Fogbound

Dense fog has swept in, covering the Lower Mainland like an army blanket (line stolen from Marjorie Allingham). Fog was such an important feature of Victorian novels--Wilkie Collins's, Conan Doyle's, Charles Dickens's--it was almost a living character in the stories.

The Gershwins wrote "A Foggy Day" for the 1937 musical "Damsel in Distress." They wrote it in less than an hour, between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m., after George got back from a party. The song was first sung by Fred Astaire, but a great later performance (1955) was recorded by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

That same year, a small gem of a film appeared. It was "Footsteps in the Fog," with Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, and a fog so dense the characters could see nothing, but only hear menacing footsteps...getting closer and closer.

Stewart Granger always looked to us more the way James Bond would than any of the actors who played Bond, and James Mason always seemed the perfect George Smiley. Mason played Smiley (renamed, for some reason,"Charles Dobbs") in Sydney Lumet's 1966 film "A Deadly Affair," based on an early John le Carre novel. We mention it here because the wonderful Quincy Jones score includes a piece called "Don't Fly When It's Foggy."

Other foggy folk: Senator Jack S. Phogbound, in "Li'l Abner" and Foghorn Leghorn, of the Looney Tunes gang.

And be glad you're not on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Unless, of course, you like wandering around in the fog. Fog hangs over the Grand Banks an average of 120 days a year.