The City of Vancouver should perhaps think of hiring ancient Egyptians to fix the decaying infrastructure of our city. We know that the pyramids were not built by slave-labour but by paid workers who thrived on onions.

Cameron Ward successfully sued the Canada Line to obtain some reparations for the long period of time when businesses on Cambie suffered with the tunnel construction.

I would like to point out here that the bottleneck that is Burrard at Pacific is now over a year in a process of which our fair city will not or does not inform us exactly why it is taking so long. How are the businesses on Burrard  from Pacific to Davie coping? Are there reparations in the works.

For at least a year Burrard from 4^th to 16 was either blocked or narrowed to traffic. Side streets were full of signs preventing circulation.

At least a year ago Marine Drive was blocked. A year ago there were policemen (this lasted 4 months) at intersections like the one at 49^th and West Boulevard warning motorists that 49^th was sort of blocked (if you lived near there and had a sticker on your windshield no questions were asked).

Now we have the same situation at hand until September.

There are few businesses in Southlands. One of them is Southlands Nursery. My wife and I happen to garden and this is a very good nursery.

To go there today I had to go through five separate policemen.

How is this affecting business for Southlands?

I cannot understand how such a long stretch of Marine Drive can be rendered prohibited to traffic. Why will our City Hall not explain what is going on?

 And now to the continuation of the above with a slightly different tack.

When I was attending a Catholic boarding school in Austin in the middle to late 50s I had to travel after the Christmas holiday or summer holiday from Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, Mexico to Eagle Pass Texas. From there I went in a Continental Trailways bus to San Antonio. It was from San Antonio to Austin where they had a brand new spanking expressway (what Texans call freeways). These divided expressways were part of the interstate highway system innitiated by President Dwight Eisenhower. It had one primary purpose. These concrete highways could withstand the weight of US Army tanks should an invading army declare war on the US. I remember seeing ads for these highways in Life Magazine about the merits of concrete highways by the likes of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope!

Now in Vancouver we have some very good concrete paves streets particularly in the West Side. But every time an old house is demolished by city regulations, the new house built to take its place needs re-worked/r-configured drainage and water works. So the nice concrete streets are cut by those men with vibrating hands and depending on the day of the week or the month of the year those re-paved cuts are done with ashalt in an almost flat-pretty good to a terrible anti-pot hole.

What is an anti-pot hole? This is my personal coinage for what is being done all over to cover potholes in Vancouver. They no longer use big heavy rolling tractors. They use pun hand push ones. To allow for the eventual collapse of the asphalt these pot holes are generously made a lot higher. The fact is that they do not collapse.

So on almost every neighbourhood of Vancouver you have streets that are blocks and blocks of anti -pot holes. From my house in Kitsilano one of my main roots to Granville or Richmond is to take MacDonald  south to where it changes its name to Puget ( a terrible mess of the aforementioned anti-pot holes to Larch which is currently blocked at 41st with one of those stupid (is asenine a better word?) signs that read

Local Traffic Only

This is many (as in many blocks) from the complete blockage of Marine Drive.

I almost broke my new car's suspension on the Oak Street Bridge a month ago (both ways!) on huge real and very deep pot holes.

At one time Vancouver Magazine writer (he wrote his famous 12th & Cambie) Sean Rossiter would have written about all this. I distinctly remember taking photographs for his column of the man who was responsible for widening the ends of street to install left-turn lanes. But we have nobody who will write about our city infrastructure (so much in decline) and our Vancouver Sun, City Hall is moot on what is going on. Streets are blocked with no advance notice just like that. A dog .....because it can. The city... because it can.

All this brings me back to that Vancouver version of the Cheops pyramid, Pacific at Burrard. It is now almost two years. When is this going to be finished?

At this rate Vancouverites will soon throw themselves from the bridges of our city's yet to be installed suicide prevention barriers in despair.

Or they might buy a bicycle as bike lanes are all nice and smooth.

Tonight, my granddaughter Lauren Stewart, 14 and I attended the first night of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company’s Season Finale (three more performances on May 26 and 27) at the Playhouse. The theme was Be Moved.

Each day has a different program so my opinion herein is all about tonight’s.

I have been a fan of dance in Vancouver since 1991. I am not a critic. I am an amateur who appreciates fine dance. What we saw tonight was just that but with a bit more.

It seems that with dance there is always something to learn. Tonight I learned a few things that I was just not aware of.

In 2015 my favourite dance performed by the Arts Umbrella Dance Company, which cleared the benches as there were at least 50 dancers on stage, was James Kudelka’s Study for Dance in the Future. This spectacular production featured no music accompaniment. I was able to hear all the shuffling on stage and, this, became music to my ears. I know from the composer in question that Kudelka had originally commissioned music for the piece. In the end Kudelka went for silence.

Dance in silence is never quite in silence. From my almost always first row seat (and that did apply tonight) I can listen to the dancers gasping for air. I know that they are not swans and what they do is not only difficult but strenuous.

Tonight I learned that slow dancing in unison with many other dancers is tough. The dance that taught me this was James Kudelka’s Slow Movement. It began with lovely silence and after what seemed like a long time the music was the Kronos Quartet.

At first as I was watching a few of my fave dancers I noticed that they would lose their balance. This was subtle. I had to look twice.And yes they were losing their balance

When I mentioned to a local avant-garde composer, at the end of the evening,  that this was my favourite work the composer said, “That cannot be. It is an elegant piece (we concurred there!) but it shows the flaws of the dancers. It is flawed.”

It was at that moment that I knew that Kudelka had taught me something. Slow dancing, in which momentum plays a smaller role, is a difficult thing. We know from Isaac Newton that a body at rest will tend to rest and that a body in motion will keep moving unless resistance or an exterior force acts upon it.

Thus I can assert with a big smile on my face that Slow Movement is a work in which the flaws of the dancers are its reason for existence. Perfection, particularly in dance, can be boring. Boring it was not!

Some years ago in one of  Evelyn Hart's last performances in Vancouver Max Wyman and I compared notes. We agreed that those moments of slow movement and in some cases pauses with no movement of all were the most beautiful. Perhaps in dance, like in music, silence between notes, fills in stuff in our head. No dancer except Evelyn Hart could have possibly gotten away with it. 

I remember to the day when Brother Francis Barrett who taught us American History at St. Ed’s High School in Austin used a strange word, entrepreneur. Thus I have known the meaning of that word from an early age.

Now I am about to be 75 and I feel that I am too old to become an entrepreneur. I do not need the money. But I know what I would do. I would cater to an aging population.

At this age of mine my friends are dying and most of my relatives who were uncles and aunts are all gone. I am now from the generation that is next for oblivion. I can almost ascertain that I don’t know anybody now who is not battling with a relative or other friend who has dementia.

It does not take higher mathematics to figure out that with improved drugs, eating habits and advanced medicine there are more people now than ever in that “wonderful golden age”. That wonderful golden age is not so wonderful.

I am certainly not alone in being plagued with arthritis, the usual one and another called psoriatic arthritis.

This is when I have noticed that nobody is designing stuff for people that cannot open jars or remove or add attachments to a vacuum cleaner. Rosemary demanded we buy a small and light Dyson vacuum cleaner. After months of struggling with it I have come to the conclusion that it was designed for young couples living in small condos. It hurts my elbows, wrists and fingers when I try to change attachments.

Pushing my car door to get out hurts. Carrying the groceries from the car to our home is tough, too.

As a person who was born before the last century was half over (1942) I have seen a lot of what I took for granted disappear. Some of it was stuff and entities that seemed to part of my life.

I could name Oldsmobiles, Packards, Studebakers, Pontiacs, Saabs and the disappearance of virtually all 100% owned and built English cars.

As a photographer my world was that of the great yellow box of Kodak, of Agfa b+w photographic paper (particularly that very good Portriga).

Before the advent of digital I depended entirely in my career as a magazine photographer on the Polaroid Instant Film that fit in my Mamiya’s Polaroid back.

In Vancouver where I have lived since 1975 I only bought photographic products that could be repaired here. This is why I have always had Minolta flash meters and Nikons and Pentax cameras.

I used to define a big city (or at the very least a cosmopolitan one) as a city where you could have Kodachrome processed.

That world is no more.