14 February 2026 – Yes, we amble. We are ambling. Were we in West Yorkshire, mind you, we’d be bimbling. But we are not there. We are here in West Vancouver — in Ambleside, in fact — and we are definitely ambling.

(If you’d like to get all lexicological about these delightful words, I suggest you click on the post bimble or amble? in the Walking the Wolds blog. It will equip you to win any pub quiz on the topic, any time, anywhere.)

However my mind is not, at the moment, deep in these words. It is, like my eyes, focused on this building.

We are closing in on the Ferry Building Gallery, which indeed began life more than 100 years ago as a ferry terminal but is now a community arts hub.

The art begins outside, with a giant Pacific squid…

which was constructed last August by eco-artist Nickie Lewis from all-natural materials, and will remain on display until those natural materials begin to decompose.

No sign of that yet, the fibres and their ornaments are still full-on dramatic & vigorous.

Close to the door, a Witch Hazel shrub bears its own ornaments, a spray of bright new blossoms.

Not why we’re here!

We’re here for this:

the Gallery’s Interlace exhibition, whose seven artists have in common their primary materials of fabric, thread and wool.

Woven hangings (Shield, Haley Hunt-Brondwin)…

explosions of silk, leather, wool and thread (Home, Lorna Moffat)…

intricately looped & stitched…

artificial sinews (Untitled, Reggie Harold), looking very natural…

and then what, from a distance, could pass for an impressionistic painting of a stroll (an amble, a bimble) in the forest.

It is indeed forest, Stopping by the Woods (Eric Goldstein), but step closer and you see…

the play of burlap fibres, gold foil, resin and wood.

In the Gallery alcove, 13 circles making a circle. Moon Circles (Madwyn McConachy) is the artist’s tribute to the 12 monthly moons plus the “mystery moon,” the blue moon (on the left, with bright blue wool).

Over on the right and a little lower down, the Red Sturgeon Moon of August…

a “stitched medication on season, subtle change and belonging, within the natural world.”

Finally, we take ourselves back into that natural world.

We look south & east across Burrard Inlet toward Stanley Park, where a freighter is about to make its way under the Lions Gate Bridge and on to its assigned anchorage in the Port of Vancouver.

We head the other way, west along the Seawall toward Dundarave. The rain is holding off, and gulls & crows are busy exploring the sands, with one more crow swooping in to join them. (Yes. That is a crow flying over the water, not a Coot in the water.)

Down through Lawson Park, with a naked deciduous tree to our left, a clothed evergreen to our right, and, poised high between them, a ghostly sun wrapped in cloud.

More gulls in the kiddy playground, this time perched high on a shipwreck mast.

(One, but only one, of them is real.)

Across one of the rivulets feeding into Burrard Inlet, a long view back toward the bridge…

and then the next rivulet, with its point of rocky foreshore and a patient mum who holds her toddler by the hand. She is watching her slightly older son do what children always do, faced with water and rocks…

namely, hurl the one into the other.

We also watch, but only for a moment.

Then we do what adults do, at mid-day after a gallery exhibition and a pleasant amble along the Seawall.

We lunch.

We walk purposefully (not amble!) up to Marine Drive & into the Vietnamese restaurant Wooden Fish, where we give ourselves over to the pleasure of heaping bowls of Bun Cha.