Frank spent Tuesday in bed with a cold, semi-comatose. I have never seen anyone get so sick so quickly. John Berry also had a head cold, and since he was too ill to go driving to the mountains we went with Loren McGregor to a Dim Sum lunch. Afterwards we drove about the city and suburbs, considering domestic and civic architecture and conducting a competition for the craziest shop sign. I have forgotten most of them now, but I do remember "Live Butcher", which provoked visions of other shops with dead staff propped up against the counters! Eventually it became apparent that John was sinking fast, so we stopped at Loren's for a rest. He lived in a Victorian weatherboard house which he was in the process of restoring, and like all the best fannish households it was knee-deep in books, records and fanzines. We sat waiting for the peak-hour traffic to die down and listening to records while John suffered the silent agonies of a man beset by a head-cold and caffeine withdrawal. Finally Loren chased us out by playing a Spanky & Our Gang record, the absolute nadir of musical taste. Thus I was delivered back to my hosts fairly early in the evening. After talking for a while, mostly about pet cold remedies, the men departed, Anna Jo and I also left, to go shopping at a vast suburban shopping complex. I bought my father some expensive chocolates, and demolished part of a manchester department where the shelves were too close together for the wheelchair. On Wednesday I rested, read a lot and talked for about an hour to Frank, who had been forbidden by the doctor to return to work for the rest of the week. Anna Jo went to a School Board meeting in the evening, and I made the acquaintance of the Phantom Phonecaller, probably a prospective burglar. Anna Jo was snuffling on her return and it eventually turned out that she also was suffering from a cold. I was merely suffering by this stage from hypochondria complicated by sensory overload. My sentences were starting to come out jumbled, and the only adjective I could think of most of the time was "nice". Staying home with an invalid was about all I was good for; fortunately Frank was an extremely entertaining invalid. The Dentons are well-read and widely travelled, and have clearly mastered the art of striking up a conversation with anyone, anywhere, Details of my last couple of days remain sketchy -- I was getting too tired to keep notes, or even to remember properly. I flew back to Vancouver on an almost empty DC 10 and found myself chatting with a 75 year old gentleman from Bombay who was spending his declining years flying around the world visiting his sons. The plane only goes to about 15,000 feet on this trip, and the view was wonderful. Susan left me at home minding the pavlova while she collected Carey and John from the station, and at midnight we sat down to her delicious potato soup, followed by pavlova, and we talked until 2.30. As you might expect we all awoke rather late. That went double for John, a creature of the night who blundered around in the mornings with a touchingly marsupial slowness, and who seemed to need at least four cups of coffee in the mornings before he could face the day. Eventually we all set off to visit Marjorie and Jeff Harris, driving through the city so that we had the opportunity of seeing a really twee display of Princess telephones. Imagine: "Espresso Brown -- perks up the conversation" et, etc. The Harrises lived in a delightful old house built by Marjorie's grandfather out of left-over bits from trams, and shared with Cat who – 19 –