neither here nor there..........

Red Deer today, about halfway up the Highway between Calgary & Edmonton - kind of neither here, nor indeed there.......

It's funny - I found out last week that Greenwich Market is under threat from developers who want to turn it into an office complex or somesuch nonsense. Spitalfields Market in East London, one of my favourite places in the City was also facing the same peril the last time i heard. We have so much history in our buildings, yet all the time faceless town planners & their corporate cohorts are thinking up novel ways to turn them into glass fronted offices for Chartered Accounting Companies & the like.

On the other hand over here, there is no history, (well apart from thousands of years of native history but no one ever mentions that) - so if a building is over 100 years old, there will be signposts from hundreds of kilometers away proclaiming "Historic Building Ahead" - I even drove past a farmyard barn today, which had "Built in 1924!!" proudly plastered all over it - I half suspect that even old coffin dodgers who hang around too long on the local park bench, will end up with blue plaques & Historic Site status about their person.

I do like the old station wagons & farm trucks that you see often round here, people seem to preserve them as antiques & park them at the front of their ranches out in the back country - they look dramatic in a kind of rustic way. Not sure it would work with your old Bedford Van though back home - one day I am going to photograph some of these relics (and probably get shot by an irate redneck at the same time for tresspassin' on his homestead).

Two tunes for the radio player today, both from a really good Box Set I picked up off e-bay recently. The Harvest Festival Box Set compiles the best recordings released on Harvest, the "progressive music" label that had it's heyday from about 1968 to 1980 - as i have said before Prog is a four letter word, thanks to ridiculous, overblown orchestral mini-rock operas & the like pumped out bythe likes of Rick Wakeman, Mike Oldfield, Genesis & other such truly tiresome bands - however beneath the surface there was a whole canyon of interesting left-field music, some folk, some psychedelia, some heavy rock and some just plain fried - Harvest was one of the labels putting out such music when flares & tank tops were de rigeur.

The Move - Do Ya (1972)

Michael Chapman - It Didn't Work Out (1969)