We take our comfort where we can get it.

What a friggin' disappointment.

The Queen Mother valiantly tried to give me a flavour of the match by text as I didn't get out of work in time to get the Setanta package on the interweb. She was actually way ahead of the Guardian minute-by-minute reporter; who was too busy watching the match to actually tell any of us what was going on.

Which proves yet again that my brother is his mother's son in a lot of ways. My brother always remembers he should be typing when it's exciting. Which is why his minute-by-minutes are better than his colleagues. It was too much to hope that he would be doing the commentary. No doubt he was somewhere far more interesting than in front of a creaking laptop for the match.

(For all you Canadian readers, I am talking about the Ireland - France rugby world cup pool game that took place last night and was the perfect end to a perfect week chez Queenie).

You leave a country for two years, and the rugby team collapses. I have heard all kinds of rumours which I am not going to repeat here because according to certain players who couldn't kick a ball straight if it killed him last night that they are not true.

Well, he may not have been kicked out of his own house, but he should be now! That's all I am going to say.

Kicked out of the country more like. Unlike his manager I disagree that his performance should be judged on how much possession he gets. Where I come from, his performance should be judged on what he does with the possession he gets.

Call me stupid, if you like, but you shape the clay you are given.

Anyways, I didn't see his performance so I can't really talk about it.

What I can say is that some of the rumours I have heard are about a Munster - Leinster split in the team.

A what?

Is this friggin' true?

Is this all we are capable of as a nation?

We endure a thirty year conflict that pits neighbour against neighbour at its lowest points, emerge from it stunned and grateful, get a few jobs, make a little money, and now a crowd of overpaid middle class boarding school boys are having a Munster - Leinster split? Over rugby?

I friggin' give up.

I had a crappy week. But I think everyone else did too, so it must have been some astrological trine or something annoying everyone this week.

The third last shitty thing that happened to me this week (the last being the knowledge that we were going down 25 - 3 to France which I received in a text message from the QM) was that I found out that I should know by the way I am treated in work how valued I am.

That's good to know. I'm glad they cleared that up.

After I heard O'Sullivan's post-match interview I realised what they meant. It's all about what kind of possession you get, you see (in staff terms). Nothing at all about what you do with said possession.

Well, we saw how well that worked for the Irish rugby team yesterday.

Himself and I went to Sugar Spice, the Jamaican diner to comfort ourselves with jerk chicken and then we got some dvds to while away the evening.

Seraphim Falls.

I never heard of this movie before. Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan chase each other across the Wild West in a John Toll-filmed (Braveheart, Legend of the Falls) landscape that just jumps off the screen at you (snowy Oregon mountains and New Mexico).

It cheered me right up. Restored my faith in Irish men on a world stage.

Liam Neeson was wearing a pair of slinky suede trousers that showed off the longest pair of male legs in Hollywood. He had a gun as long as his legs, and a grudge to match.

Pierce Brosnan was doing his James Bond schtick: but this time it was in the forest with no toys and no women.

He is actually a good actor. You can see why he was such a good Bond. It was the possessions that did for him towards the end of his reign in that franchise. His attempts to light a fire to dry off after getting shot in the arm and falling into a winter river are fantastic.

Then we watched Taxi Driver (not Taxi!) because Himself has never seen it.

That's right. Himself had never seen it.

I'd forgotten how good it is.

Sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

Sometimes so does a woman.

Watch this space.

What's going to happen this evening?

The Queen Dad is in Paris today; one of the many thousands of Irish people who must be wondering what the hell they are doing in the city of light on a night when it is possible that our rugby dream is going to be washed down the toilet.

I am wandering around in a state of complete bewilderment, no doubt engendered by my prolonged absence from the Irish rugby scene.

Stringer dropped for some bloke I've never heard of? WTF?!

All my memories of our recent successes in rugby are tinged with little baldy Peter wrestling the ball away from scrums twenty times his size and passing it to our Ronan, who then kicks it to suave Brian/ suave (other tall guy I can't remember because it's 6am) who then puts it over the touch line.

I think I remember Peter getting dropped once before and the results being an unmitigated disaster. Or maybe he was injured. I don't have a brain that can remember these things well.

And the Queen Dad is in Paris so I can't ask him.

Anyways, I am in confused shock. No doubt Stringer has had a string of bad games that I know nothing about. Because Eddie Sullivan wouldn't make a stupid decision would he?

And what's all this about the guys having 'personal problems'?

The last time I was in Paris, France annihilated Ireland in the Five Nations and the Queen Mum and I had to put up with it in a tiny room in the Hotel des Arts in Montmartre.

I hope that the Queen Dad gets a moment in the sun. At least he is on a pharma-junket, so the hotel room should have enough room to swing a cat in celebration if necessary.

Anyone who feels like sending me text updates this evening will be my friend for life. I shall be hanging onto the internet like a mad woman, trying to get the game on Setanta. Which is nigh on impossible.

Stupid internet pay per view.

Speaking of the unspeakable, on his recent visit here, the Queen Dad gave me Cormac MacCarthy's The Road to read. I asked him what it was like. He kind of shivered (strange for him) and said: 'it's a bit intense. It's a bit frightening. It's a strange strange book'.

I read it.

I couldn't be in a room on my own when I was reading it.

This book blows the bleak, post-apocalyptic vision of Margaret Atwood and her ilk right out of the ooze. It is delivered in McCarthy's simple prose, which as usual contains huge ideas in small sentences (how does he do that).

Then I read Charlie Brooker the other day:

This week Charlie finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy ("which might as well come with a razor-sharp spine, so you can slash your wrists once you've finished it"). He continued playing Bioshock on the Xbox360 ("but I can only play it if someone's in the room with me, because it's too scary to tackle alone"); and he failed to quit smoking for the 18 millionth time.

I'm glad it's not me.

If this book does not get you sorting out your compostibles from your paper waste, then nothing will.

A man and his son wander around a post-apocalyptic north american continent, heading for the (Pacific I think) ocean. The world has been on fire. The remains of the built and natural world still smoulder. Ash settles on everything. The sun is blotted out. Hordes of cannibal wildmen roam the land searching for food and weapons.

I kept reading bits of it out to Himself in a panic. 'Would we survive, babe?' I kept asking. 'Sure', he said.

Then I got to the bit that told me what happened to the man's wife.

I'd head north, meself. Fuck the ocean. They couldn't see it anyway.

Anyways, up the lads, I'm wearing my rugby shirt to work today and they had better not let me down.

Is it that time of the week already?

I got home from the movies at nine thirty tonight and Himself was already asleep in bed.

So I woke him up for a chat.

I can't go a day without chatting to Himself.

It would be like a day without coffee.

Impossible to even imagine.

Himself was very tired, so he went to bed early so that he wouldn't be a total waste of space tomorrow night. Which is very thoughtful of him.

It's not like we get up to much on a Friday night anymore.

Sometimes I go to one of the laydeez houses and we lie around and drink wine and eat nice cheese and bitch about work until midnight when we all yawn a lot and call a cab.

It helps to get all the bitching done on a Friday night, as it sets you up for a nice non-work-obsessed weekend.

Although I don't need to do it so much as I used to. I have gotten remarkably good at totally forgetting I have a job until six pm on a Sunday. When I remember. And get a tummy ache.

It's kinda sad really that a thirty seven year old woman would be still getting boarding school tummy twenty four years after she left boarding school. But there you go.

I didn't even know what it was until I read the U2 biography years and years ago and Adam Clayton described it and I said 'A-haaa!'

It is not work tummy.

It is boarding school tummy.

Anyways, I went to see Francois Giraud's Silk tonight, which involved working until six pm so I wouldn't go to see what new clothes they have in Biscuit and then a walk up the hill to end all hills to the cinema.

Silk is either unmitigated male psuedo-intellectual tosh, or a deeply ironic look at the frailty of the male penis-fixation (when it is dressed up as passion).

A young provincial French man (Pitt the lesser) comes home from the army and meets Keira Knightly, who has a very strange jaw in this movie, or maybe it was the angle I was sitting at, falls in love and marries her, circa 1863. The local money guy convinces him to leave the army and travel to Egypt to buy silkworms for his silk mills. When the worms come back blighted he sends him to Japan (which is closed to foreigners) to get some more.

While in an obscure village in Japan he sees a concubine and falls in love with her back, or her eyes, or the way she pours a cup of tea, or something.

He tries to tell the wife about it when he returns, all morose doncha know, but (thankfully for her) can't find the courage to blurt it out.

Poosams.

So entranced with the memory of this woman he is, and a note in Japanese she gives him that the local Japanese courtesan tells him says 'Come back or I will die' (she quite sensibly says don't go back, she won't die) that he heads off back to Japan for some more silk worms, just to get another look at her.

Which he does when she's setting him up with another concubine.

Whom he fucks.

While she's crying outside the paper door.

Then he heads back to France for another bout of depression and morosity, before heading back to Japan YET AGAIN, for another look at the concubine he really likes.

With dreadful consequences, etc.

All in all, the film festival was disappointing. I liked Fugitive Pieces, but that was mainly because I didn't think anyone could adapt it properly and while they didn't they made a good film of the story.

Ah well, roll on Halifax Pop Explosion in October. Maybe my need for art will be satiated then.

Life is a movie... if you can get a ticket of course

So I went to the movies last night. The movie started at nine, so at ten to nine I arrived at the cinema. There were two queues. There was a queue for people who had paid for and received tickets. And there was a queue for people who didn't have tickets. And there were a lot of people who had booked tickets online but who didn't have the tickets with them. And there were also some people who had a pass but no ticket. There was no queue specifically for them, so they were just joining either queue.

But it was all quite good-humoured at first. We're in Canada, eh! We just stand in the queue and roll our eyes at each other and congratulate ourselves on how laid back we are.

It's not like there was nobody in charge. In fact, there were a lot of people walking around with clipboards, wearing film festival tee shirts with volunteer written on them. Mostly they stood in front of the door, while everyone queued patiently. Occasionally, one of them would walk down the queue I was in and ask whether everyone had a ticket.

Unfortunately I had someone with me who didn't have a ticket. And who consequently should have been in the other queue. But then we would have had to stand in different queues, and he's a teenager so I figured we would just queue together and then I would buy him a ticket at the box office when we got inside. Neither queue was moving after thirty minutes of standing around and I didn't want him to have to stand on his own.

Also, I figured as this was the queue for people with tickets we'd get into the box office before all the tickets were gone.

Normal resourceful behaviour in every way.

Are you all still with me?

So then, in the way of queues that have to stand around for long periods of time without any explanation, the adjoining people in the queue started chatting and bitching about the queue. As my adjoining people were an elderly couple, who were getting completely pissed off at having to stand on the street in the dark, I volunteered to go up and find out what the frig was going on.

I approached the most approachable-looking of the pack of volunteers milling around hugging their clipboards against their free tee-shirts (which were incidentally, the ugliest film festival tee-shirts I have ever seen, white with AFFA in black on the front).

I asked the little woman with the big tee-shirt and the clipboard why there was a delay.

There was a question and answer session on in the theatre, but it was nearly over.

Being experienced at extracting information from officious Nova Scotians at this stage, I said: 'so we'll be getting in soon, then?'

She looked a little panicked. 'Well, they'll have to clean the theatre then.'

'Okay so, and then they'll let us in?'

'Oh yes.'

'Great', I said. She looked relieved. 'And when will that be?' I asked.

Another panic look.

'About twenty minutes?' I suggested helpfully.

She did not compute.

'Fifteen minutes?'

You often have to give them an alternative, so they can pick the easiest one.

'Oh no', she said, 'at least twenty minutes.'

'Grand so', I said. She smiled in relief.

Back I went and told the old dears and resumed queuing while he went for a coffee and we held his space and kept her company. The girls arrived and joined the queue beside us and nobody said anything about queue-jumping so I figured that was okay.

And then someone came down the queue a minute later and told everyone that there was a question and answer session on inside but it was nearly over and then they would clean the theatre and then they would let us all in in about twenty minutes.

Old dear rolled her eyes at me.

Eventually, the queue started moving and after another bit we got into the theatre.

The girls went in to keep seats and I stood at edge of the box office queue to get Justin a ticket.

There were two volunteers standing behind the counter with a huge pile of tickets and a lot of paperwork and a box with names and envelopes with tickets in them. All of which looked to me like the guest list. (which in normal societies that function properly is kept separate from the box office, as you all know).

The queue seemed to be made up of people who were either a) collecting free tickets, or b) collecting tickets they had purchased online, or c) collecting tickets because they had a pass hanging around their neck (which of course in a functioning society would get you into the theatre without having to queue). There was a lot of signing of forms for said ticket and waiting for the computer or something to print stuff, but nobody seemed to be buying a ticket for cash.

So, I figured nobody would mind if I just nipped in and got a ticket for cash while the people behind the counter were waiting for the computer to spit out some random piece of bureaucratic paper they needed to part with tickets.

So I nipped in and waved a twenty at them and asked could I buy one.

No, apparently. I had to queue to buy a ticket.

I explained that I had queued for an hour already.

I must have been in the wrong queue. I would have to go outside and join the queue for buying tickets.

I looked outside.

It was a really long queue.

So I decided that in the absence of any system on their part for the efficient vending of cinema tickets for cash I was not participating in their effing Kafkaesque nightmare just so Justin could go to the movies.

We stood in the lobby for a while near the box office, sussing out the lay of the land.

There were too many volunteers milling around to leg it in without a ticket (remembering of course that I have a ticket for myself and it would be just Justin who was getting in for free).

Justin was up for it.

I figured we'd be caught.

The pair behind the counter were studiously avoiding eye contact with me so that they didn't have to deal with an actual film-loving, paying punter while they were handing out the freebies.

Eventually I approached one of the volunteers and explained my predicament and asked if I could just buy a ticket so we could sit down because we had been waiting for an hour.

They looked sympathetic, as they had been following my progress, there not being much else for the seven of them to do.

I know they sympathised with me. There was a lot of looking panically at each other and then eventually, a group shrug and someone said 'there's nothing we can do, it's just the bureaucracy.'
I said: 'you are the bureaucracy. Why can't you just do something about it?' and walked away before I effing hit one of them.

A Scottish woman behind me said helpfully: 'you just have to let them do it and wait your turn.'

I often get told stuff like this in similar situations. I think it is because people feel I don't understand the Canadian way. They don't realise that I just think it is the stupid way.

'I don't think so', I said.

All of this had taken about twenty minutes, so it was now nearly ten o'clock and I had been standing for over an hour.

Then, suddenly, with loads and loads of people still queuing outside, they locked the doors. There was a small queue left inside, so I joined it and judging from the enormous pile of unclaimed tickets I figured I was going to succeed.

I gave Justin the thumbs up.

He gave me one back.

Justin is eighteen and about six feet tall and was standing in the corner wearing combats, a baseball cap and a hoodie over it. But he had been really patient.

I was very proud of him.

I was determined to get him a ticket after all this.

Just then, the senior clipboard person came over and said she was sorry for the problem, but I just had to queue up if I wanted to buy a ticket.

I pointed out that I was, in fact, doing that very thing.

She pointed out that I had jumped the queue.

I pointed out that the door was locked, so for all intents and purposes, this was the end of the queue, which is where I had been told to go, so in fact, I was obeying orders.

She pointed out that I had been standing around inside for a while, so that didn't count.

I pointed out that I had queued for an hour OUTSIDE in the queue for PEOPLE WHO ARE FUCKING ORGANISED enough to have a ticket.

She looked completely confused then. Well why do you want a ticket, she asked.

For my friend, I said.

'Why didn't you buy him one in advance, then?'

She hugged her clipboard to herself triumphantly.

'Because I didn't friggin' know he was coming when I bought the tickets, did I!'

I probably was screaming in frustration at this point, I don't know, the rushing of blood in my head was blocking out all sound.

'Well, you should have made him queue to buy a ticket', she explained.

'He's a teenager! What, am I going to make him queue in the dark on his own.'

She looked over at Justin, who was leaning against the wall looking like a really smelly crack dealer, and then looked back at me in utter disbelief.

Well, it was worth a try.

'I am sorry I can't do anything', she said.

'That's okay', I said, 'why don't you just organise it better next year.'

She stared at me for a long moment and then turned and walked away.

Then it was my turn to buy a ticket.

Tickets in hand, we bounded up the stairs to look for the others.

There were at least fifteen rows of empty seats in the theatre.

Yes, that's what I said.

There were at least fifteen rows of empty seats in the theatre.

I was standing at the top of the stairs, gobsmacked with astonishment at the complete incapacity to organise a piss up in a brewery; that had led to a situation whereby the volunteers had locked the doors on a long queue of people who wanted to see the movie, before making sure the hall was filled with punters.

Said volunteers being volunteers because the Atlantic Film Festival is a film festival that's always whingeing about not having any cash.

Then the Scottish woman who had advised me to go outside and join the very end of the said queue stood behind me and loudly said: 'there she is, she's very brazen'.

I thought she was impressed with my resourcefulness.

I turned around and waved my tickets at her.

'I am, aren't I!' I laughed.

'Fucking queue-jumper', she hissed at me.

Justin looked at me and said 'what did she call you?'

'A fucking queue-jumper.'

'But we did queue!'

'I know.'

'For a friggin' hour, Queenie!'

'I know, Justin, I know.'

Anyways, the movie, The Stone Queen was good, but not good enough to have had to put up with bureaucratic bullshit for almost two hours.

A pox on the Atlantic Film Festival. You better not ever come to me looking for money.

And I have four more tickets for shows.

Two of which are for the same cinema.

Himself reckons they have a photo of me in the volunteer room to ensure I'll never get in again.

Sigh.

Is it me?

Or is it them?

That's all I want to know.

If it's me, I'll change. I'll become a better person. I will never again weigh up the benefits of two queues and pick the smarter one. I will go to the queue that inconveniences me the most and benefits the supplier of the service that I am purchasing the best.

I will.

I will swallow my consumer rights knowledge and let them fuck me around because my desire for efficient customer service is irresponsible on my part.

I will.

But I just can't help but think it's them.

They could have:

- Spent the hour we were all queuing giving people their freebies.
- Spent the hour we were all queuing sorting out ticket collections.
- Spent the hour we were all queuing selling us coffee, hot dogs, chocolate, tee-shirts.
- Spent the hour we were all queuing creating a buzz about the film festival, handing out fliers

In other words, they could have spent that hour we were all captive to them extracting money for us and SAVING THE ATLANTIC FILM FESTIVAL.

But no.

They were all in there seething about the woman who got the biggest clip board because her husband is on the board of the Festival.

And working out who was going to deal with the Irish woman going postal in the lobby because she didn't want to queue.

I can hear them now.

Effing come from aways.

They have no manners, do they!

They just don't understand it's the Canadian way, or the highway.

They think that just because all Canadian population growth from this year on will be due to immigration that they can come in here and take our jobs and then swan around demanding we treat people with respect just because they are paying punters.

The right to reside in the tree

So Canada Post never bothered to get my passport signed for in the Immigration Office in New York. Consequently while they were 'looking for it urgently', it stayed there for a while, got its shiny new PRC stamp in it and found its way back to me today.

Via Canada Post of course.

I waved it at Himself (well the note from the postman saying 'while you were out...' anyways) and said, now, I'm in. Finally. Does that mean I get to live in the Tree House? Previous readers of this blog will know that the Tree House is where the big boys get to hang out. Girls don't often get to hang in the Tree House. Well this one doesn't anyways.

No, Himself said. You just get to live in the tree.

Himself was not being defeatist. It's just Himself has been dealing with an extended period of Queenie asking to be let into the Tree House at work and the boys saying no and Queenie coming home in tears, and claiming she's going home to Ireland so he'd better sort out the CD collection. Or wanting to move to South America, or Alberta, immediately!, before he's even had his supper, so he's pretty much defined his position on all things boreal-based and habitationally-inclined for the moment and is having none of the boys ever again.

Even if it does mean voting for the Greens.

Well, how the hell am I going to get into the Tree House now, I asked Him.

Cut the tree down, he suggested.

I love the fact that Himself is an anarchist by instinct.

Anyways, I feel a bit better now. It was pretty hard to say goodbye to the Queen Parents and the neighbours in the same week, and then to lose the boss, and then get a new boss without any pretext of a competition, and have Canada Post not give a shit about my passport and nobody care about the fact that I need a pension and to get my teeth seen to, and to see good friends not let into the Tree House either. Etc.

But you can't keep a good lumberjack down, can you.

Sometimes the weekends take longer than you have

Himself and Queenie were both sick today.

Terrible.

Couldn't go to work.

Either of us.

Happily we are all better now after a sleep and a lie around all day, so we'll be back at the coalface tomorrow.

Don't know what could have possibly caused it.

Honest.

Maybe the shrimp we had last night. I'm always a bit queasy when I have shrimp. But I thought barbequed would be okay.

Probably the shrimp.

Not the weekend at all.

Nosirree bob.

Nor the twelve weekends preceeding that catching up on us.

Some days, you just need a day to get your head and your body and your ability to face the hell that is being employed by the man (in Nova Scotia) all back into alignment after a bad week.

Call it a mental health day or whatever. Some days it is physically and mentally impossible to face work.

In exciting building news, Peter the Lover is back ensconced in the apartment upstairs with the new neighbour from hell, and NO I DID NOT read the letter - what kind of a wench do you all think I am?

But it must have been a good letter, as it is all back to normal upstairs.

Hurray.

Not.

However, apart from being woken at 2.30am last night by the NNFH moving the furniture or something around, it's been quiet so far.

We spent the weekend in Londonderry.

Londonderry, Nova Scotia.

With Himself's cousin and his family. Great time had by all as is normal on our annual trip to Londonderry.

Every time we go we say - we must do this more often. And then we never do of course.

Anyway, washed those work blues right out of my hair.

And then when we got back the Melwood gang had a bonfire with BBQ shrimp AND sparklers. All finished by eleven pm too.

So I'm all set to go back and face into another few weeks of the TreeHouse Gang.

Sigh.

The things we have to do to pay the rent.

Moral choices

Saturday morning....

We lay in bed and watched a spider abseiling up and down from the ceiling for about an hour then we sent it outside to play.

Himself told me the neighbours had a big fight last night, and when I went outside to put the spider out in the front yard, there was a note on my neighbour's door, saying 'Peter, there's a letter for you in my mailbox'.

What would you do?

No, what would you want to do? The correct behaviour is obvious, of course.

But still...

Apologies for the previous post, I think I left the middle bit of what I was trying to say out.

And now I can't remember what I was thinking about.

I must be getting old.

The first thing I do, when I log onto my blog in the morning

... is look to my links.

What do you do?

Are you even there anymore?

What are we all doing on multiple platforms?

Intuitively, I feel it is the best way.

But I feel myself drawn to the simplicity of a single interface.

Is that what all of this is about.

Jesus. If I had known that, I would have said the following:

Communism was a simple idea.

And so was Fascism.

And so is Christianity.

Intelligent Design has two words.

I'm not allowed into that kind of high-level focus group.

But as a member of the voting public; oh that's right, I don't have the right to vote. Even though I pay tax.

Must remember my lowly position in Canadian society.

After all that.

It's not about focus groups boys and girls.

A focus group is just a group of people who aren't us, sitting in a pretend pub.

That's what I miss most about home.

Conversation.

At least I have found it here now.

Canada Post ate my passport

So Canada Post has mislaid my passport.

I sent it off via their guaranteed XPress post to the Consulate in New York on 16th August, sat back and waited for the tracking device to kick in on the internet.

The joys of technology.

It left Canada on 18th August.

Since then, nothing.

So I called Canada Post. Complained. Nicely. Explained it was my passport. Explained that they needed to find it. They opened a file. The nice lady Karen, whose English wasn't so good called me and told me she would call me again when she had any information.

Five days passed and nothing. I called again. The nice lady Karen had gone on vacation until September 17th, so I re-entered the bowels of the call centre and got a nice boy who said the file had been closed because I hadn't called back.

He re-opened the file. Another nice non-English lady eventually called yesterday and said they can't find the passport and can I (yes, moi, me, mise) call the Consulate General in New York and see if they have it.

I pointed out that they are supposed to have the package signed for so they will know and that is why I pay them the big bucks.

They pointed out that I have to call.

It's my own fault. This is the second time they have done this to me.