Maybe if I think about Cuba, I won't be so cold

Tonight is the first big storm of the winter and the wind is very strong - it's knocked the Yule wreath off the door twice now - so I am praying the power doesn't go out, because we haven't gotten round to installing a generator yet.

We take a long time to get round to things in our house.

We are getting round to installing a new water softener/ filter system on Friday. This is very exciting, because we don't have 'city water', we have a well. Unfortunately the geology of our area means we have a lot of manganese in the water. This means reddish stains on the bath, toilets, washbasins, dishwashers, etc., plus non-potable water. Which means when guests come and try to get a glass of water you have to shout NOOOOOOOOOOO and explain.

On Saturday, we will have a brand new filter system and a drinking water filter installed under the sink with its own tap.

I am very excited. I have been dehydrated for months, and I can't get the shampoo out of my hair.

Saturday, I will have firm, plump skin and shiny hair.

HOOOOORAAAYYY!!!

I just have to go check the dog is still alive... she won't come inside... she loves sitting out on the deck face towards the prevailing blizzard...

The dog is back inside now for a bit, eating her squeaky toy.

For somethin' to do, as Himself would say.

I just had to stop typing and run around the house twenty times with the squeaky toy pretending to kill the dog with it.... when does this bit end...?

Yes, anyways, storm, blizzard, potential for no heat, light, water, alone in the house of course...

... think of Cuba, Queenie.

Cuba was great.

The air smelled of vanilla.

As opposed to petroleum.

The people were lovely.

Whether or not you gave them convertibles.

But as is the nature of humans, they were particularly lovely if you gave them convertibles.

I never did an all-inclusive before.

Here's the thing.

THEY ARE FANTASTIC. Unless you have deh guilt.

about food, liquor, lying round getting waited on hand and foot.

and deh guilt goes away after a bit.

We got up in the morning and wandered over to the buffet for breakfast.

I felt like a hobbit.

First breakfast.

Then second breakfast.

Then coffee at the bar, a nice cafe con leche made just right.

Then wander down to the beach.

Maybe take a trip out to the reef on a hobie cat.

Around eleven Roberto would walk down from the beach bar and ask me did I want a mojito.

I did wake up every morning promising myself I would go to yoga rather than have a mojito.

But Roberto just looked so sad if I didn't want one.

Lunch.

A three course affair just off the beach.

Back to the beach/ book.

Or maybe a little wander over to archery at three o'clock.

Around 4.30 the sun started to go down behind the hills and we would head back to our room for a beer on the patio.

Then dinner at one of the seven restaurants they had.

Then drinkies at the bar with some nice people we met.

Columbo spent a few days with us, despite the best efforts of Air France.

Two weeks of that.

Plus one or two little excursions outside the bubble.

I know I should talk about the interesting things I saw, but for me the interesting stuff was the all-inclusive. The rest was standard Carribean island stuff.

We have been wondering if we would ever do it again.

It is very seductive.

I'm sure my carbon footprint was enormous.

It's just, I love my food, and it was soooo good, and I didn't have to put any effort into it at all.

And I love my wine and cocktails, and again, I didn't have to think about it at all.

Maybe in a couple of years.

My arm is killing me now from my flu shot so I have to stop typing. Also I am getting a mini-flu I think.

Maybe more when I am feeling better.

Book Reviews 2008, part 1: Travel Literature

I wasn't quite sure how to do this review job - to do several book reviews in one post and then do nothing for months on end; to try to plough through all the reviews and post them one by one, or by far the most useful idea - to tackle the reviews thematically.

Or to just not do anything and blog about something totally pointless.

However, I'm home alone during a big snow storm so there ain't nuttin' else to do today, work being completed.

I'm thinking maybe I'll tackle a theme.

My themes are: Travel Literature, Non-fiction, CanLit, Literary Fiction.

I know, I know, my originality is stunning.

I may as well start with travel literature, as they are my favourite types of book now that I'm getting old and bored with fiction, and I'm too poor to actually travel anywhere anymore.

Having said that, I only read four TL books last year, for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, the genre is getting squeezed by the useful but not literature Lonely Planet type missives that everyone seems to want to buy now, and consequently, there aren't that many new titles published every year.

Secondly, I have read many, many of the existing travel books, as the Queen Dad has bought extensively in the genre over the years.

Thirdly, I am done with grumpy men who have a cynical attitude to life, especially since Inspectors Morse and Taggart left this world. So, I can't face reading Bill Bryson, or any more Theroux, or anything in that style anymore, and that's what's mostly available.

Fourthly, it's getting more difficult to get copies of what's on my list of 'great travel literature I must read before I go blind or die.' There's one shelf in Chapters and one shelf in Doull's second hand store and that's it for perusal options in Halifax.

And of course I am not supposed to shop at Chapters now, because of the Palestinian conflict. Why I don't really understand.

Yes, yes, yes, I know I can buy books on Amazon and such sites and they have a wide selection of travel literature. Interestingly, there is a list on Amazon.com that contains many of the books I am planning to read: Interesting Amazon travel literature list.

But y'see, Doulls now give you an extra 10% off your books if you promise not to buy anything online for the rest of the day, and I always do and then forget to go shopping online after the 24 hour period is up.

I know, I am pathetic.

This year I will buy more travel books.

In particular, I will track down:

- Eric Newby's book about Ireland, which I only found out about when I opened The Big Red Train Ride the other day and saw it listed in his previous publications;
- William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain, A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East
- Freya Stark's A Winter in Arabia
- Something by Pico Iyer, who is supposed to be shit hot.
- Larry McMurty's Roads, which is supposed to be good on the States

So of course, if you have any of them in a pile marked Oxfam shop, put it in an envelope and send it to me and I will make a contribution to a similar charity!!!!

Back to the task in hand, last year's crop.

As I said, there were four.

There's a trio of older style travel writers - Thubron, Newby and Raban - whom I admire both in terms of their journeys and their ways of describing them. So I am trying to collect all their works. I was lucky last year - I got one from each of them.

And finally, I found Robert Carver's Paradise with Serpents, Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. I couldn't believe it when I saw he had another book set in a country that LOVES DEH GUNS, because I own a copy of Carver's first travel book, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania.

The premise of Accursed Mountains was, Carver gets into Albania after Hoxha falls and all hell is breaking loose. He spends much time in Tirana trying to get into the countryside while not really wanting to be in that much danger. Time passes, he gets to travel to the villages and he spends his time avoiding getting shot and being terrified. He finally leaves in a big relief and writes a book about it.

It was pretty diverting and had some interesting descriptions of Albania. And he had a quote from William Dalrymple on the inside cover. Which must be the Holy Grail of aspiring travel writers...

....Well, what do you know? Paradise with Serpents is the South American version of the same book.

Guess when you find your groove you should stick to it...

Despite that nasty comment, I'd still recommend the book if you are interested in reading about Paraguay.

Lucky for me, I read it shortly before the Paraguayan elections last year, and consequently was able to appear knowledgeable about Paraguayan politics in front of some people who are still gobsmacked at my worldliness.

The book has lots of side bars about La Lynch, the Irish-born concubine of Paraguayan Presidente Lopez, which may interest Irish or French readers.

Mainly though, the book has piles and piles of useful anecdotes on how people manage to live in a hyper-inflationary economy bankrupted by the usual troika of corrupt government, fraudulent banks and business, and of course, armies of lazy public servants grown fat on the backs of the bare-foot, illiterate workers.

When Carver gets there the middle classes, who encompass some of these groups and some other people, and with whom he mainly socialises, are watching with not a little fear and trepidation as the lower orders arm themselves with big guns paid for with drug profits.

It's all very interesting if you are interested in reading about such scenarios at the moment.

Which I suspect many people are.

I like Carver because his writing is very honest. He spends most of the book hiding in the Gran Hotel in Asuncion, terrified he's going to get shot. This is because when he does venture out of the hotel or even out of Asuncion, he usually nearly gets shot. His trips out of town are centred around finding a long lost uncle who vanished into the jungle many years previously.

This type of travel scenario makes Paradise with Serpents not really a travel book; so much of his journey is spent in one place, there's more of an extended journalistic feature feel to large parts of the book. But that is inherently interesting if you like reading about the politics and society of other places.

One other comment, one of the characters he hangs with, a terribly nice person called Gabrielle, tells Carver at some point that she has invested all her savings in an apartment in west London, to avoid losing money in dodgy Paraguay.... I'm wondering how that's going for her now...

Slowly down the Ganges is the story of a journey taken in the early sixties by Eric Newby and his wife Wanda (who saved his life during WWII, the story of which is recounted in one of his other books) down the Ganges from Hardawar to the Bay of Bengal.

I love Eric Newby even though all his trips have 'classics' which have been done to death. I love Eric because a) he did them first, and b) if I held a gun to Tony Wheeler's head he'd probably admit that Newby was one of his inspirations, but Newby chose not to destroy independent travel by enabling the hoi polloi to do it.

(I consider myself hoi polloi by the way).

If you don't already know, Eric Newby is the guy who gave up a shop job in Manchester in the late fifties to travel, went to tribal Pakistan during the winter, and subsequently wrote A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which is one of the greats.

Slowly down the Ganges is a book that brilliantly describes how important it is to have moments, when your romantic illusions about travel are being systematically destroyed by petty beauracrats.

As opposed to corrupt cops with big guns.

Newby and his glorious Wanda don't just get a bus down the length of the Ganges, he proposes to do the trip by boat. Unfortunately, boats come, boats go, boats are not suitable for the depth of the Ganges, or the tide, or whatever, and the author, his wife and their trusty crew have to beg, borrow, bribe, steal and swap craft at every staging post on the journey. Plus haul his considerable luggage on and off boats and swamps and sand pits, and cliffs and sink holes etc at all hours of the day and night.

Wanda is the woman who can feed 100 sailors with two fish, some daal, and the light of the Indian moon. Newby spends much of the book amazed that such an extraordinary woman could love him (which is the other reason why I love his writing).

If you've been to India you will appreciate the vast chunks of this book that deal with lying around waiting for somewhere to open or lunch to finish or 'payment' to be made or whatever.

Slowly is the key word in this particular title.

Mirror to Damascus, by Colin Thubron is the description of a year the author spent in the Syrian capital. It is very early Thubron, and he starts to pick at many of the themes he deals with in his later writing - theories of migration and nomadic culture, the spread of Islam, the great trade routes of Asia and their impact on history. Much of what he discusses in this book is returned to in his brilliant quartet of books about Asia.

It is really interesting, when you read a lot of travel literature, you start to encounter varied descriptions of the same place. It can be quite disconcerting.

Currently I am reading a book about the Queen of Sheba written by a Californian documentary maker with a writing style that is hampered by the lens he uses instead of a pen. The writer, whose name I am too lazy to go to the sitting room to look up, describes Damascus as a Russian engineered concrete monstrosity that surrounds an impressive mosque.

It is itself an impressive description. Memorable. If surrounded by a mass of visual concrete that would be great on a storyboard but is not so good in a book format.

It also destroys the heart of Thubron's description of the same city.

Thubron's description of the city is magical. His Damascus is layered from the inside out, from the bottom up, from the outside in, from the ceiling to the ground, from the sepulchre to the minaret. There is not a layer or cross hatch of the city that he doesn't turn his attention to during his year.

The blurb on the back describes it as a 'work of love' and it is definitely a paeon. But Thubron's style is so classical and clear that the love doesn't ever veer the prose near the colour purple.

Mirror to Damascus was published in 1967, a couple of years after Newby's Ganges adventure.
It is an altogether different type of adventure, more Victorian in its style and length. Colin Thubron takes rooms in the city for a year and burrows down through the history, geography, archaeology and other aspects of this ancient city and culture, trying to pin down the city's soul, and by doing so, perhaps the soul of Middle Eastern Islam.

If we want to figure out the dichotomy in architectural descriptions, maybe it's time-bound.

Perhaps the mid-sixties was a halcyon period before the advent of the Soviet engineers that seem to have destroyed all of Thubron's travel adventures ever since.

In summation, you need to be a Thubron fan, or an Orientalist, or a fan of esoteric musings grouped around a single theme (I am trying to be all of these things) to like this book.

Ideally, you should read it in Damascus.

Finally, my travel literature collection expanded by one more book in 2008. This time it was an early publication by my beloved Jonathan Raban. I chanced upon his Hunting Mr. Heartbreak one day in Doull's, to my great joy.

Hunting Mr. Heartbreak is Raban's take on the States. The eponymous Mr. Heartbreak is Hector St. John de Crevecouer, a fellow emigrant who wrote about how wonderful it was to move to the newly formed United States.

All the great writers have to do the States. All of them have to do it their way. Raban, being Raban, has to approach it from the sea. He leaves England on a ro-ro called The Atlantic Conveyor. Because of this, and because of his tracing of a previous emigrant, the opening sentence is a reworking of the classic, 'having arrived in Liverpool, I took passage for the New World.

Happily for Queenie, The Atlantic Conveyor stops in Halifax port before it heads to New York (oh, why don't more of them do that!!), so she has the wonderful surprise of having her favourite travel writer describe the city in which she lives as he found it in 1990.

He ends up at the Split Crow, of course, that bastion of bad behaviour beloved of visiting crews. Later on he says:

In my shore-going tie, I was overdressed for the town. Everyone else appeared to have just come in from an afternoon's duck shooting. They dressed, not to stand out, but to blend in, in muddy browns, greens, beiges, and plaids, as if the height of Haligonian fashion was perfect camouflage. There was an above average incidence of beards, a below average incidence of jewellry. That cardinal provincial sin, of 'getting above yourself', was not a Nova Scotia weakness; the people of Halifax had carried unshowiness to such a point of fine moral principle that I felt my striped Italian tie was standing out among them as an act of insufferable urban arrogance.

Where they were rich, and showily rich, was in body space. Everyone carried at least 300 cubic feet of the stuff round with them on the streets. Life on a sidewalk in Halifax was a lonely business, with people swerving aside to give you a wide berth, as if you had a contagious social disease.

I nearly laughed myself sick when I read this. Nineteen years on, little has changed. Maybe a few more people on the streets, but not many.

Raban gets to New York and spends some time with the rich people who inhabit the rarified atmosphere of the condos high above Central Park. He doesn't think much of them of course and calls them the Air People. He sublets an apartment from 'Alice' and snoops into her life as much as he can and rips her to shreds in his book - I pity the poor girl, who was probably just trying to keep the apartment for her return to the city.

After a sojourn closer to the streets of New York (this book was written before zero tolerance and the peace that brought) and some encounters with the Street People of Mayor Koch's era, Raban has had enough of both crime and shallowness, and heads out into the heartland of America. The rest of the book deals with time spent in Alabama, Seattle, and the Florida Keys.

The section on Florida in particular is fabulous. Obsessed with boats and the water, Raban charters a fishing boat and heads into the Keys. He becomes enamoured with the idea of the Keys as the traditional piracy hiding grounds. His repeated attempts to get the Coast Guard and various other law-protection agencies to tell him the best way to hide in the Everglades are hilarious and really ironic when you read them with the impact of 9-11 still reverberating throughout North America.

How must Raban feel when he thinks back on the innocence of this time.... how must we all feel. I remember feeling we had hit the absolute bottom of the pits of corruption, cynicism and despair. Compared to now, the early 90s were a Disney movie...

I highly recommend this book for a glimpse of the USA that we all learned to love through MTV USA and the tv shows of the early nineties. It's a USA that has since disappeared, but Raban nails it. And like the rest of us, he liked it so much he moved there (he settled in Seattle).

There. That was a very convoluted way of reviewing four books. I will have to undertake a review redux on the rest, or I'll never get finished.

It has stopped snowing. Would winter be drawing to a close?

Don't get your hopes up Queenie, there's always one more storm...!

New Brunswick and Quebec

We left Halifax about three pm on Friday and drove to Woodstock.

Woodstock, New Brunswick.

Not the cool one.

We drove around a bit and found a Best Western and checked in and then we went to the PUB, the name of which I can't remember.... Himself thinks it may have been the Hometown Pub or something... just let's call it the Good Ole Boys pub... we were the only people in the pub not wearing a baseball cap.

But we had a nice steak each. And they had wine. Hurrah. And beer. The beer was on a special two for one, but the wine was not, no matter how hard I tried with the server who had a very sophisticated two way radio device in his ear, despite the fact that the pub was about the size of a normal pub with about twenty customers in it.

It had four enormous tv screens with the pre-season hockey on it.

I broke the news to Himself that I had decided to be a Canadien fan for the foreseeable.

Himself is a Maple Leaf fan.

He tried to explain that being a Habs fan was not allowed for people who intend to marry him, but I decided that that was stupid.

Like I said in a previous post, we are working our way through the major issues before we wed.

After the enormous steak, our tummies were too stretched to do more than have another couple of two for one beers and then trundle back to the BestWestern for telly and bed.

Up early next morning and onto Quebec city.

We liked Quebec City.

It's like a legoland Prague.

Or Paris, I suppose.

After seven pm, it pretty much shut down of course, being Canadian, but it was our single vacation night where we could let rip so we found a pub and then a restaurant, and then nicely full of (steak again) and beer and wine, we staggered down the Rue St Jean and found Les Yeux Bleues, which was recommended in the Lonely Planet.

It was a small, seedy bar a la Baggot Inn in the eighties, with a few live acts that consisted of French singer/ songwriters that sang two English songs to prove they understood the concept of rock music and then reverted to Quebec pop.

I'm sorry.

The French are great at movies.

They are great at art.

They are great at sculpture.

They are great at all forms of culture.

But put a guitar in their hands and all they can come up with is the effin' theme tune to the Teletubbies.

Everyone sang along raucously.

We met a pair of Boston gals who had driven out of the States for the first time in their lives that day.

We drank a pitcher of beer and staggered home through the drizzle to our dreadful little French hotel room that cost a fortune.

C'est Quebec.

Today, we drove to Montreal, then Ottawa, and now we are just three hours from our destination.

I'm too full of ribs and chocolate to say anything meaningful, so I'll just go to bed now.

Sorry about the break... summer's getting busy already

As I said in my last post, Columbo arrived on 9th June for two weeks.

Guests are always a busy time. Well, not that there's extra business, just the fact that there is no lying around thinking about what to blog about time when there are actual friends here.

Not to mention blog time.

This time was particularly busy, as Kitty was doing exams at the same time, so there was coaching and prompting and motivating and of course it'll be fine and there-thereing to be done (having Columbo around helped as she shared the load on that). In addition, it's the start of the summer season so colleagues are coming and going and I generally have to be around in work, as I tend to take vacation in the winter. But still, we got a few days to hit the road and see a little bit of the Maritimes.

We headed off in the sunshine and went north into New Brunswick and got three days great weather, beautiful sunshine and enough wind to make it bearable (but not to get rid of the enormous mosquitos) and camped for two nights in French New Brunswick. Christ the mossies were big. Each morning we awoke at 5.30am to the dawn chorus, after which the sun came up and shone on the three million or so mosquitos circling the tent waiting, waiting, just waiting for us to slip up and open the zip.

A few got into the car and ate me alive the second day. Almost two weeks later, I am still covered in angry red bites all around my ankles.

We spent the first night in Kouchebouguac, a provincial park set on a lagoon about half way up the coast of New Brunswick. The warmest sea water north of Virginia apparently ... I thought that was Pictou County...

... well they're both in the lee of PEI, so maybe that's what keeps the water warm.

It was nice. Peaceful and the park people left us pretty much alone. We cooked steaks and drank some wine and listened to the wind die down and the birds go to bed and the fire crackle and then we crawled into bed.

About five minutes later we heard a clang as the top was knocked off our saucepan.

So I'm lying there hoping it's not a bear, but there aren't any bear snuffling noises so I hoped not.

More noises.

Eventually I clambered out of the sleeping bag and shone the torch on the cooler.

Nothing.

Next morning we discovered raccoons had opened the cooler, taken out the bananas, peeled them, eaten them and left the skins for us to dispose of.

And they had rolled all the eggs off the camping table to crack them so they could eat the yolks.

And left the shells along with the banana skins.

Raccoons.

Just like teenagers.

Next day we drove the Acadian peninsula and rolled into Caraquet about five, just in time to catch the Acadian living history village.

Nice place, but $15 each is a bit friggin' steep to watch a lot of local people sit around in old clothes pretending to run a farm.

I took careful note of how to make linen clothes from flax.

For the compound.

So we'll have clothes.

We camped just outside Caraquet and headed into town for dinner at the Chocolaterie, which was very nice and then did the fire thing again.

We got an amazing sunset and an amazing sunrise the next morning, over the Choc Choc Mountains in Quebec. That's where we were headed, but I looked at the map and thought about the drive home and we decided not to do it.

Maybe next time...

Still and all, it was nice to see another province for a change.

No moose but.

I'm never going to see a moose.

Queenie's Big Chill III

What a day! Queenie is finally warm, at 9.45pm. Warm and in bed. Finally.

The electricity in the house has been acting up since before she moved in. During the summer, whenever someone flushed a toilet, all the lights in the house would dim, the odd appliance would blow for no reason, stuff like that. But as the evenings got darker and the power drain increased so did the problems. By Christmas, most of the circuits in the house were blowing at least once a day.

When Queenie got back from New Jersey, the only power left in the house was her light, the bathroom light, one socket in her room and the socket on the stove. Not funny, trying to run a house for five on all that. Queenie was lugging the microwave in and out of her room so that people could make dinner. But at least the furnace was working. Until last night. Everything blew last night.

So Queenie went to bed, because she had to get up at the crack of dawn anyway. So there she was, tossing and turning in bed, groaning a bit because Lady Moonbeam was making her presence felt. PsychoB and the Argonaut (Jason) were watching a hockey match loudly in the dark (no change there), but as well as being kept awake, Queenie was wide awake because she had drunk Coke that evening, had not drunk beer, had run out of relaxing holidays, and had to go to stressful, election-ridden work the next day.

At two fifty am she lost it and tore into the living room squeaking like a bat tracking a mosquito to demand they shut up. The Argonaut slunk off to bed and PsychoB banged around the kitchen a bit to show Queenie who was boss. Got to sleep despite for a bit but Lady Moonbeam is the boss in this house today and woke Queenie up again at 5.45am.

So I got up. Got dressed. Ate breakfast. Went out to get the 7.40am bus. It was minus eight and a bit windy.

No bus.

No bus for forty, achingly, freezingly, FUCKING minutes.

Queenie’s feet were sending pain shoots up her legs and into her groin by the time the bus came. As Himself would say 'Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr'.

You can only say Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr properly when your whole body is shaking involuntarily so that you don't slip into a frostbite coma on the street while waiting for the bus.

Her face hurt.

Her cheeks felt like she’d burnt them on a stove. But cold.

There was a spot in the small of her back that felt like the Snow Queen was kissing it relentlessly.

And of course it was the first day back to work so the office was cold.

Cold all day.

And then Queenie decided to work late, and then remembered she had to go to the supermarket. Which is freezing because of all the freezer cabinets pumping out cold air. Then home in the cold. And even though it was after seven when she got home, Nova Scotia Power were still foostering around the pylon in a cherry picker. And the house was down to fifteen degrees.

We issue press releases about houses when they’re that cold here.

Good thing I grew up in a Georgian house, where heat was something that escaped as soon as it was created in the radiators, and wafted up to warm the cobwebs in the ceilings. (Not that we had cobwebs very often, it’s just sometimes in the winter when it was very dark you didn’t notice them for a bit).

Now I know I can do cold.
I hate it, hate it, hate it.
But I can do it.

I was relentlessly cheerful about the whole thing because I thought my landlady was going to have a nervous breakdown and she’s a great landlady and she didn’t deserve the strop she was getting from the Argonaut.

I swear there’s nothing uglier than a whingey Cape Bretoner.

Anyways, it all got sorted in the end and Queenie cooked dinner and ran a bath and sat in it until her bones started sweating and now she’s finally warm. In bed. Warm.

Aaaaahhhhhh……………!

And she’s all smiley too because the fourth member of the Byrne clan to visit Halifax in nearly as many months emailed her today to announce the impending visit next week.

Queenie was very amused to think that there will have been four Byrnes in Halifax since she moved here and no Queenie-familias.

How ironic. I think I’ll do like my brother Baz and just move family.

I jest, I hear a little rumour that that might be on the turn soon. Just a flutter of a rumour mind, nothing in stone yet. But deliciously portentious all the same.

Yes, yes, I know that’s the incorrect use of the word portentious. Do I look like I care? You can’t see me to know? Well, get your ass over here then. Too cold furya is it? Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I stayed late in work today, as part of my ‘January is for working and working and saving and scrimping and more working’ vibe. They all left at five on the nose (despite there being a federal election), forgot I was there and turned off all the lights.

I couldn’t be assed turning them back on, so I put on RTE's Nine O’Clock News for company.

What has Sharon Ni Bheolain done to her hair? It looks like she got the new Siena Miller look done in the Ballyragget Ladies' Badminton Society Perming Salon.

And I got such a fright when I heard the regional correspondents. Do I talk like them? They all sound like leprechauns.

I’ve gotten all cosmopolitan, you know.

That’s cos I’ve been to New York (photos under the name there).

For two nights and two days.

Shopping.

And bar-hopping.

‘Twas fab, ‘twas.

Some things I loved about this visit to New York

• The Stars and Stripes suspended from the ceiling of Grand Central Station.


• The Manhattan skyline from the train to Queens.


• The red, green and gold flags fluttering in the wind at the Rockefeller Centre – were they for Kwanzai, I wonder?


• Going on the beer with Stevo and Eileen after walking from 42nd to 2nd in the FREEZING cold.


• The REALLY expensive Eastern chi-chi household stuff and Just Fahblus T'ings store we found in the Village, that had Nepalese woollen hats on sale for seven hundred dollars. The kind of hats you get for a fiver when you backpack in Nepal.


• Finding a signed, first edition hardback of Salman Rushdie’s new novel in Shakespeare and Co that was reduced to twenty bucks in the sale. The shop assistant told me I should sell it on eBay. I said ‘after I’ve read it’. But I won’t.


• The gawa crab we had at in Mainland India at the end of Bleechers (am I spelling that correctly)


• Spending all night the first night looking for that Irish bar.


• Finding it.


• Having it to ourselves.


• Getting a business card that said Kevin, Solas Vibe Co-ordinator. I shit you not. Imagine getting the apostrophe wrong on that!


• Knowing we could do it all again the next night.


• Hearing the snippets of conversation. My favourite was Because I love you, I will wear socks to the airport.


• Being persuaded to buy that skirt by Jersey Girl. Who is now haranguing me on my own blog about buying clothes. Tsk…. Ahdunno!


• The people working in the shoe shops on West Eighth Street. Particularly the woman who tried to get me to try on a pair of boots and when I said ‘no, no more temptation, don’t let me buy anything. I’m not allowed buy any more shoes today’, replied ‘okay girl, but you in a shoe store’


• Being completely wrecked so deciding not to go home and change but to just keep doing it all again the next night.


• Pastrami sandwiches in Katz’ Diner for supper, sitting between the photos of Johnny Depp and Bill Clinton.


• Drinking cucumber gin with a lawyer from New Brunswick in the Rue B. Cucumber gin is almost as nice as sloe gin.


• The bouncer at The Living Room carding me, not letting me in because I had no id, and then letting me in for being honest when I told him I was thirty five and a half.


• Having ‘ceann an baile’ at almost three am, served to us by a girl from somewhere near Nenagh.


• Hailing the maddest Malian cab driver in the world to take us back to Queens. MCD – do you know which way you want to go? Queenie – no, but I know how much it costs, so don’t rip us off or we’ll kill you. MCD – Would you really? Queenie, not very upright at this point – Oh yeah. MCD laughs insanely and whizzes us across the bridge, turning round to talk the whole time. Queenie wonders who’s going to kill whom.

The How did they keep the bar up in Whelans’ while we were separated? Lower East Side Pub Crawl

Eileen would like to point out that she invented this pub crawl about five years ago. Stevo would like to point out that he used to live in New York and already knew his way round. Queenie would like to point out that she wrote it all down. Once on the back of a Delirious Tremens beer mat, and again tonight.

If she can find the effing beer mat!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh no it’s okay…. here we are… I had it put away in the new wicker basket tidy set for posterity!! Queenie got to Canadian Tire this week and bought storage receptacles so she doesn’t go mad with the clutter. Nice Indonesian cane ones. For seven bucks. She dreads to think...

• 6.25pm The Fleamarket, on Avenue A. We had onion soup and glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon, and the cheese in the onion soup was soft yet chewy – perfect


• 7.42pm Croxley Ales, on Avenue B. We had the Beer of the Week, except they had run out, so we had the substitute beer of the week.


• 9.26pm 2A, on Avenue A and Second. So famous they don’t have a name on it. Apparently


• 10.21pm Katz Diner, for pastrami sandwiches, coleslaw and fries


• 10.50pm The Living room, near Arlene’s Grocery, which we didn’t go to for some reason. Marc the bouncer cards me and there’s a jazz funk band playing in the back room who aren’t as good as what’s on the stereo in the bar


• 1.52am Rue B, for cucumber gin


• 2.11am Musical Bar, 219 Avenue B, the barman buys us a drink and lets us smoke


• 2.45am, Mona’s for the last one

Queenies Big Chill II

Fungus on tree in New Jersey
More photos under the title as usual
(yes I know some of the photos I've entitled lichen are fungi. I just got lazy)

Ohforchrissakes.

Queenie was left to her own devices for the first time since Christmas Eve ten days ago and she was supposed to spend the day writing and blogging and catching up and she did everything but. As per usual, she found the following activities far more interesting.

Queenie used her last day of freedom from the shackles of employment to:

• Fiddle with photos from New Jersey and New York and loaded them onto Shutterfly


• Clean the bathroom (properly this time)


• Bitch to Jason about the power going out. Again.


• Ring the landlady about the power going out again. And got the best news ever, which is that psychoB is being evicted. Wahey!!


• Celebrate the news with Missy


• MSN with Polly and SovietPoP for a while


• Go to the shop to buy non-cookable food seeing as the power is out. Again.


• Eat most of a big box of peanut caramel chocolatey things Tina gave her which are exceedingly yummy


• Realise it was Myles’ birthday – shit shit shit – Queenie always bloody forgets everyone’s birthday, but his is the worst because a) he never forgets hers, and b) it’s the day after new year’s - how difficult is that to remember

Happy Birthday Myles!!!!!!
I’m sorry I’m such a shit friend!

So here she is again. Eight fifteen on the clock; back to work in twelve hours, and not a thing written.

Typical.

Everyone seemed to have had a nice Christmas, according to their blogs though.

To continue with mine, the day after Christmas, which doesn’t seem to have a day in America, and which is called Boxing Day in Canada, which is weird for a girl who calls it Stephen’s Day, we all got up pretty early because we had had a reasonably abstemious Christmas (well, until we sat down to eat anyway) Day. Jersey Girl cooked everyone eggs and then we all donned boots and jackets and hats and went walking in the woods.

It was very nice. Reminded me of Nova Scotia, with all the poplars. They were interspersed with trees of really really dark wood, which provided a nice contrast with the silver barks of the poplars. Very Blair Witch Project. And because there was no snow, there were lots and lots of dead leaves to crunch through.

The colours in the wood are orange and black, which are the Princeton colours - Queenie wondered if that is where they got them from. She took a lot of photos of fungi and lichen, which she plans to use in her new little business venture of ‘quirky cards’ which she hopes to design using some of her photos – e.g. fungi, street lights, beach pebbles, stuff like that.

For sale in the Farmers’ Market of a Saturday.

If she ever gets a day off again to go to the printer and get them made.

We spent a bit of time on the walk making up the quotations for inside the cards, all of which Queenie forgets of course, being consumed with taking photos of orange fungus, so maybe you can remind her guys if you get a chance.

Anyway, basic fitness level activity achieved, we got back in the car and hit an outlet shopping mall. It’s what you do in New Jersey. The value is unbelievably good. I went to Nike and got enough leezurkloze to see me through the next five years, i.e. one pair of sweat pants and four tops. And I got a sensible work jacket in J Crew for sixty bucks.

I am turning into such a Nova Scotian. If it’s full price I am not effing interested.

Then we went to Jesters, Bordentown’s premier beer and accompanying food joint (as opposed to Farnsworth House, which is the premier food and accompanying wine joint) for dinner and pitchers. And then home for a nightcap and bed. Next day was New York City, doncha know.

Queenie's Big Chill I

New Year’s Eve; time for reflection and resolutions. Or drinking, if the other two don’t catch your fancy. Probably best not to mix the three. Reflective drinking or resolute drinking maybe.

Queenie just got a text from Nadia, who is her normal NYE buddy. Strange to be away and not seeing her. Strange but not unprecedented.

Queenie just got back from NYC. Via New Jersey. A very enjoyable few days, which she will blog in bits and pieces, what with having a lot to do at the moment.

I left Halifax on Christmas Eve very early. The city was hushed under a soft layer of snow when the taxi came, and we took it slow to the airport – there were a couple of ditched cars on the way – then I wandered around the deserted airport for an hour until my flight was called. We had to sit on the plane for an hour until the de-icer got to us. Then up, up, up we went into a world of white and through to a bright blue sky and the sun beating in the window of the plane.

My two tall, highly intelligent, well-educated, liberal, environmentalist, politically active adult friends were waiting for me at the gate in Newark wearing candy cane striped reindeer antlers, as promised. Mike’s left antler was drooping slightly forward, giving him a slightly poignant air, which was at odds with the giddiness of the moment. Then we hung around waiting for the Dublin contingent while I drank a Starbucks and talked at a hundred miles an hour.

About forty minutes later, my presents, I mean my friends (who were carrying my presents but that’s not why I was so happy to see them) walked through the same gate as I had and Christmas was underway.

I am always amazed at how much good friends have to say to each other and how five days and nights with a close group can pass in a blur of chatter about everything under the sun.

We had a lovely dinner party at Jersey Girl’s big dining table and talked nineteen to the dozen while opening our Christmas presents. Ireland did Queenie proud this year. I am coming down with tomato cup a soup and Barry’s teabags. As well as my annual stache of books – Jane Smiley’s book on writing, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion; a book of Nick Laird’s poetry and two books which I would file under Offalyiana if I ever filed my book collection on that website that enables you to – God and the Referee, a very funny compilation of GAA quotes, and from Crinkill to Kathmandu, a book of poetry and writing by some friends from home.

The Queen Mother had also included some photos of herself and her consort and my brother. Which was very thoughtful, as I didn’t have any.

And I got a pretty evening bag and some beautiful jewellery. And then when I got up in the morning, there was a big red stocking with my name on it, with loads of goodies in it from Santa, including a very useful bear whistle (see earlier entries).

We got muffled up for the wind and rain, and went to watch George Washington cross the Delaware. As Jersey Girl says, re-enactment enthusiasts are truly mad. It was interesting, but very wet. The river was very wide, and we were on the receiving side, so there was a lot of standing around waiting for the re-enacters to arrive. There was plenty of spectator action going on on our side though. I sneaked around taking photos of the more ridiculous looking ones and began a week-long obsession with photographing the ubiquitous Stars and Stripes.

Finally, a cannon boomed and the re-enacters pottered across the Delaware in the rain and everyone cheered when they arrived and went home to dry off and eat their dinner.

We had a vegetarian Christmas dinner, my first ever, which was yummy and certainly beat last year’s Venezuelan Christmas dinner by a country mile. Then we played a board game that involved being a dealer in the high stakes world of the international art market. Jersey Girl won. Queenie spent too much time trying to figure out how to win the game and not enough time actually paying attention to what the other players were doing.

C'mon. Come from Away. Come to Halifax

I’m listening to last.fm. They’ve recommended the Israeli singer Noa to me. Which is nice, because I love Noa. I always feel like I’m watching La Dolce Vita when I listen to her sing, no wonder she’s so popular in Italy.

Smile, no matter what they tell you
Don’t listen to a word they say
'Cause life is beautiful that way

la la la, I'm wearing a drindl skirt and I have pointy boobs!

I watched La Dolce Vita again on dvd recently and realised that the opening sequence of Goodbye Lenin is an homage to its opening sequence. I had forgotten that. I had forgotten what a great movie it was. The dvd had interviews with a lot of the actors, including Anita Ekberg, thirty years on. My, she is dippy. And the dvd also contained a long interview with Fellini, in which he described his love-hate relationship with Rome.

I suppose we all have those relationships with cities. Queenie certainly has it with Dublin. But she hasn’t developed it with Halifax yet. She’s still in the first flush of madness that is her love affair with a nice city. So she’s on a mission to get people over here to visit, for a number of reasons, not least because she’d like a bit of company to look forward to.

Gypsy has promised she’ll come next year. And Jersey Girl and her BH. And Ken said he’d come after he’s been to New York. And the Queen Mum and Dad are going to get a bit of an arm-twisting as well. But the rest of you should come too. And some of you should come back. Because Halifax is great. And I miss you all.

So, step one of the C’mon, Come from Away, Come to Nova Scotia marketing campaign, for which I should be paid by Nova Scotia Tourism, not that I ever will, is a taste of some of the nice evening/ weekend things to do in Downtown Halifax.

Go to the Farmers’ Market for a crepe on Saturday morning

The Farmers’ Market starts at seven am on a Saturday morning and goes on until one. It’s packed for most of that time. I worked on the Acadiana Soy stand for a few Saturdays during the summer, you may remember, so I got a good look at the clientele and it ranges from wildly prosperous yuppie types of the brand you get in the Temple Bar market, to cruise liner tourists browsing for gifts, to committed vegans looking for their weekly food, to the Food Bank people soliciting donations. That’s one of the nice things about it.

After you meet Anna and George at the stall, you can go upstairs and visit Maurize, who runs the crepe stall near the front entrance. His crepes are to die for. He’s an oceanographer with a second job. So many Nova Scotians do that – run a little business on the side.

I always have a banana and chocolate crepe. I’m usually so hungry by the time I get it, I wolf it down in about three bites. Sometimes I have some Thai food from the ladies out in the hall, who do a nice fried rice special for lunch. And if I’m feeling really flush, I buy a loaf of the most expensive bread in the world, the five grain organic Vienna, at the next stall, which comes in at a whopping $4.50 a loaf, but which tastes fantastic.

But not fantastic enough that I’d ever serve it at a dinner party!

The Farmers' Market does lots and lots of interesting jewellry, clothes and crafts as well and there's no tax usually. Which is good, as it's 15% here.

Check your email in the Paperchase

I started eating in the Paperchase when I arrived first in Halifax, because it was mentioned in the Rough Guide and because it has free wi-fi. Now, although a lot of the coffee shops and even some of the Asian restaurants provide the service, I still go back to the Paperchase because of its atmosphere. And the samosas are really good.

It’s on Blowers’ St. near the sk8ter shop, upstairs from a small shabby newsagents, which seems to have more free newspapers on view than periodicals. Most of the staff in the newsagents has dreadlocks, or braids, or Afros of one description or another. They ignore you completely if you want to buy anything, being engrossed in their mates who hang out in the shop to keep them company.

You head past the cash register and up the stairs in the middle of the shop to the Paperchase. As soon as you reach the turn of the stairs, which are pretty steep, you get a strong whiff of coffee and then you bounce up into two bright rooms; one of which has windows all along one side that are taken out in summertime, and lots of comfy sofas and PC stations and high stools if you want to sit at a bar near the window. The other side has tables and chairs, if you want to work at something on your laptop.

They always have lots of free newspapers and magazines lying around. And you can hang out nursing a coffee as long as you want. The coffee is all organic fair trade blends, from Just Us!, which is the Nova Scotian free trade brand which is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. The clientele is predominantly green, as the Ecology Action Centre is just across the road on Argyll. After work, however, you get a good smattering of people hanging around waiting for a play in the Neptune or the Khyber. So lots of earwigging of people with interesting shoes who/ affect strangely placed pauses in the middle of their/ sentences, which signifies that they are intellectual/ Canadiennes.

Stupid Canadians just have an uplift at the end of their sentences. Or an eh!

I jest of course. I much prefer ehsters myself.

I found out recently that Buck 65 owns it. He used to have his coffee there, and when he got rich he bought it.

But I was a regular there before I knew that.

I wonder is he an artic. pauser, or an ehster? An ehster, I’d imagine.

Get a bikini wax or a DIY facial in Remedy Spa

If I were to bring back one business idea from Nova Scotia to Ireland, it would be Remedy’s DIY facial. It’s a brilliant idea, so watch someone nick it asap. I’m sure it’s common practice in Canada, but I’ve only seen it here.

For twenty five bucks, you go in and sit at a long counter like a diner surrounded by LOVELY products. They you get pampered by the staff, who are fantastic at making you feel like a queen no matter how much you spend there, while you do your own facial using their line of products.

Then you can go into one of their treatment rooms for a waxing session. Their waxing specialist has won all kind of awards for it. I don’t know what the wax is, I’ve never seen it before. It’s a bright orange paste, like liquid plasticine. She dobs a big splodge of it on your whatsit, then dips her finger into the pot to create a candyfloss style bubble of the wax, which she then sticks onto the wax cooling on your body and lifts her finger, thus ripping the lot off.

And the best thing about the best bikini wax in the world and I’ve had them on four continents, is IT DOESN’T HURT AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She also told me to exfoliate to prevent ingrown hairs. Which is the best advice I have ever got from a beautician, or aesthetician as they are called here. Why did I not know this?

Then they often give you a free something or other, like a paraffin hand treatment, or some face cream or something. They're really nice women and great business women. I'd say their repeat business is phenomenal. They do half-price waxing every Wednesday and they are booked solid weeks in advance.

Browse in the Barrington Bookstore/ Schooner’s Books

Last FM is playing me Fatboy Slim’s Drop the Hate which is a great geddupoffyoassandshakeitwildlyforabit song, so excuse me a minute.

So far I like its recommendations. I’ve had everything from John Coltrane to Sonic Youth, and from Black Sabbath to Cocteau Twins. I had forgotten about them.

Anyways, on with our tour.

Halifax is a second hand book lover's dream. There are three great second hand bookshops that I can think of offhand. And there are three other great new stock bookshops, inclduding Frog Hollow on Spring Garden Rd., where I bought all my Christmas presents.

Of course, there are second hand books on sale everywhere; at yard sales, in newsagents, in second clothes shops, all over the place. Truly Canadians are the biggest readers in the world.

We have a book club in work. It’s easy. It’s more a pile than a club. When you’re finished reading a book you bought second hand, you bring it into work and stick it on the pile. If it disappears forever, then good luck to it. If it doesn’t, and you get a sudden change of heart, you can take it home again. In the meantime, PFW get to read it. And then you can talk about it if you want. Or not.

One or two of the PFW have mentioned that they’re amused at how highbrow the book-pile has gotten since I arrived. The first book I brought in was Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Which was the first Rushdie I had ever finished and it blew me away – so funny/ erudite/empathic/plus a ripping good yarn set in Mumbai. I was amazed; I always imagined Rushdie to be like Banville. Amazing to think that such a man could write such a book (I’m reading Bruce Chatwin’s biography at the moment and Rushdie sounds like a complete prick, as does Paul Theroux, but we already knew that after his book on VS Naipaul).

Anyways, I arrived in with MC and the PFW were very amused. Then I brought in a Michael Chabon. Then an Alice Munro. Then I stole them all back again, not having gotten over the ‘must keep the precious paper with the story on it’ thing I have. Then I relented and brought them all back in again, because I have no shelves.

Although I am thinking about taking them home again for posting to Ireland to add to the collection. If it's not too expensive.

But anyway, back to bookshops. Both Barrington Books (it has another name as well which I forget) and Schooner’s are old style second hand bookshops of the Kenny’s variety.

Important Announcement: Do you all know that Kenny’s Bookshop, Shop St. Galway is closing in the New Year?

It will be the end of an era for many of us. Anytime I went to Galway I would stick my head in the door and ask Mrs. Kenny if she’d seen my uncle that day. She usually had. I spent hours in there; with my parents, with Jersey Girl, with my uncle, by myself. The sculpture gallery at the back in particular was one of my special places; it was so rare for me to see sculpture, which is my favourite visual art form.

Funny that, I just remembered I always dreamed I’d have a house in which I could display sculpture. Probably not going to happen now…

One of the last times I was in Kenny’s was a few summers ago during the Arts Festival; they had an exhibition commemorating the art of hurling. Some really clever pieces. And some really beautiful pieces. I still have the catalogue.

But anyways, yes, Kenny’s is dead, long live Schooner’s.

All of the second hand bookshops in Halifax are blessed with wonderfully eccentric owners and their patient spouses. As they should be. In Barrington’s, I always have an argument with the owner, because he has Brian Moore in the Canadian section. Brian is of course Irish. Even though he only admits it intermittently.

I am determined to have him moved. And the owner is determined to hold out for the pleasure of watching me approach the argument. The staff, who are all tall male college student-aged (I like to think he hires them for their ability to reach the high shelves) and are very possibly SMU English majors, all like to chip into the argument as well.

It makes for a nice lunchtime every couple of weeks.

Recently, I went in for a minute during my lunch break and came out with a first edition hardback of Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Chatwin, a copy of The Moons of Jupiter, which is the only Alice Munro short story collection I haven’t yet read, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which I had to stop reading because it was upsetting me too much.

Ya kinna work on policy concerning the apocalyptic nightmare that is the environment today all day and then go home and read Ms Atwwod. Ya jes kinna.

Although I'm going to try, as it is fantastically well-structured and sardonic, as only she can be. It's just so goddamn plausible.

Potter around the Mary E Black Craft Gallery (geddit?)

Halifax has a fine design college – the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, or Enscad, as it is called. I think the Mary E Black Gallery is its principal exhibition space, but it curates craft exhibitions from all over Canada.

It took the Mary E Black to make me realise to what extent Irish ceramics are influenced by the Irish landscape.

OHMYGOD I wish I could win the lottery one day, so I could buy you all one object from this gallery. The ceramics in particular are superb; the Canadian landscape and Inuit and Mi’kmaq heritage provide a very different inspiration to artisans than our peaty, mountainous landscape and Celtic tradition.

Not better, I’m saying. Just different. Different colours, different washes, different shapes.

They also have wonderful silkscreen and batik applications, room screens and objects like that, as well as wonderful stained glass collection that’s on view sometimes. Or maybe not – I don’t go in as often as I should. Just press my nose against the window and stare in longingly.

It’s just up the street from the art gallery as well, so you can pop in there afterwards and look at the collection and have a cup of tea in the café.

I have decided I am going to do a course in enscad next year. I want to learn how to make stained glass. I have wanted to study this for ages. I think my way of looking at colour would serve it reasonably well.

Find that obscure jazz record you’ve been looking for for ages in Sam’s Records

Sam’s Record Store occupies two lots on Barrington, which are broken into one another unevenly, so you find yourself walking down a slight slope to the indie section at the back of the shop. You can find most things here. They stay open till nine. They let you bring back cds if you don’t like them.

And they put a big blackboard out every Monday with all the week’s releases chalked on it so you don’t even have to go into the shop to check what’s in.

When you go in, say hello to Terry. He's down the back with the really long dreads. We went to see Bedouin Soundclash last week.

THEY WERE SHITE!!

I don't care if they're from Montreal.

Have supper in The Wooden Monkey

I’ve had dinner (or supper, as it’s called in Canada) in several restaurants in Halifax, and apart from Chives, which no one else will go to because it’s too expensive (it’s about the same as a nice restaurant in Dublin) the Wooden Monkey is my favourite. Even though their wine glasses are too small.

One of the waiters IS Chandler Bing. When you meet him, you suddenly realise that of course Matthew Perry is Canadian.

The restaurant is a typical Haligonian alternative venue: a vaguely astrological, well-meaning, hippified, hand-crafted wooden beamed, just me and my dreams and my hairy boyfriend type of place. In Halifax, this generally means that the food will be great, with lots of vegetarian options, the toilets will be sparkling and the service will be fantastic. And it will be great value.

Queenie likes her hippies with a bit of a business nose, so she does.

Have a pint in Ginger’s Tavern/ The Economy Shoe Shop

Really, you should have a pint in both, as they are very different.

The Economy Shoe Shop is on Argyll, just down from the Wooden Monkey. Argyll St. is the George’s St. of Halifax – lots of bars and restaurants. In the summertime, all the restaurants have tables on the street, so the Council puts a wooden walkway out on the road to protect pedestrians. In the winter time, it’s all put away, but the street is still nice.

If I were to import a business idea from Ireland to Nova Scotia, it would be patio heaters. But I’ve said that already.

The ESS is multi-roomed heaving mass of all types that I’ve described before, so I won’t go into it again.

Ginger’s Tavern is the opposite. It’s as if God knew I’d be homesick, so he recreated the International in Wicklow St., but a little bigger, because it’s Canada.

Long bar. Grumpy barman, who’s a big softie when you get to know him. Regular clientele, all with their own stools. Wallpaper on the ceiling, sticky brown from cigarette smoke. Tiny toilets. Uncomfortable little tables and stools at the end. Great music. Comedy lounge upstairs.

I kid you not.

Ginger’s is a microbrewery too, owned and operated by an Irishman. And the barman is from Newfoundland. His brother is the Minister for something or other over there. His name is Joe. The barman that is. The other night he said he’d like a postcard from Ireland. I said I’d see what I could do. His address is Joe Byrne, Ginger’s Tavern, 1662 Barrington St., Halifax NS B3J 2A2, Canada.

I’m sure he’d appreciate postcards from other places too. Tell him Queenie told you to send it.

Don’t let me down now.

Go to a gig in Stage Nine/ The Marquee Club

Finally, you can end the night wonderfully in any number of night clubs, venues, late bars, discobars, restaurant cum venues, dinner clubs, whatever, but my two favourite are Stage Nine and The Marquee Club. So far anyway.

Stage Nine is a small, low-ceilinged upstairs venue that shows mostly up and coming indie and alt-country acts and has a young indie crowd that makes Queenie feel ancient when she’s there.

The Marquee Club is much bigger – it’s up on Gottingen St., in the uber-trendy North end. You go there to see touring bands, from Toronto or Montreal mostly. It's got a nice raised bit at the back with a bar so you can sit down, or you can mosh with the kids up the front. It's really dark and dingy and they haven't taken the skeletons down from the Hallowe'en party yet.

People who live in the north end feel superior to people who live in the south end, due to the fact that they have to put up with gunfire and swarming and crime. And us southies just have to put up with joggers and dog walkers.

Recent crime statistics put Halifax at the top of the violent crime figures in a Canadian metro area. This is due to a small area of the city, around Gottingen, being very dangerous. Having lived in Dublin South Central for eight years, I am bewildered as to what Canadians define as very dangerous. First of all, there’s a ruddy great police station slap bang in the middle of it. Full of RCMPs with guns and taser sticks. I wander up and down that street at all hours of the day and night and feel completely safe. Apart from the drunks outside the Salvation Army hostel, but they’re not going to shoot me.

I am also bewildered as to how Halifax can be more dangerous than Toronto seeing as there is a gang war, comparable to the one in Dublin, going on in Toronto at the moment. I must compare the Halifax stats with Dublin crime figures and see if there’s any similarity. I doubt it.

There is definitely no link between violent crime and rubbish anyways, because even though the north end is less prosperous than the south end, it is just as clean.

Time to go to bed, eh?

After the Marquee closes at two, you can go play pool, or go clubbing in town, or nip up to the Citadel Hotel for a taxi, or walk down to the Dairy Queen on Spring Garden Rd. for a coffee. Or whatever. I’ll leave it up to you.

Hope you had a nice time. See you soon.

Queenie spots the new Bigfoot

Photos under the title as usual

Bigfoot. Sasquatch. The mysterious hairy animal/ person/ whatever that roams the wildest places of North America. They found some hairs recently and the most sardonic scientist – a biologist or geneticist - I have ever come across was strong-armed by the media into testing them for DNA evidence of Bigfoot. He held a press conference when he got the results back, which had the entire country up in a heap, during which he told everyone in Canada to grow up for chrissakes, it was only sheep wool.

Unless it was a Bigfoot in sheep’s clothing, he added.

Really serious-minded scientists with tenure are great, aren’t they!

Despite this, the myth lives on apace. The Bigfoot website Queenie looked at today said: “It is a fact that, for over seventy years, people have been finding, photographing, and casting sets of very large human-shaped tracks. Most are discovered by chance in remote areas. These tracks continue to be found to this day.”

Well, not to take away from the serious and important work being undertaken by the Bigfoot people, Queenie went to Alberta last week and found some human-shaped tracks of her own that were very disturbing.

The environmentalists she works with/ on behalf of talk a lot about the ecological footprint. It’s a very interesting concept. Everyone has one. It is based on how much energy you use as a person. Canadians, generally, have quite a large footprint, between eight and twelve hectares each, living as they do in a car-based society that is very cold a lot of the time. And the fact that they are blessed with an abundance of natural resources – water, coal, oil, trees, fish, wildlife, land - means they can afford to be wasteful. One of my favourite statistics in this regard is one I sourced from the David Suzuki Foundation, which states that if everyone on the planet consumed resources like a Canadian, we would need four and a half planets like Earth to sustain us all.

Despite the wonderful work undertaken by Suzuki, Ron Coleman in GPI Atlantic here in Halifax, and others, these facts are not sinking in here. In part because they are too disturbing, they involve too much change for people used to a particular way of life. And in part because of the iron grip that multinationals have on Canada’s resources. And by default her lawmakers and protectors.

Queenie got a glimpse of the whole thing in action last week in Alberta and had a serious attack of the ‘shock and awes’. So much so that she cannot shake it.

Onto Isabella to get a load

After a bowl of cereal and the application of several layers of thermal clothing last Monday morning, she ventured out into minus 15 degrees Centrigade cold to spend the day in Himself’s truck.

Her name is Isabella. Named in earlier days, because Queenie was on a bit of an Isabella Rosselini kick at the time. She’s a brand new Western Star model with a hundred feet of trailer running behind her.

A big momma in other words.

After we filled the gas tank, we headed three hundred kilometres north on the road to Fort McMurray. It was snowing lightly but the cab was warm. Outside, the landscape slid past the iced up windows. A vast prairie of grass and canola stubble, the colour of butterscotch, lightly dusted with snow. Stands of bare poplars lined the road intermittently, huddled together like herds of bodiless zebras. Sometimes scrub clung to them, stringy and bare, its bark the colour of mulberries. Other than the trees, there was nothing to break up the emptiness of the land except rows and rows of hay bales.

We had four hours of this.

Past the gulag into the forest

A few miles before Fort McMurray, we turned off the highway and made our way through the Indian reservation that straggles along the edge of Lake Gregoire. IR No. 167 I think it was. They’re given numbers on the map, even though they all have names. Almost all of the houses fronted the lake, which stretched achingly white into the soft fuzz of a snowstorm on its far side. Houses, boats, barbeques, four wheelers, pick ups, trailers, toys, kayaks, bicycles, all the accessories of the Canadian lifestyle, lay about haphazardly, covered in snow. The sky had darkened and gave off an eerie violet glow that created a strange filter in front of the horizon.

We drove on and on down increasingly narrow tracks and took a wrong turn. Not pretty with a 100 foot of unbendable steel behind us. Finally, we found the forest, located at the back of a gas refinery under construction. After getting through tight security at the front gate, we had to skirt the edge of the building site to get to the wood loader.

It reminded me of a scene from a James Bond movie, I’m not sure which one, in which a weapons silo is being built in some Artic place. I counted nearly fifty cranes. Little machines were trundling to and fro, as well as all kinds of jeeps, half tons and other vehicles. There were no people in sight though.

Foundations for all kinds of buildings had been poured and were covered in snow while they waited to be finished. Rows and rows and rows of prefabricated buildings housed the thousands of men who must have been working on this huge site. I wondered where they were. None of the cranes seemed to be operating.

Never mind From Russia with Love. All it needed was a barbed wire fence and a gun tower and it would have been a gulag.

I kept expecting the whole thing to light up with a massive explosion, after which the young Sean Connery would run out of the blast in a tuxedo to hijack Izzy and drive her till her wheels came off. But we got round the site without incident and lurched onto a narrow track between the trees.

There were no signs to our loader, the D-Loader, just signs for the PK-Loader, so of course we got lost again. Eventually, we met an Indian driving a grader, who told us to go back to the 3km sign and follow the signs for the PK-Loader. Sure enough, even though it was for a different logging company (Russians who are so Orthodox they don’t allow their drivers to work on a Sunday, but who are canny enough to suggest they start work at 12.01am that night) we eventually found the loader and its operator, known for his bad temper, sitting in the cab glaring at us like a malevolent Buddha.

“You’re late. You know you’re supposed to ring dispatch if you’re late.”

“Yeah, well, we've been too busy trying to find the goddamn loader to call anyone.”

I could tell Himself was a bit stressed at this stage, so I said nothing. Apart from applauding his attitude with the loader guy. Of course I wasn’t allowed out of the truck, as there was heavy machinery and male stuff involved, which I would just get in the way of, so I stayed warm and took some pictures.

Stretching Izzy’s trailers out

The trailers weren’t at their full length, so they had to be stretched to take the trees piled up in the clearing. This seemed to involve quite a lot of motion, you know the sort. Getting in and out of the cab; and driving forward a bit and then stopping and getting out and swearing at things, and then getting back in again to lurch forward again, and then some more swearing. The bit of me that remembered going out testing with my dad when he was tired and busy kicked in reflexively, took over and made me as small and as quiet as possible.

Trailer one slid out nice and handy. Trailer two was more problematic. Eventually, he banged back into the cab, put his foot on the accelerator one more time, till the trailer suddenly gave and everything lurched forward with an almighty squeal and a sudden stop that snapped my head back on my neck with the force of a catapult.

Now I know why they call it whiplash.

I had cried out involuntarily. We both sat there for a moment. Then he went to look. Came back. The damned hole had slid too far past the other one and the fucking bar wouldn’t go through. He slammed the door shut and stalked off to kick something. I did what every woman should do when her man is fighting the malign forces of the entire galaxy single-handedly due to the stupidity of other men, specifically, another man he doesn’t like much; I sewed my mouth shut and took an intense interest in Izzy’s control panel for the next hour.

Every now and then there was another thump and a lurch as he tried to sort it out. But the stupid thing was immovable. Eventually he gave up, none of the other men present were being particularly helpful, and loaded her. With 63,000 kgs of 100ft deciduous tree trunks.

That’s a lot of wood. On a wobbly trailer. On a dirt forest track. I thought about unstitching my mouth to point this out, but then decided he knew best.

He finally got back into the cab. His hands and face were soooooo cold.

He was worried the trailer would pull apart too.

“Or the load might come forward”, he told me.

I hadn’t thought of that. I turned to look at the sheet of cracked plexi-glass that served as the back window of the cab and that was all that stood between us and 63,000 kgs of deciduous tree trunk. I was surprised at how unconcerned I was about the whole thing.

He wrapped the load with chains and straps to stabilise it, and ran a chain through the mismatched holes in the trailer pole and tried to call his boss to check whether it would be safe to move the truck, while I sat in the cab and tried to feel nervous.

Nope. Not a thing. I smoked a cigarette, and looked out at him and began feeling a bit disingenuous. I mean, here I was, sitting in a warm cab thinking I was incredibly post-modern by trying to existentialise the whole thing, while he was out there struggling with straps and chains and machines and a rude loader operator and his boss’s unavailability all at the same time in the freezing cold, so that he could get us home safely. I decided my best contribution to the situation was to not get nervous.

Eventually he got through to his boss who said the trailer would hold as long as it was loaded. And then ranted and raved a bit about the delay and time being money yadda, yadda.

They’re all like that out here. They’re exactly the same as the blokes you meet in Café Insane on a Friday night, except they all wear baseball caps and work boots and drive Dodge pickups. The bloke in Café Insane would be horrified to hear his Armani suit doesn’t cut him a swathe apart from a North Albertan cattleman or oilman or logger, but the obsession with the time/money interface, and the relentless search for a quick buck on the back of someone else’s hard work and ingenuity is the same.

Queenie takes a pit stop

It took us four hours to get to the mill, heading south down that road that runs from the North to Edmonton. It was beginning to get dark (a long drawn out affair in Northern Alberta) as we drove onto the main highway again. I really needed to use the bathroom, but I decided not to stop the truck in the woods in case the Furies played havoc with us. Besides, I had seen a couple of rest stops on the way up. With facilities.

After ninety minutes of being in a truck on a highway with a lot of trees being hauled behind you, I was a bit uncomfortable. So I mentioned it. We agreed he’d stop at the next rest stop. Or when it got dark. Whichever came first.

Well, the guy who comes round and rolls up the streets in Alberta every night at ten o’clock must’ve put them away early, because there was no sign of them on the way back to the mill. I held on for another hour or so. Yoga practice has its uses!!

Eventually, I started getting cranky. Then suddenly, Himself pulled up against some kind of large, square-shaped concrete bollard on the side of the road and said ‘There you go. No one will see you.”

I looked around. It was still light. We were on the only road into northern Alberta. Everyone was driving home from the Canadian Rodeo championships, so a steady stream of traffic was coming towards us. And it was a very small bollard.

“I could go in the woods”, I said.

“It’ll take you a time to walk in there”, he pointed out. “I’ve angled the truck so no one can see you”, he continued, with more patience than I deserved.

“Will there be bears still awake in the woods?”

“Probably. It’ll be fine here.”

“It’s a very small bollard.”

“ There’s tissues behind you in that box.”

I clambered down from the truck with a sigh.

Not see me, my ass! So to speak. Izzy’s wheels were as tall as my breastbone, for chrissakes, leaving a five foot gap under her that anyone in a car could see through. And it was so cold. And Himself had used the stop to get out to check the load strapping, so there wasn't a huge amount of privacy although he was on the opposite side of the truck.

Well, girl, I thought, it’s adventure you wanted… I took a deep breath and began to unbutton.

Just as I was getting into position a car screeched to a halt on the other side of the road. I stood up hurriedly and watched from behind one of Izzy’s wheels as the driver, a man, got out for a quick slash behind his car, then drove off in a hurry.

BASTARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The unfairness of it! With a heavy heart, I unbuttoned my jeans again and bared my ass to the Albertan winter, and God only knows how many cowboys and their children. Just as I finished, a silent breeze (called up no doubt by the gods from somewhere north of the Hudson Bay) caressed my butt and I knew the meaning of ass-numbing cold.

As I climbed back into the cab, teeth chattering, Himself said he was very proud of me.

The ninth circle of hell produces shock and awe

A couple of hours later, the feeling was coming back into my gluteals, as we pulled into the entrance to the mill, which is owned by a Japanese multinational who shall remain nameless, because I wasn’t supposed to be there.

A line of trucks loaded down with trees queued patiently for the scales to have their lumber weighed. Himself got two coffees from the women in the weigh station. After being weighed – there’s a hefty fine if you’re overweight – we drove to an unstrapping station, where he had to unchain and unstrap the lumber before driving Isabella towards the unloading bay. This was located beside a stack of lumber the size of Croke Park. To say it was immense would be an understatement. A horizontal, leafless, branchless forest.

To one side, a crane as large and impressive as Belfast’s Goliath stood waiting for us. We drove underneath it and got out. Suddenly, its giant claw descended smoothly and noiselessly and closed itself around the first trailer-full of logs. Then they slid smoothly up into the air, with no more consequence than if they were twigs in Zackie’s hand. Smoothly, quickly, they were hauled along the transom of the crane and dropped into an enormous funnel to my left.

After a few seconds, there was a low grumble as something tore into the 33,000 kgs of deciduous tree trunks we had delivered to its fate. In a few more seconds I could see pulp and dust sliding down different chutes towards the paper mill itself.

The claw came back for the second load. They were smoothly dispatched the way of the first lot. We were free to go and get another acre of forest. And bring it back here.

We sat back into the cab. I couldn’t speak for the shock and awes. Himself looked at it through my eyes and as usual, found the words for me.

“Oh my, what are we doing to the earth?”

“Oh my, what indeed. And why?”

All so as we can wipe our asses with soft tissue when we need to.

Queenie found a mighty big footprint, don't you think?