Festivals

The summer music festivals have started. Tonight Sarah and I are watching the Glastonbury festival live on BBC 3. We've seen songs from Bloc Party, Super Furry Animals, The Coral, and The Fratellis so far. Amy Winehouse, Kasabian, and the Arctic Monkeys are on later. It hasn't rained much today but there's already a bit of mud.

There are some tempting concerts for me. Tomorrow Peter Gabriel and Crowded House play in London at Hyde Park Calling. And next month is the Latitude Festival right here in Suffolk. It's billed as being family-friendly, and I'd enjoy the chance to see The Arcade Fire and The Good, The Bad & The Queen, but I just know the idyllic fantasy of a sunny day on the lawn would more likely be a rainy crowded day with long queues for toilets, a bored and whiny daughter, and a long wait to exit the parking area afterwards.

Visiting Vancouver and Portland

Our immigration to Canada is nearly complete. We've been given a short time to make landing in Canada to complete the process. It's earlier than we expected, but it's a nice problem to have.

Our plan is to make a short visit and then return to finish out Margo's two-year work commitment, settling in Vancouver next summer.

We've planned about a week's visit over the first week of August. We'll make landing in Vancouver. Then we're going to come to Portland for a few days and we'd like to visit as many of you as we can. If you can think of any trinkets we can bring you that are lightweight, not fragile, and non-perishable, please let us know. We look forward to catching up with you all in person!

Celebrations

Today is Margo's birthday. We did a bit of celebration tonight with cards and Belgian chocolates but the real gift is tomorrow: Margo will spend the night and have breakfast at the Salthouse Harbour Hotel. It will be a break from Sarah and me. We'll have dinner together at a nearby seafood restaurant, and then she's on her own.

But Sunday is Father's Day, and Margo has offered to make me a three-course Italian dinner: primi, secondi, e dolci. I've already picked up a bottle of one of our favourite wines, Negroamaro, a full-bodied Italian red that we get from the Wine Buffers shop at the train station.

Fart Rhymes

We need your help! Sarah has reached the age where she will fart and blame it on someone else as a joke. We counter this by repeating the age-old wisdom of Fart Rhymes. Unfortunately, we can only remember two:

• She who smelt it, dealt it
• She who denies it, supplies it

I personally remember having encountered many more than this in my years of boyhood and adolescense and early adulthood, for that matter. We beg of you to help us build our vocabulary of fart rhymes by leaving them as comments for us. Help us, O Readers! You're our only hope!

Smoke Free

In a few weeks, on July 1, England joins Ireland, Scotland and Wales in banning smoking from all public workplaces.

The Dove here in Ipswich went smoke free a month early, hosting a beer festival and a Fag End party (bit of a pun there ... also refers to a cigarette butt). I visited days after, and could still smell some residual smoke even though the doors were open. I dropped in today, a week later, and didn't notice any. Hopefully that will be the experience in all pubs.

I'll appreciate it because some of the London pubs I frequent with mates over lunch are quite thick and it will be a relief to be done with it. Margo will appreciate it because her Friday nights at the pub with her mates are very smoky.

Hello Dalí!

Today after work I walked the lovely route through the Barbican, past St. Paul's Cathedral and across the Thames on the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern to see the new Dalí & Film exhibit. I first started enjoying the work of Salvador Dalí as a college student in Madison; several posters of his art ended up on my walls.

This exhibit featured the early Surrealist films Un Chien andalou and L'Age d'or, plus a dream sequence for the Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound. But a highlight for me was the I-never-knew-it-happened collaboration with Walt Disney on a short animation, Destino. It was started in the late 40s but only recently finished by Disney animators. I watched it twice. It's clearly a Dalí film - it repeats much of his common imagery like ants crawling on the palm of one's hand, melting clock faces, bearded men riding bicycles with French bread on their heads, cracked eggs, and of course the sandy landscapes with distant rocks - but there's a recognisable Disney look in the face of the girl and her movements.

I knew some paintings were included in the exhibit, but I didn't expect the collection I found: it was practically Dalí's Greatest Hits. Some of my college posters were there, and many more from a coffee table book I have, most on loan from other museums. Even The Persistence of Memory, the famous melting-watch painting, the Mona Lisa of Surrealism, was on loan from MoMA in New York, where I'd seen it last summer. The gallery wasn't crowded at all, so it was a neat experience to stand right in front of original paintings that I'd first encountered as reproductions decades ago. (And sometimes you have to stand right in front of them - some aren't much larger than postcards.) But it was a great surprise to see many of the best works of one of my favourite artists collected in one place.