Whereupon the narrator gets comfortable...

Rambling alert. It's late and I'm *tired*.

I think it’s a mafia society.

Canada I mean.

Real old style garotte from behind mafia culture.

I often wonder where their sense of this cultural history comes from.

Somewhere really vicious.

They talk very openly about things that nobody mentions in Ireland. Or London. Or Paris.

Wife-beating. And murder. And drug dealing.

And they fight. The young men do. They attack each other in the streets. Except I don’t know if that’s true, because I don’t know anyone who was attacked. In some sense there's nothing unusual about it, it goes on everywhere, but they don't do anything about it. No zero tolerance here. The cops just ignore it.

It’s amazing how we only start giving a shit when it affects us.

And there's a sense of 'good luck to you, dude' for those guys who shoot up half a town and two Mounties and then disappear into the woods for months.

Apart from the Mounties. Who get incredibly pissed off and ALWAYS get their man in the end.

Half-starved, frost-bitten, lost in the snow.

Corporals January, February and March.

But then they all have a nervous breakdown when someone in the armed forces gets killed.

I think it's about being happy that the people involved chose their own path.

And soldiers don't, do they?

But yeah, they happily engage with and talk about feuds all the time.

And they're very fond of their local headbangers.

In the Irish sense of the phrase.

And then, they've such an incredible sense of order in society they bring in a law that supports gay marriage. And common law relationships exist after one year. As opposed to NEVER in Ireland.

I don't know where the latent violence in Canada comes from. Nor the tribalism.
It doesn’t come from anywhere in particular, I think people brought it from where ever they came from.

I think that might be the problem here.

They don’t encourage the finding out of tribal cultural history easily here, because they don’t want to allow tribalism. Because Canada would disintegrate into a series of forest and urban fiefdoms.

Or revert to, I should say.

But it exists anyway.

That sense of affinity with others of your kind.

And it’s getting stronger.

Why are we all starting to mass into tribes again?

I was thinking the other day, the movement of people around the planet must be wrecking the dwarves’ heads.

"There's something up boys... the weather's changing up top. All that thunder and lightening," they must say to themselves. The gods stomping around.

Or maybe we sound like a flock of birds.

Swirling around their mountains like nasty seagulls do down on the waterfront when you’ve got an ice-cream.

What do I sound like to a sparrow?

Or a blade of grass?

I explain further on why I am talking about these profundities.

Dear Reader,

I have always wanted to start writing a book with those words.

I love those kinds of books.

Dear Reader means:

Sit down, girl.

Why?

I’m going to tell you a story.

Really?

Oh yes.

Then Dear Reader would perk right up and say:

Fantastic, let me get comfortable.

Time would pass.
Pasta is cooked.

Eventually Reader would resurface with a bag of stuff

…. Have I got everything?

Smokes.
Chocolate.
Bottle of wine.
Vibrator. Just in case.
And the dvd.
In case I need to see his face (insert actor of choice).

I’d sell fifty million copies if I could continue in the same chatty narrator vein through a rip-roaring twentyfirst century version of the nineteenth century chick lit sprawl.

I would.

Anyways, back to the sparrow…