Kingston has been very cold and wet. The term cold is relative though, it’s probably the same temperature at home. I’ve not been doing much, apart from sleeping, eating and typing. But it’s been quite pleasant and it’s a nice, laid back town with a substantial alternative lifestyle going on, side by side with the retirees and the prison officers and the university staff who seem to make up the townsfolk.
Every morning I get up and ignore Engelbert at breakfast (although he left this morning on the Moose bus with some horrendous English woman who thinks his name is Tony and who is gagging for it. I gave him a thumbs up as he left, I thought he was going to head butt me).
Where we have breakfast depends on the number of guests. If it’s busy, like this morning, we are seated in the crew messroom. If it’s quiet, we go upstairs to the officers mess. The cabins are priced according to their status. It costs $85 a night to stay in the captain’s cabin, which is an en-suite double room with a sitting room. And they felt the need to build a Radisson here.
The Alexander Henry is lovely. All creaky wood, whistling pipes and sloping floors. I want to live on a boat. Someone asked me to marry him and go and live on a boat in Vancouver last week and I said no. Maybe I should give him a ring……….
Seriously, after breakfast I go on deck for a cigarette and watch them wash the decks down and check the rigging. Then I write for a bit and head into town to the Sleepless Goat café to use the internet. The Sleepless Goat is an anarchist co-operative vegetarian restaurant that is full of the most interesting people. So I type away and listen in on conversations. There was a hilarious one last night.
Two guys and a girl were talking – I couldn’t figure out how they knew each other, but they didn’t know each other well and the two guys were jostling for position with the girl, who was scarily self-obsessed. Well, either that, or she was playing them both for complete fools. No, I think she was scarily self-obsessed.
The talk turned to their ethnicity. That’s what you do, apparently. You say, casually, ‘so, what’s your ethnicity?’ And then you get this long, rambling explanation of their background. The Asian guy asked the girl hers and it turned out her dad was Pakistani and her mother was Scots-English-Irish.
Asian guy: That’s cool. I love that actress (didn’t get the name – apparently of Pakistani ethnicity). She has a great look.
Lisa the Pakistani/Irish/English/Scots girl: Oh, that’s what my boss calls me all the time.
Other guy (who didn’t volunteer his ethnicity, being very obviously of boring European extraction) realises the Asian guy is ahead by a nose: She’s kind of wooden as an actress though, don’t you think, I prefer (didn’t get this name either).
Lisa is not sure about this, but decides to run with it: Yeah, she’s like Gwyneth Paltrow, like, so empty inside, she can be programmed. If I was a famous actress, I wouldn’t be able to play anyone but myself.
The two lads nodded seriously. I felt for them. I really did. I wanted to go over and paint a picture of the next two years of their lives if they scored Lisa the Pakistani Princess. I wanted to scare them so much they’d run away and never speak to her again. Am I being unfair, I don’t think so.
Lisa, secure in her audience’s obsequiousness at this point, went on to explain how she votes Conservative (not the done thing in the Sleepless Goat) because a) her parents, who are very rich and successful and just like, totally don’t understand her, are Liberals, b) Stephen Harpur (leader of the Conservatives, very stiff Al Gore type on a drive to be likeable) is like committed, and c) like, she has more respect for Hitler than for that guy Eichmann, you know, the Nazi who said he did it because he was told to, and voting Liberal is just, you know, being told what to do.
The Asian guy, who had been trying to tell Lisa that she had the wrong Nazi (I think he was right and she was actually talking about Speer rather than Eichmann) to no avail (I don’t think Lisa does getting it assways), gave up in complete confusion at this stage. Looking around, he spotted my shoulders shaking behind my screen and realised that coffee was coming down my nose because I was enjoying the earwigging so much. So he moved them onto another, safer subject.
Bah.
In the afternoon, I generally do some touristy thing. There are a lot of museums here and an old fort and boat trips on the lake. It’s all very tame, but nice.
In the evening, I go out to eat and generally meet up with someone or hook up with Caelen’s dad. I go to bed early, because I’ll be in Montreal next week and then Halifax and I won’t get much sleep because I’ll be hostelling again and will have to share horrible rooms with people who rustle plastic bags at three in the morning.
I am becoming an oldarse I think.
This afternoon I am going on a cruise to see the Thousand Islands, or Manitouana as the Indians called it, which means Garden of the Great Spirit. And yes, it is where the name of the salad dressing came from. The guy who owned the Waldorf Astoria came up with it in his summer home on one of the islands. I tried to go on the cruise yesterday, but it was raining so much I was the only passenger. So they gave me my money back. It’s stopped raining today, so I should be okay.
And now I am officially up to date. Hooray.
As to my ethnicity, I’ve been thinking about this. I think it’s a bit boring to say I’m Irish. So I was thinking about saying, well I’m Scots/ Northern/ Planter Irish on my dad’s side, which is where I get the freckles and the temper from, and my mother’s an O’Neill, so I reckon I’m probably half Tuatha de Danaan on her side. Or maybe some Milesian – that would account for the dark hair.
Whaddya think?
1 comment:
You have freckles?
Post a Comment