The brunette buys a goat. $100.

At twice the price, the tacos weren’t twice as good. No better in fact. For future reference: Stay out of town, stick to the sea front, even if it does shtink.

The brunette gets off the hook as it turns out, I left my headphones there too. That would have been very, very annoying.

No idea what the hell’s going on here, but the place is crawling with cops, roads are shut all over, people are blocking all the rest by driving on the wrong side trying to get through, but the brunette is doing a fine job of getting us out of the mess she got us into by leaving her phone behind in Ensenada.

Valerie at 800 Keefer Street

Eastside Culture Crawl is a yearly event in Vancouver where artists of the Eastside open their studios and host visitors to show and sell their latest work. Led by the lovely Valerie Arntzen, the Crawl lets artists engage directly with the public and gain a huge audience in the space of a weekend rather than having to tout their work around galleries and spaces, and also give people an insight into their workspaces and often living spaces.

I spent an afternoon at the Crawl and went to meet Valerie at her HQ, AMP at 800 Keefer Street, where several other artists have studios. She spoke to me about how they ended up there – several of them bought the place over a decade ago to safeguard their workspaces, and it’s worked out wonderfully…

Below is the audio of a brief chat I had with Valerie.

Valerie Arntzen – Executive Director of Eastside Culture Crawl

I’ve had a pile of books saved up for months for this trip and been dying to start on them.

I just finished reading William Dalrymple’s excellent but miserable series of essays on South Asia – The Age of Kali – and among the final essays were pieces on the remote regions where India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China all meet, and the mystery of these places which have seen Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.

Finishing that, I picked up Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin’s Three Cups of Tea, and despite its sentimentality, am enjoying – more so, as I began to read, and found myself back in the same region where Dalrymple just left me, Taxila, on the Grand Trunk Road. My books are not arranged in any particular running order but they’re flowing beautifully together…

My cousin, Atma, runs the dairy down at the farm. One of the calves became quite ill over a period of ten to fifteen days, but the mother didn’t seem to care for it, generally ignoring it. After the calf died – from a ruptured intestine – the mother refused, or was unable, to produce any milk. They created this surrogate toy calf frame and stretched the dead calf’s skin over it and placed it next to the mother, who plays with it, licks it, pushes it around, and produces milk again.

My dad is from a reasonably large family, I suppose. He’s one of eleven, somewhere in the middle – two older brothers and two older sisters. My eldest aunt is almost 89 – early next month – and after she broke her hip the last time, she’s been stationed in the ashram nursing home on the seafront, a great view if only she could see it.

They denied losing her dentures, which means eating is quite impossible and she’s quietly been wasting away. My other aunts visit and feed her small amounts of mashed potato, pastries and chocolate, but she can’t assimilate very much. She lies in that bed all day, poor old aunt.

She’s the eldest of all the siblings, the spinster who dedicated her life to the ashram, already 54 when I was born, and I’m not sure if, after this trip, I will get to see her again. But, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Is not always a bad thing. The amount of paperwork floating around means that your friendly local banker is able to get things done with a quiet word that in the UK is no longer possible, because our systems are water-tight (i.e. inflexible). Cards can be issued within a day and cheque books too. I was wondering how they did the chequebook, and then I saw. The poor fellow took out a rubber stamp, altered its digits to match my account number, and went through a new chequebook stamping every single cheque with my account number. Can you possibly imagine anyone in London being bothered or able to do that?