Right — the regular guide is not in today, so it is me and the B-Rock Pro, and I am going to start by doing the thing he never does, which is tell you exactly where my information stops.
Bollé is a French optics house whose reputation has never rested on frames; it rests on lenses. The B-Rock Pro is one of its sport shapes — wrapped, close to the face, built for somebody moving quickly outdoors rather than sitting still in a garden.
Here is what is on the record.
The colourways I can actually account for are matte black with a Phantom Vermillon Gun lens, matte black with Phantom Brown Red, matte white with Phantom Clear Green, and a shiny black paired with a brown gold lens.
Phantom is the word doing the work in that list: it is Bollé's photochromic lens, which changes its tint with the light instead of committing to one kind of afternoon, running from category 1 in dull conditions up to category 3 in glare. Two other house habits are worth your time.
The anti-fog is treated into the lens itself rather than sprayed on afterwards, so it survives washing instead of quietly wearing off in a season. And Thermogrip, the material at the temple tips and nose pads, is hydrophilic — it grips harder as it gets wetter, which is precisely backwards from every pair that has ever crept down your nose at four-all.
What I will not do is quote you a lens width or a frame measurement for this exact model, because I could not get one from Bollé and I am not going to invent a number to sound thorough. The regular guide would have given you three decimal places and a wink.
That habit is roughly why I am standing here.
Roseau, then, and I will keep out of its way. The Dominica Museum on Old Market Plaza first — a small building standing on the cobbles of the former slave market, which is an enormous amount of history to rest one modest facade on. Then Fort Young, a British battery from 1770 with its cannon still pointed at the water, aimed at ships that stopped coming a very long time ago.
Roseau Cathedral after that, built of volcanic stone under a stubby clock tower, the island's own mountain quarried and stacked into a nave. And finally the Botanic Gardens, where a school bus still lies crushed under the tree that came down on it in 1979, and nobody has moved the bus and nobody has moved the tree.
“They left the bus under the tree. Forty-odd years, no plaque, no fuss. Some things stand in for the whole story.”
The regular guide is back on Thursday. He will happily tell you the millimetres. Do not write them down.
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