have experienced here as a resident. We duly made a weekend of it.
Sidney spreads its celebration over two days and features a firework display on the night before Canada Day itself. At the last minute we decided not to attend – both being somewhat weary from our busy weeks – and reasoning that we could probably see the display from our windows anyway – which we could. We thus also saw the results of the ‘computer glitch’ that fired half the display within the first ten seconds – followed by a lengthy pause before the rest of it carried on as it should have. Glad we didn’t venture forth for that!
Our dear friends in Saanichton hosted a barbecue for the day itself which was lovely for all sorts of reasons – not least of which was meeting his father (a most redoubtable gentlemen) for the first time. At the end of the evening they announced that they had some spare passes for the following night (the Saturday) for Butchart Gardens. Summer Saturdays at Butchart mean live music and – yes – more fireworks… so we did get to see some after all.
The traffic queues to get into and out of the gardens on a summer Saturday night are all too reminiscent of some of those in the UK. If, however, one has a boat conveniently moored in a nearby marina – as do our dear friends – one can sail the short hop across Brentwood Bay and up to the Butchart back entrance off Tod Inlet. To my great delight this was indeed the plan and we duly puttered our way over in style.
Boats – music – picnics on the lawns – a stroll round the fabulous illuminated gardens – fireworks! It doesn’t get much better…
Here be a handful of random images:
Tags: Boats, Celebration, Fireworks, Friends, Fuji x10, Photo, Summer, Victoria
There are so many parks, trails and other good places to walk scarcely a stone-throw from our neighbourhood that it will be a considerable time before we have visited them all even once. Bear Hill is pretty close to the centre of the peninsula – about half way between Sidney and central Victoria. The Girl and I ‘yomped’ up it last weekend – Fuji x10 in hand. Here be snaps!
If you expand the panorama by clicking on it you will get a good idea of the vista from the top of the hill.
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
Robert A. Heinlein
Day two of our sojourn in Vancouver found us proceeding hot foot to the Arts Club Theatre for a matinee performance of the musical, ‘Billy Elliot‘.
The Girl had wanted to see the show before we left London but – what with one thing and another – the chance so to do had passed us by. Discovering that it was on in Vancouver at a time that coincided with the Canada/Japan rugby international seemed an opportunity too good to miss and we duly turned the occasion into a spiffing long weekend.
We enjoyed the show greatly… in my case considerably more than I expected to. The acting, singing and dancing were to a high standard and if some of the cast struggled a little with the County Durham accents then we were mindful of the fact that many Brits also find it a tough one to crack.
After the show there was just time to scamper back to the hotel to change for dinner. We had made reservations at one of Vancouver’s premier seafood restaurants – the Blue Water Cafe. A quick search on the InterWebNet will reveal just how highly thought of is this Yaletown eatery and it will be of little surprise that the Girl and I now think of it equally highly. The food is utterly splendid and the service exemplary – carried out by a team that clearly loves its work. Should you find your good-selves in Vancouver you really should not hesitate to make a reservation.
The wine cellar alone – curated by young Texan, William Mulholland – has won a basket of awards and features quite the best selection of fine French wines that I have encountered in Canada. We reluctantly eschewed the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti Richebourg Grand Cru for somewhere north of $4,000 and settled for Mr Mulholland’s recommended Pouilly-Fumé instead. At a fraction of the price this splendid Loire white – not that easy to come across in Canada – suited the scallops and halibut well, and a postprandial malt from the equally impressive range on offer left us feeling dangerously mellow.
Not so mellow, however, that we were unable to effect a visit to IKEA on the way back to the ferry the following morning! IKEA has much in common with the modern airport terminal in that it matters not where you are in the world – if you are in IKEA you could be anywhere! I am almost minded to suggest that a visit might be in order for the ex-pat suffering a mild case of homesickness… The Richmond branch is, for example, totally interchangeable with that at Brent Cross in North London!
Tags: Celebration, Food & Drink, Holiday, Theatre
Your hair may be brushed, but your mind’s untidy.
You’ve had about seven hours of sleep since Friday.
No wonder you feel that lost sensation.
You’re sunk from a riot of relaxation.
Ogden Nash
To Vancouver for a weekend’s worth of hedonism!
The primary reason for the trip was the first of this year’s summer rugby internationals – between Canada and Japan. This match had the added interest of being the first ever game of XVs rugby at BC Place – a stadium more familiar with Canadian football and soccer.
We stayed in an old haunt – the YWCA Hotel – which is within a stone’s throw of the arena. As you can see from the accompanying photos (which were taken from our room on the ninth floor) it seemed almost possible to lean out and touch the ‘place’.
There is nothing fancy about the ‘Y’ but it is a most effective place to rest one’s head at a very reasonable rate if the object of the exercise is to live lavishly out and about in Vancouver rather than to treat the accommodation itself as the destination.
As for the rugby, the game was most enjoyable – for the Kickass Canada Girl and I as well as for the other 10,250 odd who turned out to see the spectacle. Rugby is still only just starting to grow as a sport in Canada and as much of the attention is focused on the VIIs game – particularly with the Rio Olympics (now featuring, as it does, 7-a-side rugby) on the near horizon – this was a pretty good crowd.
Here are Canada warming up before the masses arrive for the match.
Japan are considerably higher than Canada in the world rankings and – having registered a famous victory over South Africa in last year’s World Cup – they might have been expected to record a straightforward win. As things turned out Canada would have had them beaten had they within their ranks possessed a decent kicker. They succeeded, however, in only one out of six attempts at the posts and that is no-where near good enough at this level.
The final five minutes of the match provided a fitting climax and – regardless of what had gone before – almost led to a Canadian victory. Needing two scores to win they camped out on the Japanese line and finally drove over with about a minute left on the clock. They wasted no time with the attempted conversion but set about winning the ball from the restart. They then kept the final move alive deep into injury time, driving further and further into Japanese territory until the whitewash was within reach.
The crowd – cheering itself hoarse by this point – believed for a moment that a famous comeback had been effected and the match taken, but the referee judged that the ball had been held up over the line and Japan won by two points.
Phew!
After the efforts of our vigorous supporting – and having had a post-match drink with a Kiwi rugby friend in an extremely noisy hostelry thereafter – our tender vocal chords needed soothing treatment from a nearby ‘nitro’ ice cream bar after the game.
At this fascinating establishment ice creams are made on demand on the spot, using copious quantities of liquid nitrogen. Sauces to top the resultant concoctions are presented in plastic syringes embedded into the ice cream.
Cool!
About a month ago I posted to this journal two missives – to be found here and here – in which I summarised the results of our researches into the opportunities for drama and theatre study and practice for young people in and around the Greater Victoria area. In the second such I promised that I would comment further as to what I perceived to be the gaps in that offering and had I not – as is ever the way – been overtaken by events (‘dear boy!’) I would already have fulfilled that pledge.
As was explained in the first of those posts, the provision throughout the secondary schools of Victoria and the Saanich peninsula would appear to be uneven. It is fair to say that private schools probably do rather better than do public (in the Canadian sense) schools – as is the case in the UK – and though there are definitely some institutions which are exceptional in dramatic terms, for others it is very much more of a lottery.
Outwith the school sector itself there are a number of professional organisations offering acting and stagecraft classes and other theatrical activities. These are – however – almost without exception commercial enterprises that charge termly or annual fees. These costs can quickly add up to a significant amount and, whereas for younger children such are normally borne by parents, when it comes to teenagers they may well be expected to make a contribution themselves.
It must be clear from the above that a significant proportion of the teenage population of Greater Victoria might well find themselves disenfranchised from such a valuable resource – either through not attending the right school or by not being able to afford these extra-curricula classes.
As far as I can determine there was no real echo in Canada of the Youth Theatre movement that spread rapidly across the United Kingdom (and some other parts of the world) during the 1960s and 1970s. There are, naturally, blazing exceptions, but by their very presence they merely illuminate the lack elsewhere.
Though the movement in Britain comprised groups established under a plethora of different contexts – some appended to mainstream theatres – some commercially run – some funded by the local authorities (municipalities) and so forth – it very rapidly became clear that these energetic bodies – often run by enthusiastic volunteers – offered so many benefits to young people in terms of personal growth, social development and the promotion of creativity that support for them quickly became widespread. Every self-respecting district, county and metropolis offered some sort of financial support to one or more of these groups – if only by making available some empty space in which their arts could be practiced.
That I am an enthusiast for the work done by these splendid bodies need hardly be mentioned. I spent upward of two decades as a facilitator at one such, wearing such a wide range of hats that I might have attempted the establishment of a millinery! As is so often the case with such voluntary work I am very sure that I got as much – if not more – from the whole adventure as did the cavalcade of youth that passed through our doors.
Which might – of course – go a long way to explaining why I am now trying to start something similar here in Victoria.
More on that anon…
Tags: Drama, Victoria, Youth Theatre
I experienced an interesting echo of Britain’s colonial past this recent long holiday weekend. The occasion was my first visit to the excellent and hugely popular Victoria Highland Games.
That this was the one hundred and fifty third such informs us not only as to their date of origin but also as to the continuing popularity of the event. As was our colonial forebears’ wont around the globe the original intent of the festival would have been to recreate a much loved element of UK cultural life to ease the longing for home of the expats upon whom the empire depended.
Here – a century and a half later – I found myself standing on a grassy slope in Topaz Park, looking across a greensward teeming with pipers, drum majors, highland dancers, heavy lifters and hammer throwers (caber tossing was on a different day!) toward the smoky Sooke hills in the background and experiencing suddenly the strongest recollection of sitting on the grass bank at the Pitlochry recreation ground in Perthshire back ‘when I were a lad’, watching the proceedings of a ‘Highland Night’.
It worked a hundred and fifty years ago… it works now!
Some pictures…
In the clan society section I found that my own – Clan Donnachaidh – has made a reappearance after some years missing from the west coast. I signed up – naturally!
Tags: Celebration, Fuji x10, Memories, Photo, Scotland, Victoria
Since the Kickass Canada Girl went back to work recently she has had – yet again – to take on something of a commute. Nothing much by way of comparison to that which either of us endured back in the UK, but tiresome nonetheless. Much of it is along the main arterial route down the Peninsula into the centre of Victoria – Highway 17 (or the ‘Pat Bay’ as it is ‘affectionately’ known). This journey should take only around 20 – 25 minutes. That it has – of late – been taking considerably longer is in the main down to some Victorians being apparently unable to drive safely along the highway just as soon as the sun shines.
The Pat Bay is not the perfect road by any means. Much of it comprises two lanes in either direction and, whilst the southern stretch is adequately equipped with the sort of interchange with which we are familiar in the UK, north of Royal Oak, unfortunately, the intersections revert to being flat crossroads with traffic signals.
The problem is that some of those acclimatised to keeping their feet down on the southern section seem unable to reconcile this with having to stop at the lights further north. Even worse – if a green light can be seen at an intersection up ahead that seems like a good excuse to keep the power on. There is – of course – the possibility that the signal has only just changed to green, with the vehicles ahead still accelerating away when some monster pickup barrels into the back of them doing something quite illegal.
The Girl has of late come home grumbling of extended delays a couple of times a week. I had myself to pull over and let three police cars, two ambulances and a fire truck get past to deal with a shunt only this afternoon – and today is Sunday!
This has all – rather sadly – forced the Girl to rethink her means of transport. In England the cute little MX-5 can more than hold its own in traffic. Over here – fun as it is on the curvy stuff when the roads are clear – it doesn’t take much for the diminutive roadster to vanish into the blind spots of ‘semis’ (‘artics’ to UK readers) and pickups alike… particularly given their jockeys’ penchants for tailgating.
A larger – and safer – vehicle may well be required… at least while she is yet in employ.
As for me – there are definitely unwanted echoes of the traffic conditions I used to encounter on the M3 on the way into London every day.
Not what one looks to find in paradise!
Tags: Cars, Modern life, Victoria
In the first part of this post (which like so many such started out as a single succinct study until the habitual ramblings of my so-called style brought me to the realisation that I had probably already outstayed my welcome… (See what I mean?)) I painted a brief sketch of the provision within Victoria’s secondary schools for those youngsters who wished to study drama or to practice theatre.
Outside the school system – for those whose schools do not make adequate provision or for others who wish to take things further – there are a number of options. A variety of organisations offer a range of drama, acting and performance classes, some of them so doing through a range of outlets such as leisure or recreation centres as well as from their own premises.
The best known and regarded of these are probably Kaleidoscope Theatre and the Kate Rubin Studio. Though each has its own particular USP they aim broadly at the same constituency, offering theatrical activities across a wide range of age groups but also focusing on those with ambitions to take up one the thespian professions. Both are themselves professional operations and are well resourced.
Kate Rubin herself was – for a considerable time – also involved with another admirable offering for the young of Greater Victoria… the Belfry 101 programme. I have waxed lyrical about the Belfry Theatre on more than one occasion. Apart from providing the best theatre-going experience in Victoria the Belfry also hosts this imaginative program for school-aged youngsters on an annual basis. This is based around the Belfry’s main house programme, and gives the young members access to the casts and creatives involved in each show, in addition to offering them the opportunity to create their own showcase work at the end of the season.
The Belfry 101 programme was created in the late 1990s by University of Victoria Associate Professor Monica Prendergast, and has operated to great acclaim ever since. Both Monica Prendergast and Kate Rubin were kind enough to agree to meet us so that we could pick their respective brains concerning youth drama provision in Victoria. We are most grateful both to them and to Colin Plant, who heads the Fine Arts programme at Claremont Secondary School.
Now that I have provided the broadest of sketches of the youth drama provision at this end of Vancouver Island and in the process, hopefully, given the gentle reader an idea as to what is available – it is now time to offer an opinion as to what is not…!
And, yes! – that means another post…
Tags: Drama, Victoria, Youth Theatre
“But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.”
Patrick Geddes
It was some time ago now – back in February in fact – that I posted a missive to this journal entitled Youth Theatre Dreaming in which I declared my intention of starting something along the lines of a youth theatre here in Victoria. You may have been wondering what has become of that purpose, particularly given that I wrote at the time that “things have been set in motion”.
Though I feel it probable that the gentle reader has grown somewhat weary over the years of being informed just how long it takes for this, that and the other to come to pass in our lives (which dilatory state of affairs seems to have been our lot for some considerable time now) in this case things actually have been happening… albeit – slowly!
In keeping with the ponderous nature of the progress this will not be the post that gives you all the details of the project. That will be the next one (or maybe the one after that!). This one will give some essential background and reflects the fact that one of the things that we were briefed to do by those with whom we intend to work was to carry out some research into the current dramatic provision for young people in and around Greater Victoria.
This is what we found.
Across the high schools of Greater Victoria the provision of drama teaching is – to put it mildly – mixed! Some schools have extensive offerings – such as the excellent Claremont Secondary in Cordova Bay which has a fully fledged Fine Arts programme running across the whole school. In other secondary schools drama is taught by whoever can be prevailed upon to pick it up – often someone from the English department. The content is then based upon whatever knowledge happens to be available. There is no common curriculum and drama would seem to be one of those subjects the timetabling of which has, of late, been squeezed.
One thing is, however, common to practically all schools – music theatre! I have never encountered such a plethora of music theatre courses and musical shows. It would seem that, even if no other offering for drama study is available, there is always the music theatre option.
Now – having written a number of musicals myself back in my youth theatre days I am not opposed to the form per se, but I was startled to discover that these shows are a very different proposition. These are based on hit shows from Broadway and the like, but stripped down for school use and with the entire production offered as a package – pre-recorded music, choreography, costume and set design and so forth.
Hmmm!
Outside school there are – as one would expect – other possibilities. Full details on these must, however, needs wait for the second part of this missive.
Tags: Drama, Victoria, Youth Theatre
Featured Image
Recent Comments