… who tells me that there’s a recession will receive a smack in the mouth.
This afternoon I went down to the border between the USA and Canada at Houlton as I had heard that there were a couple of freight forwarders with offices there. The idea was to talk to them about shipping this sunroof back to Europe.
When I eventually found the offices (thanks to a helpful officer in the Canadian Customs Post), the guy in the first office, that belonging to Kühn and Nagel, couldn’t even be bothered to leave his seat to come to the counter. The gist of his information was to tell me to clear off and not bother him.
Mind you, that was better than at the second office. There, there was a notice to the effect that they are not welcoming personal callers.
And there’s the rub. I have all of this money burning a hole in my pocket and it needs to be spent, and it’s far too much effort for anyone to come and take it. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that this is a regular occurrence. Nobody these days wants to earn any money and I’m completely on my own when it comes to dealing with this.
It’s not the only thing for which I’m completely alone either. I was completely on my own last night too. Cujo the Killer Cat didn’t come to share my bed, something that quite disappointed me.
Consequently there was tons of stuff on the dictaphone from last night but I haven’t transcribed it yet.
And there was a good reason for that. Once everyone had gone to work I left my bed and while I was checking my mails and messages I had the old-time radio on the computer. And on came a “Paul Temple” episode, all 3 hours and some more of it, so just for a change I did very little except listen to it.
At a certain moment Cujo the Killer Cat came to join me so we listened to it together.
After lunch I set out for the border and after my disappointment there I went to Woodstock to buy fuel , and by the time we got to Woodstock we were … etc.
Next stop was the bank at Florenceville and for a change I followed the west bank of the Saint John River and crossed over the river at Hartland on the world’s longest covered bridge where I got the protocol about crossing horribly wrong and annoyed just about everyone.
The tyre depot was extremely busy so we never had time to weigh my packets so I’ll have to do that tomorrow, but I had a lovely chat with a very verbose 4th grader who was waiting for her father who was having a tyre changed.
And it’s not just very verbose 4th graders that occupy my time either.
The mill here is full of corn as you might expect and so it’s quite an attraction for the local wild rodents which upsets just about everyone concerned. Consequently there’s a fleet of mill cats here, as you would also expect.
They are extremely wild, ferocious cats whose job is to tear to shreds any unsuspecting rodent that falls into their clutches. You can see just how wild and ferocious they are by looking at this photograph.
Honestly, if you were a wild mouse bent on stealing some corn from a corn mill, wouldn’t you be frightened to death on encountering such a savage beast as this?
On the way home we called at the house of an old woman in the neighbourhood who is a friend of Rachel, and had an interesting chat. And she gave me a recipe for egg-free molasses cake.
When I returned home later I tried it out and it was quite delicious. But I wish that Canadians and Americans would use weights for their ingredients rather than volume. And what is a “cupful” anyway? How dos anyone know how big your cup is?
It all goes back, I suppose, to Pioneer days when no-one could afford scales or just didn’t possess them, and a cup was a standard size sold by the Sears, Roebuck or Hudsons Bay Company traveller
Surprisingly I had a lot in common with this lady and we talked about churning butter, water-powered fridges and the like.
We were there for hours so I’m running quite late yet again. A “left-over supper” of my Chinese vegetables, potatoes and burger followed by rice pudding was quick and easy, and now having written my notes, I’m off to bed.
Eventually I managed to transcribe all of the dictaphone notes. We’d been talking about the shop round the corner at the top of the street in Wardle. Someone was saying that they weren’t very friendly and didn’t seem to want to help anyone out and wouldn’t do deliveries. That really surprised me because if I were living in a small village like that and a shop I’d have one of these Vespa-type scooter freight delivery vans. I’d be happy to drop off anyone’s shopping anywhere for an extra £1:00 or so a time. I’m pretty sure that that’s the way to go and it would be a success but these people at Wardle didn’t seem to be interested at all.
And then I was going skiing. I was ready to go but I suddenly found myself without my skis, boots, and bag in which to put them so I had to go back to the apartment where I’d changed and I couldn’t find them there. Then I thought that I’d been in my brother’s apartments so I thought that I’d go there. I had to persuade him because he didn’t want to let me go back in again. Eventually I did and I had a really good hunt around. I couldn’t find what I needed. In the end I had to go. There were several buses going past his apartment which was something like one every hour carried on to where I wanted to be. While I was waiting for it I was doing some work sitting at a desk but I hadn’t quite finished it when the bus came so I missed it. I decided that I’d set out and walk. It was pretty dark. Nevertheless as I was walking down the track from one bus stop to the next I came across a couple of small families with young girls who were out for a walk. One of the young girls didn’t want to go at all and started to make a scene. There was a church so I popped in. They were celebrating the death of someone with the same name as me. I sat down for a couple of minutes to listen to it. Then I wanted to get back up again and carry on but I had to disturb the people sitting in my row and possibly the row in front and behind in order that they could make space to leave but I didn’t feel like embarrassing everyone to make them do this in the middle of e ceremony.
At another moment I was dictating to my hand again. I was playing in defence for a football team last night. There was the local Sunday league team training and was a player short so I helped out at left-back for them. I was totally exhausted in the warm-up. We were kicking the ball around. One guy who looked very much like Cedric Pény was always kicking it out of play and I had to leap over the barbed wire fence to get it. I did that once and then after that let someone else do it. On one occasion it had been tormented by a wasp or something like that so I went over to see. Someone asked what it was. I said that it was a bestiole but they didn’t know what that was. There was a rabbit so I threw the ball at it to move it but the rabbit grabbed hold of it and tried to run off. In the end Cedric Pény picked it up like you would a cat and threw it out of the door. It was all completely surreal. I remember the times that I’d been playing in goal for this team during the dream and of course I’ve never played in goal for anyone for 40 years. This was what surprised me the most was reminiscing about turning out for this team a couple of times in goal because it seemed to be so real and so vivid as well.
This is another one of which I only remember bits. Of the bits that I remember, we were going to a dance but we couldn’t get the usual car going so we got this old Rolls-Royce to go. We encountered a girl who said something about the Rolls-Royce so I said “well we don’t usually bring it out in the rain but we thought that we’d give it a bit of a run-out today”. I didn’t like to mention that the Rolls wasn’t taxed or insured or MoT’d or anything and shouldn’t have been on the road anyway but it was the only car that we had when the first one wouldn’t start. There was lots more to it than this but I can’t remember.
With a bit of luck we’ll weigh these packets tomorrow and then I can press on with my plans. And hope that I can find a way of posting them without having to rely on a commercial courier.
, which will forever be associated in my brain with late, dark, cold nights on board The Good Ship Ve … errr … Ocean Endeavour in the High Arctic, and that is exactly what I’m trying to put out of my mind.
I’ll tell you all about them.
