Covid rears its ugly head

Bad news from England this morning: Bob has tested positive for Covid. It's assumed Caitlin has already been infected too, and Louis as well.

One of Bob's colleagues, one of only four people who actually go into the office, had a fever on Monday night, was tested the next day and got a positive result. Bob had both the rapid test - which was negative - and the PCR test, which later came back positive. Two other people at Bob's work have also tested positive, so he thinks there's little chance his is a false positive. Only the first person tested so far has had any symptoms, although Bob did say he had felt tired.

So they are in jail at home for at least ten days. And we will be on the edges of our seats here. We tell ourselves they're both young and reasonably healthy.

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Meanwhile, life, such as it is, goes on. After a Portal chat with the kids first thing this morning, I got out for a fast walk - same route as my run yesterday. Four kilometers is an appropriate distance for the walk, and the steps at the ravine certainly add some good huffing and puffing.

Karen had a Zoom class at the time she would usually be making our big meal of the day, so we had a treat and ordered food from Thaifoon, a local Thai eatery, which is participating in the annual Londonlicious event. The deal: a three course meal (appetizer, main, dessert) for $25. The food was as good as or better than other times we've gone there: very fresh, nicely seasoned, worth the price.

I went out for my afternoon walk at 2 and picked up the food - the restaurant is only a few blocks away - on my way back. 

More boring shots of London were taken.

The first is fast becoming a photographic obsession of mine: the juxtaposition of St. Peter's Basilica (RC), a fake medieval (neo-gothic) pile dating from the mid-19th century, and One Richmond Row, a new ultra-modern apartment block going up across Richmond St. 

Interesting tidbit about One Richmond Row in the paper today. The architects apparently stole the design concept - every second stack of four floors is skewed in relation to the others - from a Toronto firm that had, it claims, designed an almost identical tower somewhere in the GTA. The original architects are crying foul, but apparently they didn't bother to get their design copyrighted (I was surprised architects could even do that), so there's nothing much they can do. Except embarrass the second firm.

St. Peter's Cathedral (RC) and One Richmond Row

The next two were shot at or near the corner of Pall Mall and Waterloo St. It's a corner I've known almost literally since the day I was born. Our family lived a few doors south of the corner on the west side of Waterloo when I was a toddler. My Dad was a train nut, so I spent a certain amount of time with him at or near these tracks, and can actually dimly remember it. They were all steam trains we watched in those distant days - I'm talking about the early 1950s.

The red brick building at the left edge of the frame is now the poshly renovated offices of Siskinds, a law firm. When my family lived there, and for decades after, it was a sock factory. 

The mirror self-portrait was taken on Pall Mall a few doors from the corner in the windows of a modern office building. The tiny houses across the street, once virtually identical cottages, were built at the turn of the last century as homes for railway workers. Starting in the 1980s, they were bought up by yuppies and renovated. Today, the entire block between Waterloo and Hyman has been refinished, and every house now looks a little different.

CP tracks looking east at Waterloo and Pall Mall

 

Pall Mall St.

I talked in an earlier post  about chatting on the street with a homeowner on Colborne St. about his 1879 Italianate house, which I was photographing. I mentioned another home of similar style to him, one I've always liked, on Picadilly St. He knew it, had almost bought it 20 years before, he said. This is it: lovely.

301 Picadilly St.

I've always liked this building too, on the northwest corner of Richmond and Hyman streets. It used to be a great bookshop, long gone, and now houses a posh kids clothing store: Little Labels. It's just a nicely proportioned building.

623 Richmond St.

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The rest of the day, I was lost down the rabbit hole, the one that leads back to Montpellier, France, 2015. I'm still finding unloved photos that were ignored at the time, but seem worth exploring. Here's a sample of today's haul.

Montpellier has quite a nice zoo, nice because it's run by the university and sits on extensive grounds in the near suburbs. At the time, I processed a few of the pictures from our visit one day near the end of our stay in the city. These two, for some reason, I overlooked or dismissed as not being worth processing. Not sure why.

Antigone: Emile Zola media library 

Antigone: Emile Zola media library

Antigone is an office/retail/residential complex built in the 1980s under the direction of the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, mostly in neo-classical style. The 36 hectare site, once military land, also includes an Olympic swimming pool and this media library. Some smart-ass had drawn black eyeballs on the statue of the faun with a magic marker. I used Photoshop to restore it.

My beautiful sister Pat Morden and her sister-in-law Sue Gittings came to visit us when we were staying in Montpellier. One day, we lured them in to undertaking the 20-kilometer cycle trip to the seaside and back along the beautiful bike path. While at the seaside, we visited Maguelone Cathedral, built in the 11th century. The peacocks, and their hens, lived on the grounds. They were begging for food.

Pat and Sue were both exhausted by the ride. Neither was used to long-distance biking. And Pat's rental bike had a seat that came loose and couldn't be raised high enough, making it very difficult to pedal. She needed the refreshment when we reached a small town not far from the cathedral.