Darwin and Quarrington

[By Stuart] Today, February 12th, is Charles Darwin’s bicentennial birthday, so I can plug my favourite Quarrington book, the boy on the back of the turtle. It’s a tough volume to find, but Paul’s story about cruising the Galápagos Islands with father and daughter in search of Darwinian insights is funny, wonderfully informative and deeply touching. (It’s also the only Quarrington book with a bibliography; five pages closely typed!)

I have my own Darwin story. In 1991 I was in England studying the ‘natural’ or valveless baroque trumpet. England is a hotbed of ‘authentic’ instrumentalists, who play gut-string violins, wooden flutes and such, and near the end of my stay I heard Handel’s Messiah played by such an orchestra. This was in a nave of Westminster Abbey with the audience sitting on folding chairs. At intermission I noticed an inscription on the large stone slab under my chair. It was Darwin’s tomb. I had been engaged in a sort of ‘rear-view mirror’ approach to music-making on primitive historical instruments while five feet below me lay the author of The Origin of the Species.

Western Tour Revisited #3

When you’re out touring from one end of this country to the other, you can’t help but be stunned by the range and diversity of experiences. For a born and bred urbanite, I was struck by this sign on the front lobby door of a hotel in downtown Castlegar, BC.