A couple of days ago, I posted a blog about dodgy Black Friday discounts at UK department store chain Debenhams.

It triggered a response from this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent Anna Smith.

She lives in Vancouver.

She wrote:

You should come to Canada and get a Shoppers Drug Mart (chemist shop) card. You get to accumulate points each time you shop, which can eventually be redeemed for discounts. There are special days when you get double or triple the points, called Redemption Days!

They also hold monthly Seniors’ Days, when seniors get everything for 20% off plus free coffee and the chance to socialise with other seniors picking up their medications. You only have to be 55 years old to be a senior.

Not on the infamous Downtown Eastside, though, where I go to Music Class, shop, but have never lived or worked.

On the Downtown Eastside, you get to be a senior when you are 40 years old because the life expectancy there is only about 45. They might have to lower the age even further because of the fentanyl crisis.

600 people have died from overdoses in Vancouver this year and pop-up supervised injection tents have opened in the alleyways downtown. They don’t have a discount card for those but you get free Narcan (antidote) if you overdose. Emergency services have been very busy, sometimes reviving the same person three times a week or more.

The latest drug to hit the scene there is the elephant tranquilizer carfentanil.

I recently saw an unusual road accident on the Downtown Eastside when I stepped off the bus on the way to my music class.

A woman had driven her scooter into a flat bed lorry (or whatever you call them there). I took a photo just after the woman had been lifted into an ambulance. She was alert, talkative and appeared to be uninjured, even though it seemed she had been dragged along on her scooter some distance by the truck.  Maybe she used to work in rodeo.

Main and Hastings is ‘ground zero’ for drug addiction in Vancouver. There is a lot of sales activity (of drugs and everything else) outside The Carnegie Center (community center) where I take my music class.

It is a bit annoying to use the toilets inside because so many addicts are inside and drug addicts have a different perspective of time. Sometimes they shout from inside the stall: “I won’t be long! I’ll be done in fifteen minutes!”

One time, about 20 ago, I had nowhere to live so I went to a large hotel called The Old Continental at the north end of the Granville Bridge. The building was locked but then I saw a man, one of the residents, just leaving.

“Are there any rooms for rent in there?” I asked him.

“There are,” he told me, “but if you want to live here you have to be over 45 or crazy“.

So I was too young and not crazy enough to get a room… then.

Now the Old Continental has been demolished. Everything changes.

In 1974, ‘women’s music’ or ‘wimmin’s music’ had not yet been invented, so young lesbians had to dance to Herman’s Hermits and Bob Marley (mainly No Woman No Cry).