Two good guys, no one gets hurt

Happy Canada Day to all. I don’t know why I am writing this a week late, but the sentiment stands. I have a Canadian colleague who lives in Melbourne but was visiting Sydney for the week, so we decided to celebrate the glorious day. He showed up to work in a garish tie and the day was off to a rollicking start. The tie was red with white stripes and a little maple leaf in the centre. We spent about half an hour looking for celebrations online; we ended up with only one lead: the name of a pub on a street that runs many miles. Now it may seem obvious to the reader with experience in well planned cities that this would be easy to find, but I assure you that is not necessarily the case. Consider my first day of work: I woke up in plenty of time to walk to work, with the name of the street and the address in hand. As it went, I decided to progress along the numbers on a parallel street, and then cut over at the appropriate time. I realized after I had to backtrack for many blocks that the street address on one street is not necessarily the street address a block away. That is to say if you are at 122 Pitt Street and you go over one block, you may be at 220 Castlereagh Street. It gets worse though. There is actually no correlation between the number of the buildings on one side of the street and the numbers on the other side. That is to say you could be advancing along the odd numbers on the south side of a street, assuming that the numbers are advancing equally on the north side and you would be wrong. So 171 Clarence Street might be directly across 222 Clarence Street. The one hundreds might run for 10 blocks, or it might run for 2, just depending on the street. And to make matters even more confusing, streets frequently change names. For example you can be on College Street, walk two blocks without turning and be on Oxford Street, then another two blocks later be on Elizabeth Street. All this to say it can be tricky to navigate the streets here. Oh, and for those who find solace in the strict definitions of street and avenue running perpendicularly, there is no respite. Anyway, we went looking for this particular pub and had no success. It would have helped if I had actually looked up the address, and not just the name, but it wouldn’t have helped that much. We eventually went into an Irish pub that had some live music, a girl singing with her guitar. I asked her if she knew any Canadian songs, since it was Canada Day. She had no idea, but after some discussion of the finer points of Rush and Paul Anka eventually we settled on a Joni Mitchell song as being appropriate. A woman heard my request and identified herself as a reluctant Calgarian. A little while later a crew of youngsters came in wearing Canadian flags and face paint. We teamed up to sing O Canada a few times, and eventually the singer played another Canadian tune. We all closed our eyes and sang along to the Summer of ‘69, and there was nary a dry eye when Jimmy quit or when Jody got married. In the end we saw very few celebrants and didn’t really hear any definitively Canadian tunes, so as we walked home we sang out with hoarse voices a number that may not signify Canadiana to anybody from outside of that great prairie parallelogram , but we sang it anyway:

'An it's a heave-ho, high-ho, coming down the Plains
Stealing wheat and barley and all the other grains
And it's a ho-hey, high-hey, farmers bar your doors
When you see the Jolly Roger on Regina's mighty shores

If I knew it would form an important statement about my Canada Day, I might have chosen a different number, but at least we both knew the words. And pirates are always pretty fun (in mythical form at least, if not in practice). And so to all I wish a Happy Canada Day from down under.