Harbingers of spring

Overheard conversation-
Gleefully; Daddy, Sarah picked her nose and ate it.
Daddy, covering little Johnnie's mouth: Shh

It was spring for a few hours this afternoon and I was luckily enjoying a day off when it happened. Walked down to see how Beacon Hill Park was looking. Crocuses fading, more daffodils, a few cherry trees blooming but most trees still bare. Young moms and young dads out with preschoolers. One dinner plate sized turtle spotted basking on the island in the middle of Goodacre Lake. Now I'm home, and just in time, too. The wind has come up, the sky has clouded over and small raindrops are tinkling against my window.
The afternoon stroll took me from the library along Courtenay Street toward Christ Church Anglican Cathedral on Quadra, where a well known bricklayer named Winston Churchill put in one stone. They had a new organ installed there about a year ago but I was a little bit disappointed at the concerts I went to. The sound didn't quite resonate and shake the building quite like I imagined it would. And I guess the organist was tired of the famous Toccata and Fugue cause he didn't play it. It's an old chestnut but I would have liked to hear it all the same. If I remember right I was catching the flu that month, and the weather was miserable.
Looking for cherry blossoms I walked down Quadra but since most of the trees are still bare I decided to detour via Humboldt Street and cut through St Ann's Academy. It's a beautiful building dating from 1871 and it's set in a beautiful park. Originally it was a convent with a residential girls school but now is owned by the government. One minister of our unlamented NDP government of a few years ago wanted to show porn movies there. I guess he thought it was a pretty funny idea. I didn't think it was funny at all. No longer an elected representative, I am sorry to say he landed a lucrative position at our university. Funny how failure in politics is no obstacle for career advancement. No hard landings for those boys and girls.
That part of town has a lot of old buildings, and looking out my own window at the new buildings going up on Tyee, I wonder why modern architecture is so ugly. Is it really so expensive to add details pleasing to the eye? Are glass, steel and concrete, practical and solid as they are, incapable of beauty? The older buildings along Humboldt are beautifully proportioned, and details in windows, doors, entryways, stairs, rooflines were carefully designed to please the eye. Funny how they didn't think anything was wrong with lovely ornamentation just for the sake of ornamentation. Actually, the new Mount St Mary's hospital on Fairfield is quite an attractive building, and unlike the stark squalour of the new part of the Jubilee Hospital, the grounds are lovely, too.
But long ago, in the early part of the 20th century influential architects adhered to the dictum, "Form follows function,"
and decoration for decoration's sake was repudiated. Luckily, Victoria's original growth spurt of the late 1800's and early 1900's preceded that lamebrain idea. We were also blessed with architects of vision and talent and the men who hired them had pride in their city, ambition for its future, and good taste. Even luckier, probably because Vancouver replaced Victoria as the economic engine of BC, our classic buildings escaped the wrecking ball during the booms of the '60's and '70's. Whenever I stop to smoke my pipe in Bastion Square I think about that and am grateful.