Posts with the cottage tag

Barris Beat

Escape to the cottage? Yes and no.

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
A rustic cottage – thin walls, stove, up on stilts, fish flies on the screens.

They’ve been packing up for weeks. RVs all loaded. Trailers full of motorboats, Sea-doos, kayaks, flotation devices and other water paraphernalia. Oh, and they’ve got plenty of camping gear too, with food coolers and bug repellent crammed into every nook and cranny of their cars and trucks.

I asked one of my neighbours, heading out of town, how long he’d been getting ready for this summer’s great escape to the cottage.

“Since we got home from the cottage last year,” he said.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about all my friends dashing off to cottages each summer. (more…)

Barris Beat

Music that fills the distance

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Frank Zappa’s “Hot Rats” album and memories of meeting him, help fill the COVID gap.

Until about a year ago, it sat there, unused. It was just a piece of furniture filling a corner of my office, covered in dust and unopened. Its knobs, glass dials and chrome corners pretty much untouched for years. Then, shortly after Trudeau and Ford locked things down, the result of the pandemic, I unlocked its lid, turned the dial to “phono,” and got reacquainted with an old friend – my record player.

I should say friends. In the opposite – and equally dusty – corner of my office, I pulled out some of my favourite vinyl. And I got lost in the leisure of pulling discs from their cardboard jackets and paper sleeves, sliding them onto my turntable, dropping the stylus in the groove and turning up the volume. (more…)