The Roquefort Files

I cycled over to Queen Elizabeth Park one evening to meet up with Monica, Pete and Travis, all from the office. Monica and Pete are one of the many, many couples who work there: permanent employees get a security badge, computer password and assigned spouse on their first day. We had packed a load of [...]

To recap from last time, I had a pair of dimensionally-challenged handlebars which my brakes would not fit. It was time for radical measures. It was time to spent some money on a set of real bullhorns, given that my penny-pinching DIY approach had been found wanting in more or less all possible ways. This [...]

So, as I mentioned before, I now proudly rock an old school steel-framed Peugeot road bike, complete with skinny tyres and comically incapable brakes. And while it is now a sleek single-speed machine suitable for silent running and blissfully maintenance free cycling, ’twas not always thus. My plan, after buying it, had been simple: ‘chop [...]

Three weeks in, and I’m starting to get a feel for Vancouver. And, too, its resident Vancouverites, whose appellation sounds like that of a race of Doctor Who villains*. I started to write about the various different excursions I’ve been on since I arrived (all courtesy of our customers/hosts in the office in Richmond), but [...]

Dom and Alice left Vancouver on Wednesday, off for a road trip into the wilds of British Columbia, and so I moved my remarkably paltry amount of gear from the hotel to the company apartment. It’s a big place — my rucksack lives in one bedroom; I live in the other — with a balcony [...]

I’ve arrived in my temporary home for the next three months. The plane left London for Vancouver at about 5.30pm on Wednesday and touched down in Canada a notional hour and a half later. We skimmed over the southern reaches of Iceland a few actual hours into the flight, passing over the crinkled grey-green relief [...]

Yes, the dog-related puns will just keep on comin’. Things have been quiet of late; not boring as such, but to borrow and roundly abuse a mathematical metaphor, the graph of excitement against time is smoother than normal even as the integral of said graph is somewhat greater. Dog ownership enforces more responsibility and regularity [...]

Ash had booked us into the revolving restaurant at the top of the CN Tower for dinner on the last night of the holiday. We got suitably dressed up — lo tops instead of Birkenstocks; cords instead of jeans — and walked down to the shore through Chinatown and then the shiny, concrete downtown. We [...]

We took the cheap, roomy Go Train from Pickering to Union Station in downtown Toronto. The weather was balmy and warm, and we could see from our map that the hostel was only a mile at most from the station, so we set off at a brisk pace. Half an hour later and seemingly no [...]

On the road to Kingston, we stopped in the town of Gananoque to have some lunch and to take a short boat trip around the Admiralty Islands just off shore in the Saint Lawrence. Gananoque is another eerily Amity Island-alike place, quiet in the off season and with the locals looking slightly askance at us [...]