Growing up in Barrow-in-Furness a medium to large sized * UK  industrial coastal town engaged primarily in ship building, ** located in the northwestern corner of England all but isolated at the western tip of the Furness peninsula, one was spoiled by the extensive choice of beaches to explore. Most all of them were pummeled and pounded ad infinitum by the almost continually wind swept Atlantic Ocean and its’ local co-conspirator in aquatic violence, the rarely stilled Irish-Sea.  The Furness peninsula boasts about sixty kilometres of coastline and hence beaches, most all of them readily accessible given an almost complete…

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Some years ago when I was a member thereof, the Vancouver Welsh Men’s choir * received an enquiry from a film production company in town to shoot a made for TV movie ‘Mrs Delafield Wants to Marry’. The location was the very picturesque and locally much loved Anglican St. Francis-in-the-Wood heritage church in West Vancouver. Could we supply five singers willing to be in the movie? The quintet would be costumed as monks and required to perform a Gregorian chant. ** Is the Pope Catholic? I was quick to volunteer. Another volunteer knew a Gregorian chant and went about teaching…

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Barely six months after emigrating from Britain to Canada via transatlantic liner in May 1967, disembarking in Montreal and driving the 4,554 kms to Vancouver in the Austin 1100 * we had brought with us and having had the good fortune, somewhat against the going odds, to land a well-paid job in Vancouver soon after our arrival as did my wife, I fulfilled a goal going back to childhood and bought a sailboat.  She was a Shark 24, a fibreglass 24 foot One-Design racing ** fixed keel vessel designed in 1959 by George Hinterhoeller a then 31-year old Austrian immigrant…

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A well established if comedic adage with regard to hiking in the Canadian backcountry in general, particularly in habitat known for dangerous wildlife populations such as grizzly, black and polar bears (the latter on Hudson’s Bay, Manitoba and further north) along with cougars, wolves, coyotes, wolverines, moose and rattlesnakes, is to always hike with a buddy whom you can outrun! Specifically with regard to black and grizzly bears, there are well established dictums that say ‘if the bear is black fight back, if the bear is brown, lie down’. Do not run away!  For the record, when traversing polar bear…

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The 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, or simply Expo 86, was a World’s Fair held in my home town of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from May 2 until October 13, 1986. Conveniently, for the first and only time, I had just been laid off. I immediately bought a season’s pass to Expo. Along with the layoff came a very nice ‘to whom it may concern’ letter from the company saying it wasn’t my fault. Nor was it that of my numerous also laid off yeoman cohorts. We worked for one of the top five mainframe computer manufacturers in…

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The word Couloir entered the English language in the 19th century from the French where it meant passage. The term was originally applied specifically to steep gorges in the European alps and later to similar gorges elsewhere including ones now transited by downhill skiers. It is simply a narrow gully with a steep gradient in mountainous terrain. It is one thing to successfully ski down a steep often iced over high altitude couloir. This especially if it is a double black diamond flagged and thus experts only run. It is quite another thing to stop skiing and watch in abject…

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Some years ago an early morning phone call brought devastating news to me of an aviation ‘incident’ to use the classic softening euphemism favoured by authorities of various and sundry stripes. Responding right away I drove to Delta Air Park (now Delta Heritage Air Park) * twenty-five kilometres south of Vancouver, Canada. The small airfield has but a single east west grass runway or strip if you will. It does not have a control tower hence flying safety is entirely dependent on a see and be seen mentality. The call was from one of my two co-owners of a light…

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Not being a submariner nor masquerading perhaps as an able seaman aboard a naval surface vessel, finding myself in imminent danger of being torpedoed was not a risk I ever expected to have to mitigate. Having immigrated from the UK to Canada, my wife and I had settled in Vancouver about a year previously and had recently bought a sailboat, a 24 foot ‘Shark,’ a Canadian designed and built One-Design racing sloop. Embarked on a two week cruise and having just sailed the twenty nautical miles or so from West Vancouver across an arm of the Salish Sea – the…

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A year before exiting Britain and immigrating to Canada in 1967, my wife and I set out on a sort of poor man’s and woman’s motoring ‘Grand Tour of Europe’. (We visited eight countries.) Eyeing a large sign on the outskirts thereof giving directions to a Paris by-pass, with only about a month available for our ’ Grand Tour’, rather impulsively I took the by-pass. Never to this day having yet visited Paris, I have regretted taking it for the fifty six years since. The following year as planned we arrived in Canada by sea disembarking mid-May in Montreal bound…

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On a hot summer day back in 2006, with the top down I was driving solo in my black BMW Z4 two seater convertible rag top’sports car. On a local freeway, as in Vancouver Canada I thought that perhaps I had spotted of all things, a mule.*  A very unique and exciting mule. Surely it can’t be I thought, what are the odds? And here in Canada not even in its country of origin the United States. Driving in the fast lane I had glanced in my passenger side wing mirror prior to changing to the inside lane when I…

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