Comedy, home renovations, nature and all aim to draw residents into four weeks of fun across Greater Victoria
The Victoria Home, Reno & Decor Show is back in Saanich this weekend.
Greater Victoria’s ultimate one-stop shop for home improvement and building products, services, and advice fills Pearkes Community Centre Feb. 25 to 27. The show opens Friday, Feb. 25 from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. and runs Saturday, Feb. 26 from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. then wraps Sunday, Feb. 27 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Admission and parking are free, at 3100 Tillicum Rd.
Romance returns to Crystal Garden for Modern Wedding – the largest wedding and event showcase of its kind on Vancouver Island. The marketing team aims to bring a fresh approach each year, to immerse brides and grooms in breathtaking visual displays. Billed as the absolute opposite of ordinary, organizers target Instagram-worthy displays to fill the Victoria Event Centre. Modern Wedding returns Sunday, March 6, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Victoria Conference Center – Crystal Garden, 713 Douglas St.
Learn from the birds with a Saanich nature workshop March 12.
This workshop features a 15-minute talk introducing bird calls, their seasonality, meaning, and general tips for identification. Then participants listen, eyes closed to create mindfulness, and afterward discuss the different sounds. A slower walk, listen, observation and questions round out the event.
While run through the Compost Education Centre, the workshop takes place at Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary and involves slow walking on uneven natural pathways with steps surrounded by bushes and trees. The instructor has been a birder from an early age, growing up in the region and offering guided birding walks for Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary and the Victoria Natural History Society for the past 10 years.
Attendees must pre-register as the workshop is outside and in-person only with health and safety protocols emailed in advance.
Compost centre members can get free tickets and there are a limited number of ‘pay what you can’ tickets available for folks who self-identify as Black, Indigenous, people of colour and/or facing significant financial barriers.
Register online at eventbrite.ca, call 250-386-9676 or email office@compost.bc.ca.
The workshop is March 12 from 10 a.m. to noon at 3873 Swan Lake Rd.
Comedy invades the Sports View Lounge in Oak Bay on March 19.
Comedienne Kirsten Van Ritzen hosts a night of laughter starring her winter adult comedy students in March Madness. Some folks will make their stand up comedy debuts, with several experienced comics also returning to the stage. Parking is free and there is an elevator to access the upstairs venue.
The comedy show runs March 19 at 8 p.m. in the upstairs lounge at 1975 Bee St. Tickets are $15 in advance at Eventbrite or $20 cash at the door. Doors and the bar open at 7 p.m. (pub-style food also available).
All events are subject to provincial health orders.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
