Nepotism - when do I get my turn?

Dear Baz:

You're my brother and you write for the Guardian.

I see they are giving out free paid blogging trips to the Far East to people who are related to people who write for the Guardian.

That's me, dude!

I am a little confused though, do I have to have written for Skins to qualify for the trip?

Maybe you could just lie and tell them that I have.

I have read a lot of travel books though.

Anyways, I'd quite like a three month trip to Skull Island or Craggy Island or Cicely, Alaska, or the Yukon maybe, anywhere really where there's no chance of meeting hordes of aviator-wearing, skinny jeaned yoof.

Thanks, Baz, I owe you one.

Your sister Queenie

xx

P.S. I will still respect the Guardian if I get this gig.

P.P.S. Did they fire that idiot travel editor yet? Or was it his boss made him do it?

P.P.P.S. If they didn't, maybe you could remind him - first rule of the hole is, put the shovel down.

P.P.P.S. Don't tell the Queen Parents, they're dead set against nepotism.

Just slow the hell down, guys

Queenie drove 750 kilometres yesterday. It was a long drive, interspaced with meetings, but a long drive in solitude. A long drive in solitude generally results in a long think.

Yesterday was a long drive in varying winter driving conditions - terrifying black ice conditions in complete darkness along the airport highway, a long, slow dawn up towards Truro, the brightening sky streaming rose pink shadows onto the snow covered landscape, more black ice, then wind and blowing snow on the hills near Pictou, passing an accident near Exit 21, a woman sitting weeping in her car as the police try to pull her out of a snowbank.

I do this driving because I live here now and I have to learn. I don't take any risks and today I am not driving to Amherst because the forecast is bad and Himself said no.

I think that Himself is a little protective of me driving and I probably would have made it, but the deal is that if Himself says no I don't go.

Normally I don't pay much attention to other people's views on stuff or let other people dictate my actions, but in this case if I ignore his request and travel, he would spend all day worrying about me and waiting for text messages to say that I have reached pre-agreed milestones safely.

I suppose part of loving someone involves compromise so they don't spend their day worrying about you for no reason apart from the fact that you are a stubborn git who takes work too seriously.

Commitment to work = good; injury or death because of it = egotistical stupidity.

Also, it is an intelligent choice to listen to the advice of a local who drives for a living and who is spending the winter clearing snow so that people can drive safely, so who knows what he is talking about.

Also it is the anniversary of the day I could have died on the same road while a passenger in another vehicle. With a much more experienced driver.

The portents were all telling me the same thing.

But yesterday was different as the forecast was progressively better rather than worse.

Finally, around nine am, brilliant sunshine emerged to etch the landscape onto my eye all through Guysborough County. The sunshine made it easier to go off-highway onto snow-covered roads into Sherbrooke, warmed up the road during a slippery drive along the riverbank to my last meeting, and finally, I turned for home, driving three hours into a deep orange sunset along the Eastern Shore. So bright I couldn't see the winding road.

A lotta scary moments. A lotta impatient drivers overtaking me when they shouldn't have.

A lotta thinking.

Life is so precious. Why are people in such a hurry? Why do people insist on taking such risks? Do they not stop to think about the cost of a mistake in these circumstances?

What about my life? Do they have the right to make that decision if it affects me?

I don't think so.

I don't think they have the right to make the choice for themselves, because everyone has someone who is worrying about them on the road somewhere.

I want to pay special tribute to the nice driver from Seaboard's who overtook me at 160kph near the airport in complete darkness, with black ice, zero visibility and blowing snow from the lake.

Thanks dude.

Your backwash sprayed my mirror with icy slush that my wipers couldn't get rid of.

I had to pull over on the AIRPORT HIGHWAY where nobody dares to pull off because the lanes are so confusing.

I had to spend three minutes finding the stupid hazard lights in the stupid dark in the stupid hire car, praying nobody would thump into me.

I had to get out of the car in minus 12 temperatures ON THE HIGHWAY IN THE DARK and clean my windshield off with my lunchbag because the cleaner brush couldn't get the crud off my car, it was so encrusted with the oily dirt from your badly kept wheels.

I had to sit back into the car with the heater on ROAR for five minutes so I could actually feel my foot enough to put it back on the accelerator.

I had to talk myself into pulling back out onto the road. "Queenie, you can't spend the rest of your life on the highway, so you may as well go somewhere there is coffee at least."

Who the hell do you think you are?

And thanks to the Eisener driver who did the same thing about twenty miles later.

Thanks to the companies that cut back on drivers so that these guys face impossible deadlines and consequently do this to other people.

And thanks to the people who have 'surveillance cameras' on that highway that everyone knows are empty so that they don't have to pay cops to put up speed traps.

I hate the airport highway.

Ironically, it is the Veterans Highway. A big sign at either end solemnly says: Lest we forget.

It should be renamed, Lest we be five minutes late.

As I mentioned, I spent time thinking about the choices people make.

Pretty dark thinking all round all day, but that was because I spent most of the day thinking about the way loss is forced on some people.

Life is always precious but sometimes you lose people you just shouldn't lose yet. I spent a lotta time yesterday thinking about one such person, a neighbour who passed away a few weeks ago. I have not been thinking about her death much, because I still can't believe she is gone. I cannot believe that her family have to go through this loss and go through it without her.

She was such a force of life. She literally was a sunbeam. Her smile was the epicentre of that sunbeam. Every picture I have of her in my head, pictures stretching back thirty four years, to when I was a toddler and she was about seven, are of her smiling.

Even yesterday, with all day to think about it, coming to terms with the fact that she is gone on such a beautiful beautiful beautiful day was almost impossible.

Maybe she was somewhere in the cosmos, helping the dawn turn the snow rose pink with her smile ...

Maybe ...

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,

I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I did not die.

Snow talk

There's no business, like snow business, like no business I know.....

We are in the snow business in our house these days.

It's kinda counter-intuitive but.

Normally when it snows it's all, hooray, snow, let's stay inside and watch tv and eat crap.

But now, I get to do that and Himself has to go out and plough the stuff away.

For which he gets paid. Which is good.

But which tends to happen at midnight and on weekends.

Not so good.

But I am becoming expert in all things snow-like.

Flurrie: A snow flurry is a snow fall of impossible to predict magnitude. For example, last night flurries result in almost a foot of the stuff being dumped on us. Previously, flurries used to mean a couple of cms.

Blowin' snow: Blowing snow means Himself will call you on your cell and order you back to Halifax when you're supposed to be going to Cape Breton. Thankfully too, because as I was driving down the hill to the carpark next to the office, I put my foot gently on the brake to stop the car.

AND IT DIDN'T.

hahahahahhaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Not nice.

Snow drift: The stuff the weather puts in the middle of the highway to stop you from travelling over to the wrong side when you are in a snow-induced spin.

Snow day: day off when it is snowing. Queenie has had one since she moved to Canada. One is not enough for all the snow she has had to put up with.

Grammys, ECMAs, and other stuff

So Amy won the Grammys.

So what. We had the East Coast Music Awards on the same night in the Maritimes.

Much more important.

Joel Plaskett Emergency won all the prizes for a mediocre album about an ashtray.

Poor Wintersleep didn't win anything, despite the fact that the music journalist in town loves them.

Boo fucking hoo.

Reminds me so much of Ireland in the eighties when U2 won all the prizes.

Except of course, I liked U2.

I like neither of these acts.

God I wish I was somewhere where you could go to a gig in a heated venue that started before eleven.

More importantly, The Daily News is closing down today.

That is bad.

How can you have a first rate city with one newspaper?

Apparently, the Greater Halifax Partnership have taken to referring to Halifax as 'the new Dublin'.

Now there's a scary thought.

That would put me living beside the Red Cow Inn, where people get shot.

Oh, that's right, I live near Spryfield, where, er, people get shot.

But only sometimes.

Not as often as when I lived in Dublin.

Halifax is not the new Dublin.

Halifax is the old Dublin.

That's why I like Halifax.

Like the old Dublin, Halifax is a former colonial capital that has gone to seed due to the pull factor of Ontario and Alberta. Unlike Dublin, it is not the entry point to the lucrative EMEA markets and it doesn't have a dodgy tax break system that facilitates MNCs to set up shop here.

Its best hope is to become the Florida of the north.

We should send a flotilla of boats to Cuba and load up anyone interesting (shouldn't be too difficult, everyone here knows the way to Cuba), and then set the town on fire with a salsa beat.

Plus we'd have all those trained Cuban healthcare professionals to fill the jobs we will need filled.

(Apologies to Cubans by the way, I am not being insensitive to your culture, I am merely taking the piss out of the GHP)

Hey, we'd have fun at next year's ECMAs.

Incoming February bleughs alert.

May the existential crisis and unconnected ramblings time of the year begin.

Snowbound so there's no excuse

I have been putting off writing in this blog for a while now. But a combination of the never-ending snow and a half-day with nothing to do, apart from shovel snow, means that really I should write on my blog today.

Sigh.

What to write about...

I see Macca and Heather are back in court for their divorce.

I am betting myself a new pair of shoes that Macca and Heather will be divorced before Himself and She Who Would be Married Forever.

Even though Himself and SWWBMF have been at it since 2004 and they've only been at it since 2006.

It constantly brings this famous case to mind:

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on.

This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.

Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit.

The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse (or dirt bike, as we say in today's world) when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse (or Harley), and trotted away into the other world.

Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

Nevermind, as the delightful Kanye says, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

And of course disposing of the copious output from the lawyers is great for adding texture to the compost bin.

It's the little people who have to live in Bleak House I worry about.