Our unofficial foreign correspondent Anne Cameron, who lives far beyond
the urban shenanigans of the Lower Mainland, sends us her first report.

Rain. Such a novelty. Pussy willows, crocus and primroses are starting, columbine is beginning to re-grow... and the Tahsis Legion is fully occupied with planting oriental poppies around the cenotaph.

Most poppy seeds don't produce plants so I have patriotically offered to contribute my own poppy plant babies. In spite of Harpoon and his warbirds in Snottawa, one does feel the odd twinge of rah rah. Anyway I'm tired of having to weed grass out of the damned containers.

I would LOVE to come to Reckoning 07, that publishing conference in September, and talk about B.C. books. Be interesting to get a discussion going on the huge split between what is accepted by the illiterati in the rarefied circles and what is actually read by the unwashed who use the libraries and used bookstores.

Are publishers turning into tremulous old farts, tip-toeing their way through manuscripts like a banker en pointe through columns of percentages because the dwindling number of readers are voting neo-con for no reason other than the Left has lain down like fat poodles gone mute or are the voters giving the nod of approval to Harpo because the publishers fear "political"; or "radical"; the way the citizens once feared the plague, rats and fleas? Or am I just blowing smoke out of a particular orifice and writing absolute shite these days?

I continue to plug away at what I think is important and hey, you never know, I might win the 6/49. When that happens, don't even bother packing, we'll buy new stuff when we get there.

Meanwhile I am declaring war on General Motors. DO NOT BUY A BLAZER!!! You will wind up in the poor house because of buying new brakes. Three times in the past year-and-a-half I had to buy brakes. We have hills, we have gravel roads going up or down mountainsides, so, yes, by all means, let's have brakes.

So the damned things started to screech again, which I'm told is how "they"; warn you you're running out of brake power, little cunningly placed pieces of metal to howl and wail when you get down so far...

This time Agatha, my daughter-in-law, drove the bitch of a little red hen out to Campbell River to see the GM people at their big shiny garage. Totally hooped. Going to be sixteen hundred for parts and at least four hundred for labour, take a full day, they said. F---. Last month it was the computer. Double F---. Have I, at some point in some previous life, accumulated sour karma with regard to things with moving parts? Did I chop down a gibbet or take a sledge hammer to a guillotine? I repent! If, in another incarnation, I was wont to saw through wooden spokes on the wheels of wagons heading westward, I apologize.

Speaking of C.R., one entire area of C.R. is now mainly First Nations people. So many of my daughter-in-law's reserve members have moved away, they now hold band meetings in Campbell River where they live marginalized lives in truly crappy apartment buildings. Sociologically, I think that is hugely significant but I betcha none of the academic-y types are even aware of it, let alone think it's important. So I got Hard Times by Charles Dickens and I'm re-reading it. I am really struck by how NOW it is!! He had much to say about how entire populations were being forced into cities by industrialization. But not to worry, Gorderator has met with the Governator and they'll fix it all up just fine 'n' dandy.

Thank God for my long-time acquaintances at the Powell River Credit Union. When I win the 6/49 I'm letting them handle it for me after they come back from a holiday in the Bahamas. "Wendy"; phoned to say, 'Listen, Cam, you'll be 69 in August, and you HAVE to do something about your vast fortoon, it has to go from RRSP to....' And I said HUH and she said, 'Don't worry, I'll mail you the forms, all you'll have to do is sign, I'll do the rest for you.' So they came, I signed and sent 'em back and then sat in the bathtub and thought, hey, my mom was pregnant for nine months so by the time I was three months old I was really a year old so a birthday means you're finishing the year not starting it so... I'm almost seventy!! I didn't think I'd live to see thirty.

Anne Cameron is a novelist and humourist who lives in a trailer home on the West Coast of Vancouver Island at Tahsis.

[BCBW 2007]