Axis of Shaving

Part one of the new world order in shaving apparel has arrived, safe and sound. After almost two years of shaving with a Tesco Value Razor with Tesco Value Razor Blades

occasionally living it up with a Johnny Wilkinson Sword. Just the two shaves, and then you are you are using the dull, spoon-like wit of 'Roseanne' rather than the rapier class of 'Yes Minister'. So I decided to step it up a level and brought up a century of
Feather blades - the choice of Samurai shavers from Sapporo to Kagoshima. I'm yet to use one, but I hear that they will slice through unwanted hairs just by placing them in the next room and pointing your chin in their general direction. This should yield two years of shaving delight, less probably a month or so when I am cut to shreds by its diamond sharpened, or laser sharpened, or diamond-laser sharpened blades.


And certainly one needs sufficient support for such an investment. The £2.50 razor from Tesco which has travelled with me from the UK to Italy, Austria, Canada, France and Australia, is starting to bend it like Beckham. If I get the odd nick through to the keeper with this, and my bedulled scythes, then I will be peeling through the dermis in no time when the feathers arrive. Hence to the heart of Teutonically efficient shaving, and to the Merkur Heavy Duty.


The astute reader will note the light, aromatic Yin of the light blades, tempering the ponderous, imperious Yang of the heavy razor. No? No one? As Wino says, early doors... whatever that means.

Farmers' Markets swings, misses and DLF maximums

For the last two weeks we've hit up the local Lethbridge Farmers' Markets.

The polka-dotted scarves are the standard garb of the female Hutterites, a clan who are omnipresent at the markets. More seasonal produce than one could, and indeed should, poke a stick at. We nabbed some 'korabhi', or something similar, which was toted as 'like a sour radish'. That was more than enough to have my left hand throw it back into the pile, while my right grabbed Di to try to escape the madness. But not, I was overruled and we now have a brace of korabhi sitting in our fridge, waiting to be eaten. I have declared that I would need to suffer horrific olfactory and glossal injuries before entering the dragon and eating one of those; perhaps that explains the firecrackers I found in my cereal.

Anyway, you have your fair share of characters at the Farmers' Markets. One bird, who was English (and whom Di thought was from New Zealand) started to talk to us, thinking we were English - error. We were after some of aersol-freshener for the car, to douse the stale taste of cigarette smoke which the previous owner so lovingly left for us, and at no extra charge! Does PT stand for 'Pulmonary Terminator'. Now that would be a film I would pay and see. Well, that's a lie - everything is on the internet these days.

So anyway, this bird was selling all manner of deoderants, and after the first two, Robin Goodfellow and Portia, I spotted the subtle Shakespearian reference. Di said that were after something which wasn't 'too girly', and I grunted my approval in the deepest basso profundo imaginable. The bird recommended the Portia - to which I said, 'If this is the same Portia as in the Merchant of Venice then it shouldn't be too girly, at least, not in the second half'. I got nothing. Di stood, waiting for the punchline, and the bird stood, waiting for cold hard cash.

But we connected, in a Stanford Super Series fashion, with a bloke and his wife from Guyana. They make some of the best hot sauce I've tasted in a while

http://www.firenbrimstone.com/info.htm

since it has things in it that add to the taste (mangoes, cucumbers and the like) rather than a concentration of 10 litres of Peruvian Psychopathic Chillies in one tablespoon of mayhem. We talked about West Indian cricket for a while, before he made the schoolboy error of saying 'you probably wouldn't know about the great batsmen we used to have, like Worell, Weekes, Sobers.' That is where he made his first mistake. Good times were had, though, discussing CLR James' 'Beyond a Boundary' and the demise of the pace quartet.

Oh yes, and you can buy a proper fraction's worth of cow or hog. With our new chest freezer (to double as a heater during the winter) we are thinking 1/4 of the finest Albertan cattle will put us in good stead for a while.

Time for that DLF Maximum chilli.

Worth more than two birds

Last week marked the final week in the generic (although definitely a step up from the Burgmann Colleges of this world) accommodation at the University's temporary summer honeymoon getaway residence. I had the pleasure of a twin room, and Di arrived only after I moved out. That meant that I was able to sleep in one of the beds and make forts, on a miniature scale to Fort Whoop-Up

complete with a whisky store, at which I was the major customer, and a saloon in which I put my spurs up on the nearest stool and told the barkeep of the trouble brewin' down in Medicine Hat. Anyway, we are now in our new place, which has more character than an Agatha Christie novel.

I bought a bed, although that was after much umming and ahhing in the Lethbridge IKEA equivalent, known by the partially unpronounceable name 'JYSK'. I had gone a good portion of my life without knowing what a 'box spring was' - apparently it is the poor man's bed frame. So I bought a bed frame, and a mattress - with a future cricket captain on the way there was no need to skimp on the mattress... and, in a deer-in-the-headlights daze, I asked the attendant what the story was re the box spring. She said that it was not essential... but 'added some height'. BANG! Height adding is what I'm all about, so I had no hesitation in buying it. She was a little puzzled at my trio of purchases, but was good enough to sell them to me nonetheless.

I pieced together the bed, whence the title for this post. There was a classic set of 'non-language-specific' instructions, which brought all of us together as citizens of the world. This was the first page.

Note, not just the prison-cell depiction of the placing of one's bed, but that one bird had been crossed out, leaving two. I figured that, in the bed composition department (if nothing else) I was as good, if not better than two birds, particularly ones whose heads and legs were not attached, which must lead to very compromising times in the Allen-key rotational stakes, that is, if they can get the time off from moonlighting as toilet posers. Oh yes, and there is a hammer there. I had no hammer. I did, however, have the recent purchase of two 1kg cans of tomatoes to 'watch my back'. These helped in the hammering, with some judicious rotations to avoid the expectoration of tomato juice over the bed frame.

(Recently, I thought it a wise move to reacquaint myself with one of my childhood heroes, Sherlock Holmes. I tell you now, the second time round is a bit of a let down. Perhaps people were more easily fooled in the 1890s, or in their pre-teen book reading days, when the only other serious competitor was R.L.Stine, of the 60 chapters, each two pages, gambit. The climactic ending of one of the novellas hinged on Holmes' constructing a dummy which 'looked just like him', and thereby delaying the miscreants sufficiently long to gleam his incriminating information. Oh yes, and there is lots of air-time to the word 'ejaculated', in the classical sense meaning 'thrown out'. Thus, Watson will, periodically, interject ('throw between', sure) with 'But surely Holmes, you cannot be serious?!' with the customary first-person two-step of ', I ejaculated'. That seems to have lost its way in the modern world. It would be a brave man who brought that one back. I'm trying to bring back flat caps to Canada,


but the reintroducing of 'ejaculated' into family-friendly conversational currency, is out of my league.)

Anyway, the final product of the bed was an Everestian behemoth.


I had to perform a little run-up and primary-school-high-jump-scissors-kick to even gain access to this Procrustean bed, but, fortunately, my feet didn't ram up against the foot board. On her first night in the house, I had to provide Di with the two-step step-ladder (and some tanks of oxygen) to aid her ascent.

I'm not sure whether the inimitable JYSKians are keen on their refunds, but this is an exercise for the forthcoming week.

No camera, but plenty of banter

It's been two and a half weeks since I arrived in Lethbridge, with 18 days of tales of coulees, B-teams and street-cred. To explain? Surely. Someone said that a new blog would be a sign of 'self-re-invigoration' - which has either come from the mental recesses of a former US President, or is the ultimate 'unchallengable' word in scrabble.

A bit of background: Lethbridge has a good 80,000 people and is located relatively close to the US border in Alberta, Canada. It is in the middle of prairie land, and I tell you if I have seen one gopher floating around, I have seen a gross.


They would be a groundsman's worst nightmare, constantly on the prowl for new craters to excavate. Are they filling them with nuts when the gopher equivalent of the GFC hits (are we still calling it the GFC, or did we finally decide that it was the word dare not speak it's name - which rhymes with 'concession'?)

No deer yet - apparently there are deer to be found in spades up and down the campus. To take the self-referential gambit to a whole new level of fun, there is a piece on deer here

http://timinoxford.blogspot.com/2008/04/climbing-over-rocky-mountains-iv.html

I have recently purchased a car, or a swollen London taxi, if you will


sadly the radioactive glow was extra and on my (reinvogorated?) tightened budget, it missed the final cut. I bought it in cash, and, not having a bank account established in Canada, it involved a few trips to the ATM. Now, the ATM only deals in twenties, and, although this was a second hand car, it was still a car, which meant a firm wad of twenties - the sort of scores Damien Martyn used to get all the time. I had a paper bag from when I bought a bottle of Alberta Springs Whisky - more on that another time - so it was classic Sopranos times.

There is not much in the way of trans-pacific assistance when it comes to the driving license. There are 'some countries' which have a reciprocal agreement with Alberta - that is, if one is from one of the following countries


one pops along and swaps one's licence for an Albertan one. Easy. Note that, even though they drive on the wrong side of the road over here, there are still your UK and Japan contenders on this A-team list. There is a C-team list, wherein you need to start from scratch, that is, you need to apply for your license from the get-go and take a full year as a 'learner'. The B-team, at the top of which is Australia, who are surely itching for promotion out of this Oceania-esque Confederation, contains

• Australia
• India
• Iran
• Iraq
• Kenya
• Lebanon
• Libya
• Morocco
• Nigeria
• Pakistan
• Philippines
• Republic of Congo
• Trinidad & Tobago
• Rwanda
• Sudan
• Syria
• United Arab Emirates

The deal here (and what a deal it is too) is you take your written and practical test (hands and 10 and 2, remembering 'how many seconds you need to indicate' and what have you) and then instead of waiting 1 year on your learner's permit, you wait a mere 3 weeks. Bargain.

The locals asked me one day whether I enjoyed the 'coulees', pronounced 'cool-ees'. I let out a slow exhale and began to look from side to side. I've taken to wearing ties here (hence the street-cred from the locals... the busdriver thought that my wearing a tie meant I was a great soccer player. He's playing his own game from behind the wheel, clearly.) and I loosened my Windsor knot ever so gently as a thin trickle of sweat developed on my brown. I remember Sir Alec G on the Bridge of the River Kwai use the term 'coolies' and it was directed towards his captors in a less than flattering way. "Are we even allowed to use that word these days?" I thought. But no, 'coulees' are wedge-shaped hills and valleys around town. Very nice indeed, and something which my camera - not in the single-malt category that Dad's is - will capture before long. Here's one that the internet prepared earlier.


The river that runs through town is quite a sight. I asked some of the locals what its name was, to which they responded 'Old Man River'. Say what? Surely he don't plant 'taters, he don't plant cotton... but no way is that called Old Man River, surely this is right up there with the 5 o'clock wave trick that people from Wagga Wagga enjoy. It turns out it is called the 'Oldman River', which loses some of its mystique, unfortunately.

I now have a kettle for my office.

Oh yes, I've been boning up on the rules of the road, since I need to sit these tests. The book they give out is 155 pages long, and it is not until we (I say we, because if I have to waste my time on it then the least you can do is read about it and offer some empathy) get to page 28 when we are shown a picture of a One Way sign with a caption explaining "Proceed in direction of arrow only". It's going to be a long night.