… last night’s question about where I might end up during the night is “I don’t know”. Or, more to the point, “I can’t remember”. Yet I was certainly somewhere. And on at least two occasions too (and maybe more) judging by the files that are on the dictaphone.

As of yet I haven’t listened to the tracks so I can’t even say with whom (if anyone) I was travelling last night. And that’s always the exciting part of course. I can’t wait to get to grips with the dictaphone notes and type them all out. That will mean editing the blog back as far as … gulp … 26th June. So that’s really going to be a labour of love, isn’t it?

The alarms went off as usual at 06:00 but it was a good hour later before I showed a leg. What with the medicine and all of that and a general tidy-up I was upstairs in the living room at 08:00. Sandra came to join me a little later and we had breakfast and a really good chat for ages.

A little later on, once the tremendous rainstorm had subsided, we went for a walk to buy groceries for tea tonight. She lives on a new housing estate tucked on down a side road right at the end of a commercial zoning area and this area is alive with ethnic shops and restaurants from the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.

We stocked up with tons of stuff of all kinds of varieties, had a look at the big cinema across the road (nothing there that tempted me at all) and then went for lunch. There’s a place that covers pitta bread with various toppings (I had vegetables), toasts them in a gas-powered pizza oven and then folds them over to eat.

Absolutely delicious they were too.

But while I was out, I did a very foolish thing that maybe I shall come to regret – but ask me if I care.

There’s a pawn shop along the highway nearby and we went in more out of curiosity. And my eye was inexorably drawn towards a Genz Benz 200-watt combo amp and 15-inch speaker with tweeter.

Way overpriced at $CAN 350 but nevertheless this is a serious piece of kit and the guy in the shop lent me a bass guitar to sit down and have a play, which I did for over half an hour. It needed a good clean (which it had at the tender mercy of my fair hands) and then quite some use before the dust on the potentiometers disappeared, and then it had the most wonderful sound that I have ever heard.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, it’s now joined the Fender practice combo in the back of Strider and I didn’t pay anything like the asking price for the outfit. One very happy bunny here.

All I need now is an opportunity to go out and put it to work while I’m over here in North America. I have everything that I need, including a guitar strap that I managed to negotiate into the deal. High time I started bringing in some money isn’t it?

This afternoon we went for a walk. There’s an abandoned railway that runs past the end of Sandra’s street right along the riverside and it’s been converted into a cycle path and pedestrian walkway. The weather was quite nice so we made the most of it, walking all the way down past the Belltown Dome towards the city as far as the public beach at Britannia Park.

The beach cafe was closed (this ridiculously short tourist season in Canada gets on my wick, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall) so we walked back again. Sandra went off to practise her Spanish and I did a few chores on the laptop.

For a change, I made tea tonight. One of my pasta-and-bean-in-tomato-sauce surprises (the big surprise being that it was edible) and it went down really well which is always good news.

And then we tried to fire up her ancient Sony Handycam 8mm camera to watch some of her old family videos, but to no avail. Dead batteries (as you might expect) and no battery charger. Anyone have an old Handycam going spare for a few days?

After another really good chat (we seem to find tons of things to talk about ) I’ve come to bed. An early night and hopefully a voyage that I might actually remember. It’s no fun going anywhere if you can’t remember where you’ve been.