I ate there once when it was in one of its restaurant incarnations. It was beautiful... the food was o.k., too. It seems a shame that it's going to be plowed under, likely.
Having said that, let me share a personal anecdote about this cartoon. I went over to my neighbourhood friend's porch where a bundle of papers are dropped off for his son to deliver. I
took my copy, and as I was walking home I turned to page "A4" to see if I had a cartoon in that day. I did. It was the "Contractor Tales" one you will see posted below. I set the paper aside to do some housework. In the afternoon that neighbour asked me what I did to get two cartoons in the paper in one day. I said, "What?" (I thought he was pulling my leg). He said he was serious, so I immediately thought I must be blind. I asked him where it was? He said right beside the other one on the opposite page, (A5), accompanied by a letter from some reader. So I went and checked it out and sure enough there it was.
So I'm not blind, just unobservant... but I already knew that. Anyway, I was really glad this one got printed because I spent some time at it and consider it more a work of "fine" art than a cartoon. (Does that make cartoons "not-so-fine art"??? Apologies to my cartoonist soldiers in arms... ) Maybe what i mean to say is that I was just shooting for more visual realism than caricature or visual jokes.
This was fun to do. Mercifully, I left out Meaford, unless you count the Bognor Bridge stuff. Trust me when I tell you, I could have easily put Meaford in. It could have had 9 and 10, but
There was a big letter to the editor (with a picture!) in the paper that talked about how the city is erecting all these nice looking plaques in places where significantly historical buildings had been. I think the plaques are a nice gesture, and if a building has to go, or if it goes through accident or thoughtlessness, it's good to a least have one of these nice plaques as a public reminder of what we used to look like. But it would be nice to try to keep some of them if at all possible.... just like our teeth. Thus the silly, but hopefully effective, idea I came up with for this.
I'm glad the city is apparently going to help support heritage buildings lasting longer. Really, I am. We've lost enough already. I just thought it would be funny to have someone with a brand new house thinking about it. Just another way of drawing attention to a story. In this case a good story.
I ate there once when it was in one of its restaurant incarnations. It was beautiful... the food was o.k., too. It seems a shame that it's going to be plowed under, likely.
Maybe it's the best thing to do to tear it down and build new, maybe it's not. Seems like the money they're getting to build new could be used to restore the old part. It just seems a shame that so much of what makes this city unique is being lost lately. If the goal is to look like every other city around our size then I'd say we're well on our way. But once this stuff is gone, it's pretty well gone.... the same as aspects of the environment... like endangered animals, clean air, clean water and all that kind of cost prohibitive stuff that, without imagination, is hard to make a buck on. All I know is that if and when the world ever ends there's going to be a whole whack of rich people with sheepish grins on their faces praying to reverse everything they and others had done. And so it goes.
All I can say is that I'm hoping I don't get labeled as part of the heritage around here, any time soon.
