Finally, Queenie has found a drinking buddy. Which is a good thing, as sitting in the house listening to this year’s hockey season playing itself out in the living room was trying her patience a little. Queenie is sure that watching men in puffy body armour and black helmets skate around a frozen swimming pool trying beat each other up with misshapen hurleys all night every night is probably deeply fascinating to Bruce. Unfortunately for her, the commentators all have Canadian TV accents (which is a nasal version of the Superbowl commentator accent) and are therefore really irritating. And there’s an ad break every seven minutes on ABC.
As Himself in Alberta said in a moment of understanding (which was nice of him because he's a big hockey fan too), the logic of using the tyre iron to smash the tv in was probably becoming more acceptable as the days passed. Queenie didn’t tell him it wasn’t the tv she was visualising under the tyre iron.
Blogs are useful for that kind of thing.
But now that particular source of stress is manageable. Because Queenie knows she’ll be getting out once a week.
We all need to get out once a week.
Anyway, Queenie now has a drinking buddy who’s an architect from Istanbul and who is a great storyteller, so we’ll call her Sharahazad, which we’ll shorten to Shazz.
We were out on Friday. We went to the Economy Shoe Shop, which is the nicest pub in Halifax. It’s an old building with three distinct sections – a big airy plant-filled section at the back, where you go to eat rather than drink; a dark, heaving front bar, which is where all the action takes place, and a smaller snug at the side, which is where all the toing and froing and arguing and meeting and greeting goes on.
Queenie walked in at nine and bumped into someone she knew, which is unusual. So we all piled into a corner and he introduced her to the people he was drinking with, who immediately told her not to go out with him. Under any circumstances. Which was hilarious, for a number of reason, not least because Queenie had already figured that out for herself when she met him first. Something to do with the fact that he starts talking about not being able to find a wife four minutes after he meets a girl. Wedded to an initial overbearing over-enthusiasm for said girl, that morphs into aggressive petulance at the first hint of a brush off. And an arrogance that is breathtaking in one so devoid of social graces. And a completely frustrating inability to take no for an answer.
So they told Queenie to tell Shazz the same thing, but Shazz is a clever girl and figured it out by herself as soon as he suggested she pay for his drinks because of the Armenian massacres. (His ethnicity is Armenian, but still, it's not like Queenie asks all the British people she meets to pay for the drinks because of the Famine, now is it?)
It was very unusual for a Canadian, much less a group of them, to do something like that though. They're usually far too polite. And then they all got up and very obviously went off somewhere else without him, but he was too drunk to notice. After they left, he sat and moaned at us about gay people (an 'I'm not anti-gay but' rant, which really irritates Queenie) for a while, ignoring the fact that we were not interested in his homophobia and were trying to have a conversation. Then he just stood up and left. Without paying for our drinks. Despite having asked us to join him for one. So Queenie had to pay for them, because she had brought the situation into being by being stupid enough to be nice to him once a few months ago.
A bit of a W, as Jenni Diskin would say. He’ll be single for a while, Queenie reckons. He's a whingeing miserable git because he's single and he's single because he's a whingeing miserable git. No way out of that one, is there? Apart from going down the mail order route.
After that, Shazz and Queenie had another drink to celebrate our liberation from the Ehud Barak of the dating scene, and sat people-spotting for a while. We eventually were joined by another woman who was out on her own because her brother in law and his children were in her house and she didn’t want to go home. She told me she was of Finnish ethnicity. She had the whole Finnish ‘get drunk and sit worldlessly in the corner’ trait down pat. Eventually we got bored and made her move bars, as the cute guy Shazz had been eyeing up had disappeared, and we wanted a change of scene. So she brought us to Tribeca which, as the name suggests, is an uber-trendy loft bar in Downtown Halifax, with the obligatory DJ and plinky plink shite they play here.
But it’s a nice bar. We sat in the alcove at the end of the bar and met a young couple from Newfoundland. When the girl heard what Queenie did for a living, she pinned her in a corner and spoke intently to her about the Newfie economy for about forty minutes. Now Queenie loves the Newfie accent. It's really rich and melodic, particularly in the women, who are all really smart and passionate about their Rock. So it was fine for the first while. But her eyes burned into Queenie as she spoke, and eventually Queenie's eyeballs started to hurt from maintaining the eye contact. Eventually it got so bad she had to go home, as digging her nails into her palms stopped working. Her eyes began to glaze over and get that itchy feeling at the back of the eyeball that you get if you stare at a vdu for too long.
What can Queenie say? It’s obviously the start of a long overdue karmic punishment for doing the same thing to some unsuspecting person many many many times in her own youth. Apologies to any of you who were at the other end of one of those rants. Really, Queenie didn’t realise how bad they were.
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