All Right for Quantity

“Can you hear all right at the back there? All right for quantity? Can’t do much about the quality of this sort of thing.” – English comedian Michael Flanders, of the comedy / music duo Flanders and Swann, At the Drop of a Hat (1957), Parlophone, London, England   I lived in Vancouver from 1970, when I was 22, until 2000, when I got a job teaching at Queen’s University, in Kingston, where Lin and I bought a four-bedroom house. Then I retired, and last year we obtained a small apartment back in Vancouver. We have now lived there for a year, and have recently come back to Kingston, temporarily, to sell the house.  So we are now in the process of downsizing its extensive contents, to fit them into our little Vancouver apartment. Some of the rest of it will stay here for the new owner, and much is going to friends and family, second-hand stores, the recycling centre and the landfill. We’re getting rid of furniture, appliances, clothes and linens, books and CDs and DVDs, tools, implements and junk – and reams and reams of paper, in numerous cardboard boxes which I packed years ago in Vancouver and