Just before dawn on the Minas Basin

Queenie had an emotional roller-coaster of a week last week. The long soft landing had gone to my head a little bit I think. Last week, the runway of reality loomed up with a velocity that almost unseated me. But I’ve steadied again. Not without a few tears though.

After my Long Island escapades, I went back to Grand Pre and busied myself there for a couple of days, before heading up to Halifax to look for somewhere to live. Of course, I started to miss Long Island as soon as I left it, as I knew I would. At least the weekend is the weekend there, unlike the farm, where the weekend is when most of the work gets done.

The vibe on the farm was a lot tenser than when I left it. I don’t know what happened while I was away and it’s none of my business. Yoichi and Janna, the German wwoofer, had both left for Halifax, so maybe the family dynamics aren’t so good when there isn’t company. The first day there was a Saturday, so I did the farmers market in Wolfville, which was very pleasant, before tackling the hillside jungle of docks and clover that is their lawn. No wonder I have big muscles in my arms, dragging the lawnmower up and down that slope.

I actually have scarily big biceps at the moment. For a girl that is.

Sunday was even more tense, with tears and slammed doors, so I ended up bringing the youngest to the pub for a couple of hours to try and relax her. As we drove home, the most beautiful moon I’ve seen in Canada so far was rising over the hill at the back of the farmhouse. It was the continuation of the full moon I experienced on Long Island, but the orb seemed closer to earth, more rounded and more golden down here in the Annapolis Valley. Its pull has had a profound effect on my body in the last two weeks, which was a bit freaky at the time, but it’s great to be back in sync with it. However, the house was early to bed as usual, so I couldn’t watch it for long.

Searching for a home from home

Monday morning, I got the Acadian Bus to Halifax and for a while it was nice to wander the streets and drink a proper cup of coffee and be the mistress of my own hours. Even though I was house hunting. To my surprise I found myself getting a little bit stressed. Nothing like I was in Ireland, but still, the heart rate was up a bit and I was tetchy. It was strange to feel stressed, not having felt like that for two months now. I was in for worse, though, as Monday and Tuesday both were made up of fruitless hours pounding the pavements.

Monday in particular was awful – it poured rain all afternoon and I wandered the streets phoning numbers on To Rent signs all around the South End, only to find the flats were unfurnished. Then I viewed the flat from hell, you know, the one you ended up in at the beginning of second year in college when you had no money and no sense. This time I took advantage of my opportunity to have a go at a rackrenter, and I let fly at my proposed landlord, asking him how in the name of God could he stand over his statement to me on the phone that this was a nice apartment, when it was blindingly obvious that it was nothing more than a damp, basement, cockroach infested firetrap. With no windows. The cheek of him, wasting my time like that.

I felt great afterwards.

A wet Monday night

Back at the hostel though, reality began to seep through the cracks in my defences and I felt really disoriented and a bit lonely. It was raining. In Halifax, when it rains, it RAINS. A sweet little Australian girl, on her way to Winnipeg to work at a Christian mission there, comforted me a bit, and we talked about why we found ourselves meeting each other, halfway across our worlds, in a small room with six beds and no curtains in a wet city on a Monday night. What drove us to do this? We neither of us had an answer for ourselves that night.

After we put the lights out, I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I lay worrying about my job, about my house hunting, about money, about my job again, about whether I would be able to make the enormous intellectual leap they are asking of me. How am I supposed to get up to speed on the political system of a completely different COUNTRY in a couple of weeks? Not to mention learning the policy ropes. Not to mention figuring out all the nuances of the party and the provincial legislature. Not to mention coming up with innovative ideas. Not to mention doing it all at the speed of a parliamentary day, which is something akin to the speed of light. Not to mention doing it with forty people wanting me to make a mess of it, so they can get the job. I eventually fell asleep. I dreamt of my days back with the old party, the old fear of fucking up came back and prowled around me again, and when I woke I could taste its metallic tang on my tongue. I didn’t want to face the day at all.

Tuesday with a morose Yoichi

After a morning of phone calls that weren’t providing me with many leads, I met up with Yoichi, who was in a foul mood as well. Unsurprisingly, he is not yet fluent in English after just two weeks of classes, so he was engaging in that most Japanese of pastimes, metaphorically battering himself around the head for not being perfect. I really wasn’t in the mood for it, having spent the previous evening doing it to myself, so we spent a couple of hours sitting morosely nursing our Tim Horton’s cups, looking out at the sea. He was silent because he wouldn’t say anything unless he could construct the sentence perfectly. I was silent because I was panicking about what I was doing with my life. Finally we separated, as I had to view a house. Two minutes later, my prospective landlady cancelled. The evening stretched out endlessly in front of me, so I ran to the ferry terminal, but Yoichi had already gone back to Dartmouth. I felt so alone.

Wednesday, the sun blazed down on Halifax and everyone’s mood lightened as they looked forward to the long weekend. My new boss emailed me and didn’t appear to have any misgivings about hiring me. Some woman called Jill rang to say the room she thought she had let had become available again, so did I want to view it? I still can’t figure out who she was, or how I got in contact with her. I don’t remember ringing a Jill. Anyways, suddenly I had three places to view in one day. I’ll have to get one of them, I thought.

Finding a south end address

I have walked the length and breadth of Halifax city (not suburbs) at this stage. It’s quite compact, with the residential areas all situated very close to downtown. They are mostly blocks of detached clapboard houses on small lots, with trees lining the streets and very little traffic. I had pretty much resigned myself to having to trade proximity to the centre for access to a garden, having spent two days struggling with this decision. The first viewing was almost what I wanted, although it was just a bit far out, and not fantastic enough to merit the distance. Nevertheless, as I walked away I felt that at least I had something do-able in the bag.

When I looked at my map I realised I could walk down to the sea on the other side of the isthmus upon which the south end of the city is built and follow it round to the second house on my list. That was how I discovered why everyone said I should live in the south end. The road cuts through a big park, then meanders along a series of beautiful streets, with big hedges hiding gorgeous houses and large gardens with mature plants and trees. I found my street, Beaufort Avenue – the fourth house down, the yellow one, she had said on the phone – and suddenly I rounded a bend in the road (an actual bend in the road, boys and girls) and there it was. It was love at first sight and I had three hours to go until I viewed it. I went and sat in the Public Gardens and bit my nails.

Thankfully, I got it and signed the lease on the spot.

So now I have a home at last and it’s very nice. The rent is EU340 a month, which includes all electricity, heat, water, cable, phone and hi-speed wireless internet costs. As well as all my sheets and towels and blankets, which saves me a major expense.

I walked back to the hostel down South St. and the sun was shining and I realised this would be my walk to and from work. The DalPlex sports complex is five minutes from the house, as is the sea. Suddenly, it all seemed plausible, workable, manageable again. Yoichi and I went to the pub to celebrate. I had a pint of IPA and he had two pints of some Guinness-like concoction they make here which is quite nice. Then he brought me to a really serious looking Japanese restaurant for sushi. We were having a rare old time, trying to get my hands to mould into the right shape for using chopsticks, and failing miserably, when I got a text message from my mother with some bad news. Which brought me right back down again, and discomfited Yoichi terribly, as he is not used to western displays of emotion. He finally decided to deal with it by eating all of the sushi except for the piece I had ruined by my tears plopping onto it.

Back to Wolfville for the last time

I had promised the farm family that I would work at the Farmers’ Market in Halifax on Saturday, but I had asked them to pay me this time, to cover my expenses in the hostel. We agreed on fifty dollars – which is outrageously low, but never mind. However, as I had found a house there was no reason to stay in Halifax, so I decided to go back to Wolfville and stay until Saturday. That way I could help with the preparations for the market and save the family fifty bucks.

I returned to complete chaos. I kept my head down and cooked dinner for everyone. There was a new wwoofer, a sixteen year-old home-schooled vegetarian called Zephyr, so I cooked tofu. Which is so boring. There was nothing else to eat, though. The atmosphere was so tense that afterwards I watched a dvd on the laptop in my room. After three days of broken sleep in the hostel, my body relaxed in the quiet of the countryside and I slept in until ten. I got up just as they were leaving to bring the produce to Halifax for the market. Oops!

When they were safely gone, Ron sloped over for a fag and a moan. He and the youngest had had a fight. He didn’t go into the details, but I assumed he had wound her up too much as usual. Then he told me they’d been moaning about having to pay me for the market. He shouldn’t have. But he was mad with them.

As I pushed the lawnmower around their endless, ever-growing acre of grass for the fourth time in a month, I began to get so angry about it I could spit. I tried not to. I wasn’t supposed to know this, so I shouldn’t get mad. And they were short of cash. And I hadn’t mentioned the fact that I wasn’t going to charge them.

But still.

The darkest hour

Next morning, I was up at 4.45am. It was still pitch black outside, with no stars or moon to relieve it. The darkest hour truly is before the dawn. As we drove through the valley, the sun came up over the Minas Basin and streaked the sky boldly in scarlet and shocking pink and orange. I thought about the funeral that was taking place at home. I wished I were in Springtown with my friends, not in Halifax selling tofu to hippies for a woman who didn’t think a day of my labour was worth a miserly fifty bucks. When she offered me the money at the end of the day I refused to take it. She didn’t need to be told twice.

Although cynicism is at best not constructive and at worst destructive and there’s too much of it in the world, the problem with idealism is that people always let you down in the end. One of the questions I often ask myself is how do I find a steady state in which to operate that exists somewhere between these extremes?

After the market, we had to do deliveries. It was very hot. I was very tired and cranky and the car was stuffed with boxes, bags and coolers. We got to the Grainery, which is an anarchist co-operative foodstore. Their order was under a box of glass soy milk bottles. I eventually unearthed it. When I brought the order in the three people in the shop, none of whom had phoned in the order, started having a row about whether or not they needed the eggs.

I pointed out that they had ordered them, so it was irrelevant whether or not they needed them. They argued some more. Eventually we agreed to take them back. I made a couple of narky remarks and shoved the egg box back into the car and we took off. Muttering to each other about feckin' hippies and how disorganised they are. We drove up Robie and stopped at the lights. Two rednecks in a pick up truck pulled up beside us and grinned down at me.

Oh, for God's sake, I thought, ignoring them.

"Miss, do you know you've got a box of glass bottles sitting on the roof of your car?"

"Oh shit!"

I jumped out and rescued the box and as I got back in the lights turned green and we sped off buckled with laughter.

Sitting on the dock of the bay

After all that, I was exhausted. I sat in the blazing sunshine on a rock in a deserted corner of Halifax harbour. Which is the second biggest natural harbour in the world apparently, after Sidney. The Mi’kmaq called it Chebucto, which means ‘great harbour’. I watched the tall ships and cruisers, motor boats and yachts go by. At one point they were dwarfed by an enormous container ship bearing a Swedish flag that boomed its foghorn majestically as it headed out to sea. I wrote a letter to a friend. After a couple of hours, I heard someone on the rocks behind me and looked round to see Yoichi, who had left the library early and found me somehow. He took his flip-flops off and rolled up his trousers and splashed around in the water like a four year old until he got me to laugh.

Yeah, it was a tough week in more ways than one. But I’ve decided to stop imagining dragons for a bit. Life is too short to be scared.

Queenie’s going to settle down for a bit

Nearly two months on the road now and I'm getting a bit tired of other people's ideas of tidy.

I’m gong to Halifax next week to look for somewhere to live. It’s a really nice city – it has a really busy port, so it’s very nautical. It’s built on the side of a hill, so everything slopes down to the water. It has four universities and a big gay population, (Rosie O’Donnell and Cindi Lauper arrived last week on a cruise ship with loads of gay couples that got married one after another during a single day) so it’s a very right on, organic restaurants, fair trade cafes, alternative music stores, second hand bookshops type of place. Perfect. It’s about the same size as Galway. Actually, it’s a mirror image of Galway, if Galway was built on the side of a hill.

I have a job. I’m going to be working for the ***. I’m to be a researcher for them – mainy on education, environment, immigration, a few other things. I saw the job advertised in the paper and submitted a CV, more out of curiosity than anything else. Then they offered me the job on the spot. I was so surprised I took it. Then I had to talk myself into it.

Before you shout complete sell out, Queenie, I told you so, I have to tell you I'm conflicted.

On the plus side, it’s a job, it’s a good job with an excellent salary for Nova Scotia, although it is woegeous compared to my last one. It’s something I can do, I know I can do. It may help to make a difference, if what people tell me about them is true. I get a nice office high up in a building in downtown Halifax, which I reckon is a pretty good spot to watch the winter from.

Most of all, it's an opportunity to live in Nova Scotia on more than the minimum wage.

I’ve been in the Maritimes, or Atlantic Canada as they call it, for about a month now. I absolutely love it. It’s like Ireland was in the eighties, except with better weather. The roads are terrible, nobody has any money, there aren’t any good jobs around, they all moan about the government all the time. Everyone’s convinced that there’s dodgy stuff going on, with big companies buying up all kinds of resources dead cheap. The ass is falling out of the fishing industry and farming. The only difference is that the place is full of call centres. So they must have fast-forwarded to that bit of the economic cycle.

Souns great you say. The thing is, it’s all at a much slower pace than at home. Cell phones are for emergencies. Nine to five is what it says on the tin. There’s time to stand and talk in the street if you meet someone. Nice. There's a focus on organic food, on recycling, on community-building, on having time for people that we have lost in Dublin. I want to live here for a while. This job is an opportunity to do that.

On the minus side, it’s the same work as I’ve done in the past, and this year is about doing things differently. So I’m a bit annoyed with myself for taking the first job I've been offered. I have a feeling I should be trying something different. But I wasn’t coming down with job offers from anywhere else and I am not wwoofing in the winter. My friend Ray said I should look at it in terms of changing one or two variables at a time in my life, think of it as part of that experiment – i.e. same job, different people, place, context.

We’ll see. It will be an interesting experience for the six months of my probation anyway and then we’ll see what happens. They asked me to stay for a good while. But they don’t know when that will be.

Another plus was the vibe I got from them and about them. My interview was delightfully informal and they seemed to be on my wavelength. And anyone I have talked to seems to think they're a good, well-meaning group of people. Apart from hunting enthusiasts. I hitched a lift from a guy the other day who told me he had twenty two guns!! He didn’t like the ***. Having said that, he also thought Hitler had a point. He asked me how I was going to use my Irish experience to get Canadians to vote for them and I said “What about 'Vote *** or I’ll kneecap you'” and he nearly crashed the car he laughed so much.

Actually, on a tangent, one weird thing I find is that most Canadians think the Troubles are still going on and always mention it in a really sympathetic manner. Then they’re almost annoyed when I tell them it’s all over bar the shouting. And the odd bank job. Overall though, they know quite a lot about the outside world compared to their neighbours. Very few of them have travelled abroad though. It seems to be that if they make it across Canada (and a lot have) then that’s enough. Having said that, they are wonderfully open and welcoming and interested in other cultures. A bit nosy, to tell the truth, a bit like the traditional Irish B&B woman. I haven’t been alone for one second since I got here, never mind lonely.

They have a really dry wit and mostly get the Irish sense of the absurd, although not always. They are also very polite, and nobody swears. They don’t drink very much during the week – they talk about community-building a lot here and do that sort of thing on week nights. They like to go out at the weekend though.

They never stop talking though, jeez, I thought I was bad. Also, I find Nova Scotians don’t like spending money and complain about the price of everything all the time. As everything is around half the price it is in Ireland, I find this hilarious. I don’t know yet whether that’s because they don’t have much money, or whether the stereotype followed them to the new world. I think it’s a bit of both!!!

On a final note:

Today’s learning is all about relativity. On my relatively woegeous salary, I could afford a 2,500 sq foot house on two acres of Atlantic seafront, in a nice community thirty miles from Halifax. Which doesn’t have traffic problems, not really, so the commute would be a doddle.

Read it and weep boys and girls….we are being ripped off by somebody somewhere in that value chain we keep being beaten up with the Yankee stick.

Grand Pre Gazetteer

I found this in the local newspaper. I thought it was interesting, if a little po-faced:

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings, but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints.

We spend more, but have less.
We buy more, but enjoy less.

We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time.

We have more degrees, but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgement, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom and hate too often. We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life, but not life to years.

We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbour. We conquered outer space, but not inner space. We’ve done larger things, but not better things. We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice.

We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less. These are the times of fast food and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships.

Attack of the Medusa

Balancing Rock, Long Island. The rest of the photos are under the blog title as usual.

Long Island is a long narrow foot that pokes its toe gingerly into the cold waters of the Atlantic, its instep elegantly curved towards the mainland. It is the end of the North Mountain ridge and the centre of the island is dense with fir trees, with some hardwood sprinkled among them. They crowd to the island’s edge and peer over into bouldered coves, watching seals bask at low tide. In winter, storms tear trees up and hurl them into the ocean. There, the currents strip them slowly. Firstly, the needles and leaves, then the branches, roots and finally the bark. When it can do no more with them, the ocean flings them back onto the rocks at Bear Cove. The spring sun dries and fades them to a smooth, buttermilk sheen. They lie there until summer, when groups of people arrive at sunset, carrying beer coolers and hot dogs and warm fleeces for nightfall. The men pile two or three trees onto a roaring fire, working in groups to lever them on, while the women sit on the rocks, sipping beer and passing comments on the work. They hike in from the road, a mile or so that’s easy in the slanted evening light, trickier by starlight or in fog, or after a few too many beers. Sometimes they bring the whale babes with them. That includes me, apparently.

Whale babe…………….

Chief bottle washer I am. At the sharp end of wwoofing. Nasty little man with his nasty little business and two other summer staff he treats like muck, leaving nothing for me to do but cook for them all. I roll up my sleeves and get stuck in. I last a week before his manipulative little ways get to me so deeply I go through him for a short cut, roaring at him until I have gotten it all out of my system, much to the delight of the rest of the island. But I only promised him a week, so I kept my side of the bargain. And I did get to see a whale. For about a minute.

‘Nuff said about him. We’ll save it for the formal complaint to the agency.

So yeah, whale babe…

Fog babe more like.

Sitting in the ferocious sunshine, you suddenly get a feeling that something’s looking at you and turn round. There it is, slipped quietly in from the ocean, a deep, deep fog that cuts the island off from the mainland and from the sea. The hourly ferry honks mournfully, reminding everyone it is passing across the short mile of water that separates these villages from Tim Horton’s’, from IMAX, from Subway, from the grocery store, from the highway, from everything. Soon it creeps over you, wrapping you up in its coolness and dampness. It can last an hour, a day, a week. Everything takes on a new shape, fusses around its edges. Birds get bigger, cars softer. It’s more difficult to figure out who’s coming down the road. The fog is what protects the islanders from the relentless gaze of their neighbours. It holds all their secrets in its moist grasp and draws them back into the ocean with itself. They sink to the bottom and nourish the long, green-feathered plants living there. It is deep here, off Long Island. Deep enough for whales, deep enough for oil, deep enough for secrets.

I am living in a spooky house. It’s down the road a piece from the whale watching business, where the wwoof host lives. A kind of staff house, although we eat with him. It’s not even his spookiest house apparently. It’s the mirror image of one I drew when I was a teenager. It has two front doors. One opens onto a stairway that leads to my bedroom. The other opens into the kitchen, from which you get to the stairway through a completely unlit passageway. On my first evening, the woman who works in the whale watching business invited me to her home for a barbeque. Returning through the fog alone, many hours and many drinks later, I pick the wrong door. It took me a while to figure out how to get to my room. A bit scary because I was alone. Story of my life I thought miserably, as I finally made it to bed and realised I had no curtains.

I have two housemates. Helen is English and working here as a SWAPPER. Mykyle is from BC. He has cycled across Canada to get here. His speech patterns remind me of Andrew Farrell, if Andrew was trapped inside Denzel Washington’s body. Helen and Mykyle are at opposite ends of the human spectrum as far as I can see. I have to try and get on with both of them. Luckily, they are never together, as Mykyle is an organic vegan and eats alone. We discuss his theories on the universe, which are very strange, coming as they do from the perspective of a mathematically inclined brain that has had no formal training. As I said to him, you could be spectacularly right, or you could be wrong. But I’m never going to be able to tell you which. Maybe Keith could have a word while he’s here.

Whale watching………..

I go whale watching. I see Minkes and Humpbacks. I see a humpback calf playing around in the water, with the rest of the family watching over it. Lovely. The best moment is when I am sitting on a rock in Bear Cove, taking photos of the fog. I can’t see past shore, but I can hear a sort of watery, sucking noise that came and went every couple of minutes. It’s a whale rising and blowing. It is so close to me, feeding away, it is great. The whale watch guy zooms past twice in the Zodiac without seeing it. I laugh to myself.

Apart from whale watching and fishing, there ain’t much to do on Long Island. There are some nice trails. One leads to the Balancing Rock (see photos). The Balancing Rock is a geological freak that has ended up being quite a nifty tourist trap. Somebody told me that the locals tied a rope around the rock and tied the rope to a boat and tried to topple it into the sea fifty or so years ago. Another leads to the lighthouse. There’s a park and some nice coves.

Flour Cove is one of the prettiest. One end stretches out into a little point, with trees stepping in a line towards the sea. It’s on the west side of the island, so it has spectacular sunsets (again see photos). The other end has a lot of flat rocks that are perfect for bonfires and parties. We have one there one Friday night, going down to watch the sunset, before building a fire and hooking my laptop up to a car radio with iTunes on shuffle until the battery ran out. A couple from Montreal who were camping in the cove decide to give in and just join the party. Their Labrador, Bob spends all night trying to get the hot dogs out of the fire.

I get to know the locals a bit. They’re all very friendly. Some are a bit more friendly than others, but that’s the way it goes. They all tell me all the scandal about all the others. I feel full of secrets. I don’t repeat them to anyone. But some of them are superb novel fodder, I tell you.

One of the locals is having a messy break up with his wife. He moans about it to me a lot. I try to sympathise, try to help him talk it through. She’s having a psychotic episode, she keeps stealing his car and driving it round the island, screeching to a halt whenever she sees him. Shouting and screaming through the window. She bites him on the face one day. I am really shocked. Nobody else seems to be as shocked, although they complain about her behaviour and call her Medusa.

Pretty soon, her eyeliner-circled racoon eyes start to focus on me. I am standing on the porch of the spooky house drinking a cup of tea one evening when she drives past. Screeches to a stop. Reverses back. Rolls the window down.

“I hope you enjoy him now, cos he’s got nothing left!” she screams at me.

I say nothing. I’m trying not to laugh.
She drives off.

The next day, I am walking on the main road up to the Balancing Rock when she drives towards me. I can see by the movement of the car that she is deliberating whether to point it at me. I look at the ditch and calculate my chances. But then she’s past and the moment is past and nothing has happened.

I have moved out of the spooky house at this stage, my wwoofing week being over, and am staying for a couple of days in the house of the brother of the man with the psychotic ex-wife. The weather is fantastic. I sit on their porch sunbathing and watching the cars drive on and off the ferry. One day I am sitting there alone when she drives past on her way to her friend’s house.

She screeches to a halt again. Rolls the window down. Starts shouting at me. I have my back to her and I don’t react. Don’t turn round, don’t move a muscle. Eventually she goes away. I am relaxing back into my sunbathing when suddenly I see her car make its way up the hill towards me. I am out of my chair, off the deck and into the house with the screen door slammed behind me faster than you can say “psycho ex-wife”.

She comes into the house after me. We stand, tense, neither of us sure what to do next. Up close, she looks tired and ill. She starts the shouting thing again, but as I don’t react at all, she eventually calms down. She wants me to give him some garbled message about something he has to do in half and hour or he’s dead. I refuse. She’s a bit taken aback by this. We agree that she should leave and she does. I am shaking. I decide I should leave the island, but it is almost evening so I will have to stay the night.

Happy Birthday Queenie

My true centre is my capacity to fall in love with everything around me.
- Malvina Hoffman

They say that the lifelong challenge for Cancerians is boundary making – they have trouble marking out where they end and the rest of the universe begins. I have always felt that to be true. Picking my way through the no man’s land of my intersection with life is sometimes a problem, because even though I think we are all tiny, interconnected carbon specks, other people don’t. Which is why I love to travel. Because when I travel, I can ignore boundaries and fall in love with everything around me every day.



Today is my birthday and I am thirty-five. I am a smoker, so I reckon I’m probably half way to my next life. If I’m lucky.

Half way there. As Yoichi would say, “WOW!!”

Yoichi is the Japanese wwoofer staying here at the moment. A Murakami novel of a mind, wrapped up in a slender little frame, with big spectacles and a nifty Casio translation machine that we use to torment him. We call him Yoichi Parker because he loves jazz and plays the alto sax. He smiles quietly to himself whenever we do. He’s an ecologist. He cycled around the coastline of Japan by himself last year and built a fire every night and cooked squid and potatoes and pumpkins and ate them looking out at the sea. Now he has a girlfriend who is studying in England. His English is neither good nor bad, but he has the endearing habit of shouting “WOW!!” at completely inopportune moments. For example:

“Yoichi, I’m going into Wolfville, would you like anything from the shops?”

“WOW!!!”

“Would you like anything?”

“Yes no.”

“YOICHI, I - DRIVE – (mime driving) NOW (point to watch) - TO - WOLF-VILLE (point west towards the town). ME. (point to myself, do driving watch thing again). WOULD – YOU (point to him) – LIKE – SOME-THING – FROM – THE – STORE (point to plastic Sobey’s bag)? COCA-COLA, CHOCOLATE, POTATO CHIPS?”

“Aaaaahhhhh, you are going Ulfwill?”

“Yes. Would you like me to buy you something?”

“I come too?”

“Sure.”

I think there should be a wow here, but there never is.

Anyway, halfway there – wow.

I got up early and read my birthday emails and then Ron arrived at 7.30am and when I let him in, he had a present for me. I knew he would. I was up early to get it really, although I didn’t let on. But I could tell he was pleased I had made the effort.

He bought me a birthday cake. And thirty-five candles. So I put all the candles on the cake and when I turned round he was standing there with the fire extinguisher in his hand. We laughed till we cried.

We laugh a lot, Ron and me. Or Wrong, as I call him. Cos he likes the last word does Ron. Oh yes. He’s been married three times. He has a girlfriend now; she works nights at a call centre over near Berwick. So he really only sees her at the weekends. He mentioned the fact that he had a waterbed this morning. He’s had one for twenty years. So now of course, I cannot get the image of Ron and Arlene on the waterbed in his trailer home, which is on top of the North Mountain across the bay, out of my head.

Ron is George’s friend and he’s putting a new floor into the tofu shop this week. In return, George is going to give him an old car he has sitting in the yard. And then he’ll fix it up and give it to someone else for his winter wood supply. Everything works on a barter system here, because nobody has any cash. The completion of these transactions is the cornerstone of the social life of this community. Firstly, you have to call over for a chat about what you want. And what you can trade. And when and where it’ll get done. And then when the work starts, you both go to the lumberyard or the repair shop or Harley’s Discount Hardware to buy whatever supplies you need to get the work done. Presumably so you can agree on what to spend.

You get up early and drive over and work from eight until about four thirty because you get breakfast, lunch and a beer at the end of the day. And then you go home and do your own chores. Everyone has a vegetable garden or some chickens. You don’t go to the pub because their beer is too expensive. Maybe once in a while you go over to the casino on the M’qMaq reservation and blow whatever you have.

Ron’s last wife did that with his savings account. And then got herself a good lawyer, and made him sell the house and give her half. Which is why he’s in the trailer. And she sold his dog to someone and wouldn’t tell him who. Everyone thinks she was a right bitch. Ron won’t be drawn on the subject. I asked him whether I could be wife number four and he just smiled and said I was too mouthy.

So I cooked eggs and we made some coffee and drank it and talked about the time he was a truck driver, bringing lumber down into the states and how scary that was compared to driving across Canada. And what Newfoundland is like, because I want to go there.

Then Yoichi got up and when he came into the kitchen, he bowed to me and handed me a small package that contained a pair of lacquered chopsticks.

Then George and Anna and their daughter Heather, who are the family I am wwoofing with, sang Happy Birthday to me and we all went to do our chores. Tomorrow night we are having a bonfire and some beers, but Friday is our busiest day because we have to do the Farmers Markets in Halifax and Wolfville on Saturday, so we have to get all the produce ready. Ready to us tofu in plain, herb and smoked. Free range eggs. Apple cider. Tofu dips, burgers and patties. Soymilk. George and Anna brought the produce into Halifax and put it in the fridges for tomorrow. Heather is making burgers. Yoichi and I are planting soybeans and corn, and we have to hoe the potatoes and bank them, and try to hoe the cabbages. But it rained last night and the ground was really sticky so I gave up after two rows and went back to work in the garden.

I am clearing ground for them. First I strim the wilderness back. It’s tricky, because I am keeping the hollyhocks, the bluebells and the wild mint and parsley, so I have to precision strim, which is not easy when my glasses are covered in bits of grass. Then I go over it with a heavy-duty lawn mower and take the last of the growth out. Then I rake it and dump barrowfuls of weeds on the compost heap. I dig up all the burdock roots and the docks and the thistles. Then I go over it again with the lawnmower and George tills what I’ve cleared if he can get the rotivator in. Sometimes I have to dig it out by hand.

It doesn’t feel like work, it’s a meditation. Even though it’s backbreaking, I can do it for hours, even in the rain. Whereas Yoichi and I are united in our hatred of hoeing and will use the first hint of mist to throw them down and find something else to do. I feel very close to Paddy, my gardening friend who’s dead now. I remember evenings watching him dig out beds, weed and plant, and when I start to do the same thing; I don’t have to think about it. George and Anna say I’m a natural gardener – I have an eye for it, whatever that means. Paddy and I have long chats about the state of the earth. There are too many stones, he’s disgusted, and when I ignore one he nags me until I go back and prise it up and out. Together, we’ve cleared over half an acre in just a few days.

So yeah, halfway there. Have I learned anything? Apart from the fact that I’m mouthy!!

Well, I’ve learned that I can do a lot of things, most things in fact, but I suppose the one thing I can’t do is be happy unless I feel that my work is in some way helping the earth or the people who live on it. I know this sounds appallingly right on, but I can’t think of another way to say it.

I’ve tried to fit in with the way things are done. I’ve really tried. Because people I care about want me to. Because it’s easier to live in a city and have an office job. Because for a long time I thought I was making a difference. Because I wanted to be successful and respected and well regarded. Because the work that makes me happy doesn’t bring wealth, or even financial security. But when I was wealthy (relative to the rest of the planet I was) and successful and a city girl I was miserable and lonely. As my sister Gypsy said in an email today, living in a city is such an inhumane thing to do to yourself after a certain point.

Even though I’m eking out my money and worrying about it constantly, even though I’m dirty and covered in mosquito bites, even though I haven’t been to the pub in two weeks, even though nobody bothers to acknowledge my job applications because I don’t have something I don’t know I don’t have, I am mostly blissfully happy. I am surrounded by people who are closing ranks around me because I make them smile (and hoe their pumpkins!). So maybe I was right to get out of the cul-de-sac. And although I am only reversing out of it yet, carefully, carefully, some days I feel like I’ve made the right choice.

But it’s all on a knife-edge still. Every day I panic at some point and want to pack my bags, run to a city, get an office job and have my old life again. But that is not what this year is about. This year is about learning new ways of living.

The most important thing I’ve learned in my two weeks in this community is that everyone knows their worth, their potential contribution to the overall work that needs to be done, whether it’s farming, caring, building, or whatever. Everyone hates the multinationals and shops local as much as possible. Everyone avoids tax through barter. Nothing is thrown away. Everything is recycled, reused, composted. Not because Bono told them to do it. Because they can’t afford to buy new. I can’t afford to buy new at the moment either. So I have to learn to trade. And in order to do that I have to determine my worth. My potential contribution.

As Ron would say, that’ll take some figurin’.

As Yoichi would say, WOW!!!!

Just after I posted this, I got an email from the *** offering me an interview. How ironic.

The Farm on the Hill, Grand Pre

Photos of the farm and some sights in North West Nova Scotia

Bearley’s House Blues n Rib with Ed the Hawg Dawg

Ocean Train and Halifax photos link under the title.

I was sitting on the terrace of El Med, a local Lebanese restaurant. I had finished what I could of my Binna Plate and was smoking a cigarette, trying to decide what to do next. It was pretty early for a Friday night. Only eight thirty. Nothing was going to happen before ten in Halifax. Across the road was a beggar I had photograph earlier. He was a big, gone to seed meathead, with an orange yellow coiff and a short, black back and sides. He was dressed like a punk. He held a sign saying ‘Out of work supermodel’. On the reverse side it said ‘seeking sugar mama’. He was from Toronto he had told me, over in Halifax for a holiday. His girlfriend got too stressed out he said, so he’d told her, baby, I gotta go away for a couple of weeks until you calm down. But he’d bought a bus ticket and he was going home to her Sunday. I hoped he’d have a bath before he got on the bus.

A pony-tailed, bearded man in a leather jacket, who had been sitting in the open window of the restaurant, moved with his bottle of beer out onto the terrace and sat smoking a cigarette too, pretending he was not looking at me. Eventually the beggar, who had a dreadful smoker’s cough, hacked long and hard enough to cause heads to turn and the bearded man used the opportunity to say something. I didn’t quite catch it so I leaned forward to hear it better.

Ed the Hawg Dawg

“I said, he can afford to buy cigarettes”, he raised his voice a little. He had a very strong Nova Scotian accent. A kind of drawling Dorset twang I think, but I haven’t quite pigeon-holed it. We had the usual first five minutes when I met someone. Where ya from? Why ya here? Where ya been? Where ya going to? That kind of thing. He talked about a trip he’d made to BC. I often find that with Canadians. On hearing I am travelling, they launch into a long narrative about their last trip. It’s part of their one-upmanship. They’re universally conversationally competitive, actually, nearly as bad as Americans. Or Irish people.

This guy was no exception. He had driven across Canada with a camper van full of weed in November and hadn’t been stopped once. For a bearded man with a long pony tail in a camper van with BC plates that must have been a miracle.

“You stayed off the TransCanada”, I said.

“Oh no, I rode it the whole way”, he answered. He introduced himself as Ed. I introduced myself as well. He was a Harley Davidson mechanic. He liked Van Morrison. His dad had sold the business so he was working for another guy. I could tell that rankled with him.

The waitress, who was an all-Canadian prom queen blonde – Type II: chunky legs – came out then and started tidying away the chairs. I paid my bill, but had a half a bottle of beer to finish, so I invited myself over to Ed’s table. He asked me to watch his jacket, then took a clear plastic bag with a large packet of skins surreptitiously out of his pocket and disappeared into the washroom for ten minutes. I sat and finished my beer and thought about stealing the jacket. I like to play these games with myself.

Who would notice? There was an Indian couple sitting in the window of the restaurant. They might. The beggar across the street might, but he wouldn’t care. The waitress? She was down at the serving hatch talking to her boss. In any case, I never actually steal anything. I just think about how I might do it.

Ed came back. Sat down again. Drew luxuriously from his beer. Placed it carefully back down on the table. I let him do this a few times and then asked what’s to do here on a Friday night. Turned out he didn’t really know. He lived about thirty kilometres outside of town. Only came in now and then to see what’s going on. We sat another while. I started to tie up my backpack. He coughed and asked would I like to go for a walk? That knocked me for six. I thought about it. It probably just meant a walk. Not like in Ireland. He seemed nice enough. He wasn’t very big, I reckoned I could kick him in the balls if needs be.

We walked up town. He lit the spliff he'd rolled in the washroom right on Barrington, Halifax’s main drag. I was a bit nervous, but nobody batted an eyelid. All the same, I suggested we walk down to the Waterfront and turned him down Blowers, which is the skateboard kids end of town.

We made our way down to the waterfront. Halifax is a serious of walks uphill to the town and downhill to the water. The wind had died down and there were all kinds of people sauntering up and down the wooden boardwalk that extends the length of Halifax downtown. Ed asked me what I thought about the city. I shrugged non-committedly – it’s guaranteed to wind them up when you do that. He started telling me about the different boats that come in and out of the port. Cruise liners and old sailing ships, and posh yachts and big game fishers and all kinds of freight boats, and of course the good old navy patrol boats. I made a smart comment about the importance of the Canadian navy, making sure no Yankees get across that maritime border. He wasn’t impressed.

Sharing a waterfront bench for an hour

“Those boys save a lot of people, you know. And they look after the buoys, and keep an eye on the weather and just look out for people generally”, he remonstrated. I kept schtum after that. At this stage, we had gotten down to the centre of the Harbourfront, where a bright yellow tugboat painted up like a cartoon character, which I had noticed earlier, was moored. On the land side, there was a little circular pavement area, with cafes and takeaways on all sides. I spotted a bench and made for it. Ed pointed out all the motorbikes that were parked neatly around the circle. There were about twenty maybe.

“Is this the biker part of town”, I asked.

“Sure is”. He was triumphant. Pleased I had chosen this bench, even though it looked out to sea. We sat watching people go by. It was very pleasant. I looked at the bright yellow tugboat, wondering if you could hire it for a wedding reception. It would be a perfect venue for a rave. Ed burbled on, recounting his version of the history of Halifax, which was low on detail. I was able to fill in a few, having read up on it in my Rough Guide. Ed didn’t really like that. He swiftly changed tack. Got onto that great stalwart of Canadian conversational one-upmanship – the winter.

I reckoned I could do a Nova Scotia winter.

“I’ve camped in the Andes you know”, I said. “I know about cold.” He wasn’t impressed.

“Maybe your Halifax winter, but down in Yarmouth where I’m from, you’ve got your freezing fog.”

“Freezing fog?”

“Oh yes, first you’ve got your rain, and then you’ve got your snow, and then you’ve got your freezing fog. And it freezes the snow. The snow falls, and then it tries to melt, but your fog comes and freezes it right up again. You can see it happening if you look out. And after you look out at the snow for a long time, eventually you can see it stops freezing in the fog, and starts to stay a little bit soft, and you know that soon it’ll be raining again and it’ll be spring.”

“Is that what you do in Yarmouth in the winter, sit and watch the snow melt?” I asked. We both bubbled over with laughter suddenly, as we got the same picture of Ed sitting behind a frosted up window, putting warm pennies up against the glass to see how the snow’s doing.

The talk turned to motorbikes. I admitted I knew nothing about bikes. Ed tried to get me to turn round to point out various bikes to me, but I figured he was trying to show me off to the biker guys, so I feigned complete disdain.

He talked bikes some more, until finally I decided that I had to interject in order to be able to steer the conversation away at some point. I considered asking him the stalwart biker dude question (so, have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), but decided against it. It would probably involve a long, complicated explanation of a book I’d found irredeemably boring. So I asked whether there were any Canadian bikes. He said sure, Bombardier. I said I always thought they were French. Ed tried to get me into a long argument about it, but as I didn’t have a clue he ended up arguing with himself and finally stopped, frustrated.
“Are you sure they’re made in France?”

“I told you, I don’t know anything about bikes.”

“Well why did you say they were?”

“I thought I’d take a stab at it”, I said. He looked at me for a long minute. I could see his thought processes clicking away behind his eyes. Then he looked at me anew. I could tell he’d made some sort of decision about me. As I had made up my mind about him two minutes after I’d met him, the idea that it had taken him over an hour amused me.

Ed stretched his legs out a bit and puffed his chest out a bit, and started telling me about how he never usually came down here, because all the guys would pester him for advice about their bikes. Apparently, there is some damn tv show where they do up bikes in impossible ways and say it’s possible. And then those guys come in the shop the next day and Ed has to tell them it’s not possible. Not for two hundred bucks anyway.

I figure it is the Hawg equivalent of Changing Rooms. I wondered aloud whether he shouldn’t have his own tv show. He preened. He didn’t think so though, he didn’t like those guys. But Ed could tell it like it really is, I persisted, be the biker’s mechanic, not some smooth tv guy who didn’t know how to handle a form wrench, or whatever it was he had been wittering on about earlier.

Ed considered this for a while. I watched him considering it. I love watching men think about something. They always move their head in a deliberate way that implies they are physically turning something over in their minds. I guess that’s where the phrase comes from. It’s something that was very male, and I often find it useful to mimic (only in work of course), if I want a man to think I am taking his views seriously.

He eventually decided against it. I suggested that he just tell guys that if they wanted his advice to come see him in his shop when he could charge them for it. Be upfront, you know. He liked that. He started to look around, wondering whether he could try it out in front of me.

I sneaked a look at my watch. We’d been sitting here for over an hour and no one had come near them. Dang, he was stupider than he looked. I sighed inwardly. I really wanted to go for a pint, but we’d have to run the biker gauntlet now, which meant one of two things could happen. Either nobody had noticed him, sitting here facing the sea with me, in which case they would descend like locusts when we stood up. Or, more likely, he was bragging to me, and the subsequent lack of locust type attention would injure his ego and he’d sulk for the rest of the night. Just as I was figuring out how I could save my time and his ego, he suggested walking on a bit.

We stood up and turned round. Holy smoke, there were over a hundred bikes parked in the circle. Not too many guys though. Only a couple of clusters. Ed headed straight for one of them, looking over his shoulder to check I was following. I did, at an angle. Well chosen, too, as none of them appeared too overjoyed to see him. A sudden surge of anger flowed through me. He wasn’t too smart, but he was a nice guy. He’d spent his evening trying to tell me what he knew about the harbour. He’d patiently explained the inner workings of Harley Davidson motorbikes. He’d even told me about winter in Yarmouth. I streamed on past him and half-turned, folded my arms and looked impatiently uptown. They looked over at me and then back at him. I tapped my foot a couple of times. Looked annoyed. He made the international gesture for ‘women, what can you do’, then loped over to me. I could tell he was happy enough.

“I think we should go for a pint”, I said.

A series of minor misunderstandings

It took us about forty minutes to find a suitable bar. Firstly we walked uphill from the waterfront. It’s a steep climb over three short blocks in Halifax. Nothing there. Ed said there was a place down a piece, so we walked over. I could feel the backs of my calves tighten. “Are we going downhill again?” I must have sounded a bit moany because Ed acted all affronted. I could feel his back stiffen as he walked along beside me. He must have had a cranky girlfriend one time, I thought. “I was just asking”, I said, “not complaining.” He didn’t answer. We found the bar he was looking for. The door opened onto a long hallway. Loud techno music thumped from behind the bar doors at the far end. There was a bouncer. We ventured in a few steps, then simultaneously turned and ran out of the place. That broke the ice a little bit.

“Do you mind if we go check my bike. I left it parked near the restaurant.”

“Sure.” He turned us onto another street. Now it was my turn to tense up a little. It was a bit dark and I didn’t know where I was. I tried not to let it show. Let the moment pass, girl, I thought, just be ready for the next one. He could feel my nervousness but he didn’t say anything. We walked on in silence. We were walking uphill again.

“Goddamn it, Ed, we’re going uphill again.” He started to laugh.

“Not able for it?”

“I told you, I’m a hill walker.”

He looked at her measured tread up the hill. “Yeah, maybe, you got the stride for it anyway.”

Far from a fucking hill walker’s stride you were reared, I thought as I stretched my legs into the slope for the third time that evening. Trust me to find the only man in Nova Scotia who couldn’t find a night out in a party town. Finally, we crested, back on Barrington again, and I sighed happily. I knew where I was again. I felt safe again. We walked down the street a little and then he stopped.

“There she is, she’s still there anyways.” He nodded across the street. I could see the outline of a motorbike in the dark. He didn’t bring me over to it, as I had expected. I wondered why. He stood for a moment.

“Do you have a place to stay?”

“Not yet”, I said.

Much to my amazement, he took a step backwards.

“I mean, I have a hostel, but I don’t have an apartment yet”, I said.

His relief was comical. I think our Ed got taken to the cleaners by a lady friend one time. Or maybe more than one time. I started to laugh at him, and he got a bit embarrassed about how rude he’d been. Then he rushed out a spiel about how the restaurant was down there if I wanted to go on my way, he gesticulated to his left. And there was a blues bar he knew down there, he gesticulated to the right. Then he stood there. Waiting for me to decide, I suppose.

I started walking towards the blues bar, which was in the same direction as my hostel anyway. I was dying for a pint after all that walking. He scurried after me.
”I don’t know what it’ll be like”, he said, all defensive again, “I’ve only been there the one time.”

“Jesus, Ed, what kind of women do you hang out with?” I said. “It’s not a problem if it’s not a nice bar.”

“Well, just so as you know.”

They were standing outside it. Bearley’s House Blues n Rib. It looked pretty seedy. It had its own car park, which is code for redneck here in Nova Scotia. I had walked past it a few times and there were usually a few people sitting outside on plastic garden furniture, smoking Du Maurier and drinking Blues, which is what I wanted to be doing, but there was no one there now. Ed seemed deflated at this.

He seems to have had more than his share of disappointment in life, so quickly did he rear up against it. People like that usually irritated me, but tonight I was feeling more forgiving. I figured I’d show him how Irish people do a Friday night.

“It’ll be fine, come on.” I plunged in.

A pint or two. Or not

As we walked in a girl sitting at the door announced it was four bucks cover charge. I paid. We walked in and sat at the bar. The place was Italian. Full of middle-aged couples. The women all wearing low cut tops and high high mules. The men with colourful shirts straining against their bellies. Mostly they were sitting at little low tables in front of a small stage. It was set up for a blues band – a saxaphone, a keyboards, two guitars and a drumkit. There were no signs of activity around the stage.

The barman was a big burly Italian, who like every other Italian I have met in Canada, talked like a cast member of The Sopranos. He ignored us for a good ten minutes. Ed wasn’t very good at getting his attention. Finally, I gave him a long stare and he came over after the obligatory minute.

I ordered a pint of Keiths, as it was the only tap I could see that wasn’t an import beer. Ed wasn’t impressed. “That stuff’s real cheap”, he said, “it’ll blow your head off tomorrow if you drink enough of it. What time are you getting up?”

“I have to be at the market to meet my farm family at eleven.”

“Whoo hoo”, he crowed, “you’ll be sorry!”

Canadians think anything over two bottles disappearing down a woman’s throat is a mad night on the beer. They also think eight am is early. I haven’t bothered explaining Irish women’s ability to hold liquor and work the next day. He ordered a bottle of something or other, I can’t remember. My pint came, and as usual, it wasn’t a pint. It was something in between a half pint and a pint. I made the fatal error of asking the barman how much the glass held? He glowered at me and stalked down to the end of the bar. I could hear him bitching to the waitress about me.

“I think I fucked up, Ed.”

“I reckon ya did. They don’t like it when you point out it’s not a pint.”

“I wasn’t pointing out, I just want to know what the measure is.”

“It’s a pint.”

“But it’s not.”

“Exactly”

Exactly.

We took our time because we knew it would be a while before we got served again. I watched the waitress. She was a blonde too, with tight ringlets that fell to her shoulders and bright red lipstick. She had a strange accent, like a gangster’s moll in a low budget movie. She fiddled with her nails all the time and complained to the barman about how bored she was. I wondered whether they were really Italian, or whether they just all wanted to be.

Finally we got served again. I made Ed pay for a second round, as I had paid us in. He didn’t seem to mind so much. He didn’t tip the barman, in retort for my pint that was not a pint. The barman remonstrated with him loudly. I was just thinking I’d like a cigarette when he asked me did I want one. He led me upstairs into a small pool hall that filled a mezzanine above the bar. To my amazement, there were tables and chairs and ASHTRAYS there. Inside. In some bars in Halifax there are smoking rooms and in some there are not and I can’t figure out why. Ed tried to explain but he wasn’t making any sense.

We lit up and the band came onstage and started playing the blues. They were pretty good. Some of the couples got up and started dancing.

“This is a great bar, Ed, good choice.”

He thought about it for a while.

“Yeah, it is fur sure.” He clinked my bottle with his. I think he was having a good time.

“Say, you want to go for a ride on my Harley sometime?”

SCORE QUEENIE!!

“Sure Ed. Not right now, though.”

“No, no, I just got one helmet tonight.” Not to mention the fact that he was biccied. We finished our drinks. He put his hand in his pocket, somewhat reluctantly this time. “You want another one?”

“It’s my shout”, I said, sliding off my stool to go and get them. Ed looked like he’d died and gone to biker heaven. A woman who got her round in. His face was a picture. Actually, what I wanted to do was make sure the barman got a big tip, as I wanted to be able to drink here again. Twenty percent did it, he seemed mollified. He even asked me where I was from.

When we finished and left around midnight, Halifax was in the middle of a thunder storm. The music was so loud we hadn’t noticed. We stood in the pouring rain outside on the street as Ed fished around in his many pockets for a business card. I still have it. One of these days I might go for a ride on a Harley. Down to Yarmouth, to look at that fog they get down there. In the meantime, I hope there’s a hawg dawg somewhere that is beginning to believe that not all women are on the make.

Bless him.

A day and a night on the Ocean Train

Wednesday evening – east along the St. Lawrence

I am writing this on the Ocean Train, which runs from Montreal to Halifax through Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It is a twenty-two hour journey, but this train has been delayed by three hours so I have been in my seat for a long time already and we are still in Quebec.

It is ten thirty at night and I have been issued my blanket and pillow and the lights have been turned down here in Comfort Class (read Steerage). I have managed to get a two seater space to myself as there are only about fifty people on the two comfort class coaches. Everyone else is living it up in Sleeper Class. If you are in Comfort Class, you are not allowed to eat in the dining car.

HOW’S THAT FOR CANADA THE LIBERAL, EGALITARIAN SOCIETY.

MY ASS.

For one third of the price of a sleeper car, the seat is surprisingly comfy. The centre bar between the two seats pulls up to allow me to lie across them both. There is a big space underneath the seat for my bags, and the space allows the seats to push back in a really cool way, it’s as if they swing forward in an arc, rather than actually lean back. This means that you can lie back without driving the person behind you demented. And there’s loads of legroom. Would somebody please adapt these seats for use on planes.

When I asked why the train was delayed a security man told me the brakes aren’t working on the train. Having some experience of the ‘international language of lying to customers about why the plane is late’, I don’t think he was supposed to tell me that. So I hope it all goes okay. There are no steep descents anyway, according to my travel companion, Jean.

Cape Breton jam-making bear watcher

Jean is a middle-aged Presbyterian minister’s wife from Cape Breton, who loves making jam. She has been in Montreal caring for her grandchildren while her daughter recovers from an operation. She’s really cool. In a devout Presbyterian kind of way. She winces every time I take the Lord’s name in vain, but she doesn’t say anything. I’m not sure what age she is, but she has perfect skin. No life of clubbing and smoking for her, I’d say.

She loves nature. Her husband moved ministry recently and she’s still trying to settle into her new house. She told me she went out one night to take in her washing and realised a black bear was standing looking at her. So she hightailed it back inside and woke her husband up to let him know. So he said make sure and lock the door.

I said someone had told me that you should punch a black bear on the nose and she said, no, you should just run away really fast.

Limey the Native American narcotics agent

Jean and I met in the queue. We also met a Micmac, a Native American from Nova Scotia, called Limey, after the doctor who delivered him. He is a Canadian narcotics agent (I swear I am not making this shit up) and he is on his way home to eastern Nova Scotia for two week’s salmon fishing. He has a German Shepherd called Echo who is his drug dog. Echo, unfortunately, was in the kennels for his holidays and not on the train. Otherwise, we coulda had some fun.

Limey and Echo are one of the sixteen members of an all-Native American narcotics unit that work for police services across North America. There are Cree, Iroquois, Mohawk and many other nations in the unit.

I am so pitching the television show to the first media mogul I meet.

Before Limey became a cop (about fifteen years ago), he used to work on skyscrapers as a construction labourer. Apparently, high-rise construction is something that Native Americans are particularly renowned for. He worked on the CN Tower, the Sear’s building in Chicago, and the Empire State Building.

So, in terms of the plotline of my tv show, I was thinking, you could have a main character who had a problem with alcohol or something, who got careless one day and didn’t strap his buddy in properly and then the buddy fell to his death from the CN Tower. And the main character is wracked by guilt, and goes into narcotics work to make amends. But he is so wracked by guilt, that his only friend is his dog. Who is this really intelligent German Shepherd called Bravo or something.

Didn’t they have a similar show about a Mountie?

When I have my quiet time in the Lord’s presence

The night was full of broken sleep as the train stopped at dozens of fiddly little stations along the St. Lawrence river and loud Quebecois’ got on and off, chattering in French and laughing loudly. Occasionally, I managed to hoist myself out of my sleeping position and glare at them. Unable to speak for tiredness. I finally went into a deep sleep around two am, lulled by the feel of the train rocking underneath me.

At four am, Jean, who I had installed in the two seater behind me, shook me awake to see the sunrise. Which was fine. Except she wanted to talk to me about how beautiful it was. Which was also fine. Except that she expected me to be able to respond. Which I was only capable of after two cups of coffee and several hours of staring out the window. By about eight in the morning.

It was worth it, though. We were heading into Rimouski at the time, so the rising sun shone on the water of the St. Lawrence for a brief moment before we headed south towards New Brunswick, through deciduous forest alongside a wide fast river. We rose a couple of hundred feet and were plunged into dense fog that was rising up from the river like some strange vapourous cloud. The sun burned it off in less than an hour and we have been travelling through the interior of New Brunswick ever since.

There are a lot of trees in this state. It reminds me a lot of the part of Sweden I visited last year, around Stockholm. Or perhaps a ramshackle Maine, although I haven’t been there, just seen pictures.

The air is crystal clear. All the farmhouses are white clapboards, with blue or red roofs. Their edges are clearly defined and the white puffball clouds in the sky stand out in extreme three-d against its bright, bright blue. I feel as if I am moving through a picture postcard. There are barns shaped like upturned boats, all painted a deep red colour, and little lakes with swimming platforms scattered in front of wooden holiday cottages.

Every now and again we thunder alongside a river for a few miles. These are big wide salmon rivers, with the smolts working their way upstream at the moment. Towns are small and scattered. There are no defining boundaries on properties, you seem to cut your lawn up to where you think it ends.

Jean showed me a hymn she wrote this morning during sunrise.

“When I have my quiet time with the Lord, sometimes a song comes to me”, she said.

Having seen the same sunrise, I think I know what she means.

Café Chaos on the Rue St. Denis with Loïc the Stoic

Montreal photos link under the title - just click on it.

As I sat typing on the terrace of the Café de Beau Poseur, or something like that last night, a young African man approached me, holding a cigarette. I held out my lighter for him to use. He said no, could he sit down and talk to me. I said I didn’t speak French. He sat down anyway and began to speak to me in English. I said I was leaving in a minute. He brought over a full glass of wine and proceeded to drink it while telling me that he was a student in McGill University up the road and that he liked to talk to new people.

I sighed inwardly. I really didn’t want to have a broken English conversation. I was too tired after six hours walking around the city under the hot Montreal sun.

“What do you study?”

“I’m doing a PhD in wind energy in France and I am here doing an internship on Canada’s alternative energy policy.”

I get my buzz from wind turbines, I do

“Oh right.” Great, a broken English conversation with a guy who’s into wind farming. Just what I need on a hot Tuesday.

Actually, he was pretty interesting. From Cameroon originally, sent to study in France by his parents when he was fifteen. He subsequently went to university and did a degree in electrical engineering and now his passion is wind power. We talked about environmental issues for a while. I said that I was shocked at how wasteful Canadians are, particularly with paper products. I suppose it is something to do with all the trees they have, and the logging companies and the lumber companies and the paper mills and the paper product manufacturers etc, etc.

We talked wind turbines. He said the average Canadian turbine is 70 metres in diameter. He wanted to develop smaller turbines that could be used in urban areas, but Canada wasn’t interested in funding this type of research. Presumably because they have enough space to build enormous great farms without anyone complaining if an entire bog slides down a mountainside as it did in Mayo.

It started to rain then, big fat drops that were more painful than actually wet, so we decided to go to Café Chaos, a worker co-operative bar further up the street. Inside it was the usual dark, red lit, grimy wooden space. This time, one long wall was covered in cartoonish graffiti of some character whose name escapes me, but whom I had doodled all over my journals in school. You know, the guy with the big nose, peering over the wall.

Microbrews in Café Chaos

His name was Loïc. I couldn’t remember it, so after about four attempts to memorise it, I eventually linked it to stoic. Loic the Stoic. It suited him. He was very intense for his age, just twenty four, and a little morose about his chances/ its chances/ the future. Very stoical. I explained who they were to him – the Stoics - and he corrected me on one of the finer details.

Right. I’m dealing with a really smart guy here.

We talked a lot about sociology and the elitist nature of French society. About the difference between social and symbolic capital and how French power-brokers use symbolic capital to keep the poor in their place. For example, using cultural questions in exams. I don’t know how accurate this is, but I wished I had had some of this ammunition at any number of EU-related conferences I attended for dealing with patronising French delegates.

The single beer turned into three. The music in the bar moved seamlessly back and forth between The Cure and some dreadful heavy metal band. It was as if the bar staff were having an argument about the music and kept switching it on each other.

We talked about Africa a bit. He said Cameroon was very conservative and religious. It sounded just like Ireland about thirty five years ago, actually. He said that when he went home on holidays one time, his uncle the bishop came to see the returned émigré. Instead of kissing the ring, he shook his hand. There was a stunned silence in the house.

I said wait another few years till they find out about the bishop’s illegitimate children and the money he stole from the diocese to educate them.

By midnight I was exhausted and I had to make my way back up the Rue St. Denis and home, but we agreed to meet at the same café for coffee the next morning and tackle Mont Royal, the dormant volcano that rises up above Montreal. And gives it its name of course.

New Jersey girls on the town in Montreal

When I got back to the hostel, Joanne the Aussie nurse who spends most of her time asleep was asleep and Shaila and Cindy, two students from New Jersey, were still up brushing their teeth and giggling a lot. Next morning, I got to have my first all native English speakers’ girl conversation in two weeks. In which I got to

a) Bitch about the impact of humidity on my hair. Shaila and Cindy assured me it was fine.
b) Talk about blokes what I saw/ checked out/ passed on the street. The girls agreed that there were some fine men in Montreal
c) Not have to worry about whether or not the other people could follow my English

It was great.

At breakfast I met a guy from Vancouver called Tyson. Who said he was a little ashamed of the name now, since Tyson had thrown the towel in during his fight a couple of weeks ago. I refrained from asking him whether he was ashamed of the name when Mike T was outed as a Neanderthal rapist. (See, see, I am learning to keep my mouth shut).

Tyson’s of Laotian ethnicity. His family were brought over to Canada after the Vietnam war by the Mennonite Church. Tyson called them extreme Christians. They pitched the family up in northern Manitoba, and they eventually escaped to Winnipeg and then Vancouver. He told me his dad had lived in the jungle for a number of years in Laos, so he reckoned he was involved in the war in some way. He told me that Laos had the unhappy honour of being the most bombed country in the world. I had heard that before. I wonder is it still the case after Afghanistan and Iraq.

Probably.

Tyson was driving from Vancouver to Halifax and back, via Gettysburg, with a friend who is getting married soon. They have three weeks to do the trip. He offered me a ride to Halifax – it was a pity I had my train ticket, as I would have liked to have done a road trip.

Anyways, we both ended up going for coffee to meet Loic the Stoic and spent a very pleasant hour on the terrace looking at Tyson’s photos of Manitoba and talking about wind turbines some more.

Then Loic and I climbed Mont Royal. It’s a dormant volcano in the centre of Montreal that is a big park and provides spectacular views of the city. Too hot. Too high. Great view though. Cannot wait to work on the photos.

Anyways, goodbye to Montreal, where all the women are pencil thin and all the men look like Johnny Depp, and it takes forty minutes to get a cup of crap coffee, but who cares.

I could live there, actually, I really could. I need to check it out in the winter first.

Did Queenie take a wrong turn? Because she’s in New Orleans, isn’t she?

Everyone I’ve mentioned Montreal to here in Canada has told me that I would love this city because it is really like Yerp. Exactly which bit of Yerp is not always as clearly enunciated as the level to which I will love Montreal. Is it like Paris? Is it like London? Is it like Tallinn? Is it like Moscow? Is it like Rome? Is it like Ballyporeen? I ask. None of the people who assured me that Montreal was just like Yerp had ever been there, so I had my suspicions.

Having spent 28 hours here, I can now definitively state that the answer is, none of the above, and not only that, it is like nowhere I’ve ever been in Yerp. Apart from the Old City looking remarkably like Dame St. About ten years ago before they started cleaning the buildings.

True, the murmur of French all around me is reassuring in a weird way, but the locals are so ecstatic at my attempts to speak the language that I can’t possibly be in the ‘land of the people who almost wrecked Europe, as well as Canada’, according to most Canadians. Not me. I’m delighted they voted NON.

Actually, I feel like I’m in New Orleans, so I suppose it’s American style Yerp. It’s very similar. Lots of wrought iron balconies, but not as many window boxes, perhaps something to do with the long cold winter. The same long, dilapidated boulevards, superimposed onto an American grid system. The same blistering heat, and obsession with terraced coffee houses. The same jazz records playing in the background.

It’s nice, although I have already decided that I prefer Toronto. But as night falls on my second evening here, I might change my mind, because it is definitely a city that wakes up around eleven pm.

Way back in March when I collected my first Frank’s from Ian, Dermot, Mark and Lisa were in the Alliance Francaise and I told them all I was going to Canada. We talked destinations and Montreal came up. Dermot said that God Speed You! Black Emperor had a café/ bar there called Casa del Popolo and I determined then and there to add it to the musical itinerary. I found it last night, at the far end of the Boulevard St. Laurent, the main street of Montreal, which separates English speaking west from French east.

It’s a long straight street, leading up the hill towards the Mont Royal. Being the interface between two dominant cultures, it’s mostly Arab and African, with some trendy furniture shops and a lot of hookah bars. On the way, I ate in a Portuguese restaurant on Duluth.

Inside, it’s really dark. A DJ was setting up his equipment at the end of a long bar. The bar sells only microbrews, at four dollars a pop, which is really cheap for here. It’s small as well, only about the same size as the back part of The Long Hall, with the same panelled ceiling, painted bronze I think. The walls are tongue and groove wood panelled. Painted white. Dim lights hang low on chains, like in The Long Hall.

You can smoke inside. The bar has zebra print covered stools along it, and a large leopard skin lamp, which apart from ten red bulbs on a string, are the only light by which the barman pulls pints and washes glasses by hand. It’s quite Irish in a way. The bar is dark wood, with some spirit bottles sitting in a desultory fashion along a single shelf behind the bar. The barman’s English is terrible, but I manage to get a nice beer all the same.

There are a couple of tatty sofas in the bay windows and the rest of the space is taken up with a large stage and a few small wooden tables. Photos of jazz legends are on the walls, as well as two large blackboards, one outlining the food menu and the other listing the events for three months.

I went out to the terrace at the back of the pub. It’s a small enclosed courtyard, overhung with two enormous plane trees (I think). They droop over nine small aluminium tables with an ashtray placed artfully in the corner of each. Fairy lights are hung on the walls. It’s not as nice as Aileen/ Dermot/ Katharine/ Andrew’s garden. They need a bit of design input on the horticultural and lighting sides. On one wall, there is a large rectangle painted white. It is for showing movies I presume. Tonight, the trees cast shadows across it, making a show of their interaction with the wind blowing up the boulevard.

On the back wall is a large sign that says ‘Don’t talk to me like you’re my real dad’.

Upstairs on an apartment terrace, a barbeque sizzled into life and someone played Venezuelan merengue on a wheezy sound system. I moved inside because DJ Sundown was starting up. He was accompanied by his partner, Ilana. The music was very languid, lots of French stuff I had never heard before, with an English, poppy beat underlying everything. The sound system is fantastic – clear as a bell.

At ten thirty, there were eight of us in the bar. By eleven, there were forty people milling around. They were eyeing my table longingly, so I gave in gracefully and left for the long walk home to my hostel.

Queenie would like a life where she gets to go to the pub at eleven in the evening on a Monday to hear her mate’s DJ set. Is that too much to ask?

Probably.

I am only starting to realise how intertwined music is in my life. Everywhere I’ve been so far has had a really important musical connotation for me – Toronto and NXNE, Kingston and the Rev (and Neil Young’s dad was buried there the day I arrived), Montreal and Casa del Popolo, and tomorrow, Nova Scotia and the town of Springhill. And all that represents for me in terms of the music I grew up with.

I am enjoying my pilgrimage I must say.

Queenie cruises 1,864 islands on the Island Queen III

It was one of those moments. Just as Queenie was wondering how many islands were in the Thousand Island archipelago, the bilingual tour guide tape blaring out of the speaker on the top deck of the boat began to explain. The Island Queen knew the Queenie’s mind before she knew it herself.

Apparently, an island in this group is defined as a visible slab of granite that has a diameter of more than six metres. As the water level in the St. Lawrence river fluctuates regularly, so too does the number of islands, but at the last count, there were 1,864 islands in the Thousand Islands group.

They are the oldest rocks in the world. Slabs of granite left here by some ancient glacier. According to Iroquois legend, Manitou came from heaven and promised the warring tribes paradise on earth if they would stop fighting. So they did and he did. But not long afterwards, the bickering started again and arrows flew, so Manitou returned to earth with a buffalo hide, into which he gathered paradise. He began to ascend with it to heaven, but as he did, the buffalo hide ripped, and little shards of paradise fell down into the St. Lawrence and became the tufts of grey and green we cruised amongst today.

The most beautiful parts are the little pine covered peninsulas that jut out of tiny, tiny islands. Looking at them, you get a sense of what it must have been like for the Indians who fished here, and for the first French explorers who came upon it. The bigger islands are all host to holiday homes of varying degrees of luxury and age. Some of the Victorian houses are nice – they range from turreted Queen Anne style, to NeoGothic piles, to plain clapboard pioneer type homes. They are all marred by modern marinas and swimming decks. I wondered where all the waste goes. Nobody could tell me. Into the river I suppose.

The day started out grey, but as we meandered among the islets and peeked into people’s summer lives, it brightened and hundreds of sailboats and other pleasure craft came out to play. There were a few jetskis. One portly gentleman in particular kept cutting across the wake of the Queen, to get a few bumps and show off. You could feel everyone on the top deck silently willing him to fall off. Or maybe it was just me. Meanwhile, you could look across at the United States and imagine hooch runners bringing whiskey over in the twenties.

Speaking of smuggling things across the border, someone told me the other day that there have been 4,000 deserters from the US army since the invasion of Iraq. Is that possible?

The cruise boat was the usual blaring, lowest common denominator type of tourist crap. Why have sky and water and birds and landscape when you can eat nachos and listen to the WaterRats, or Riverbend, or whatever the hell they were called. Even on deck there was no escape – their two piece plus Roland multi-instrumental blared out of the speakers when the tour tape was silent. I wonder whether the local fish set their watches to plunge each day when the boat passes.

The waterway is very historical. The French explorer La Salle found it, along with the Great Lakes, and then he went south and discovered the Mississippi. The French moved in and trapped for fur and traded with tribes such as the Mohawk. They were followed by the British, who bought a huge tract of land for some cloth and a gun and founded Kingston. They finally overcame French resistance at the Battle of Quebec, further north, and booted the French out of Canada.

You can see why they fought over it. It’s a very lush land, easily navigable by water, full of timber and must have been teeming with wildlife a century ago. The few pelted creatures that are left are no doubt underground, their paws over their ears, trying to escape the current tourist invasion. I know people have to make a living, but why can’t people who want to leave a light footprint be allowed to do it without having to spend lots of money?

I always think of George Orwell when I go on these type of trips. He seemed to have a utopian vision of the ‘bus to Brighton’ type trip, full of jolly working class types enjoying a bit of sing song. I always feel as I would if I would if I were Graham Greene trapped in one of these trips forever. I think I am a bit of a snob.

Okay, a total snob.

Anyways, the pilgrimage is done. I reckon that Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips must live somewhere a bit more secluded, because I certainly didn’t get the vibe here.

Never mind. I tried.

Tonight, I walked around Kingston in the moonlight and looked at the lake for a long time because I probably won’t see it again for a while, if ever. It’s very beautiful.

And for the record, it’s 183 miles long and 54 miles across.

WHICH IS NOT BIGGER THAN IRELAND.

Rainy days in The Sleepless Goat, Kingston, Ontario

Kingston has been very cold and wet. The term cold is relative though, it’s probably the same temperature at home. I’ve not been doing much, apart from sleeping, eating and typing. But it’s been quite pleasant and it’s a nice, laid back town with a substantial alternative lifestyle going on, side by side with the retirees and the prison officers and the university staff who seem to make up the townsfolk.

Every morning I get up and ignore Engelbert at breakfast (although he left this morning on the Moose bus with some horrendous English woman who thinks his name is Tony and who is gagging for it. I gave him a thumbs up as he left, I thought he was going to head butt me).

Where we have breakfast depends on the number of guests. If it’s busy, like this morning, we are seated in the crew messroom. If it’s quiet, we go upstairs to the officers mess. The cabins are priced according to their status. It costs $85 a night to stay in the captain’s cabin, which is an en-suite double room with a sitting room. And they felt the need to build a Radisson here.

The Alexander Henry is lovely. All creaky wood, whistling pipes and sloping floors. I want to live on a boat. Someone asked me to marry him and go and live on a boat in Vancouver last week and I said no. Maybe I should give him a ring……….

Seriously, after breakfast I go on deck for a cigarette and watch them wash the decks down and check the rigging. Then I write for a bit and head into town to the Sleepless Goat café to use the internet. The Sleepless Goat is an anarchist co-operative vegetarian restaurant that is full of the most interesting people. So I type away and listen in on conversations. There was a hilarious one last night.

Two guys and a girl were talking – I couldn’t figure out how they knew each other, but they didn’t know each other well and the two guys were jostling for position with the girl, who was scarily self-obsessed. Well, either that, or she was playing them both for complete fools. No, I think she was scarily self-obsessed.

The talk turned to their ethnicity. That’s what you do, apparently. You say, casually, ‘so, what’s your ethnicity?’ And then you get this long, rambling explanation of their background. The Asian guy asked the girl hers and it turned out her dad was Pakistani and her mother was Scots-English-Irish.

Asian guy: That’s cool. I love that actress (didn’t get the name – apparently of Pakistani ethnicity). She has a great look.

Lisa the Pakistani/Irish/English/Scots girl: Oh, that’s what my boss calls me all the time.

Other guy (who didn’t volunteer his ethnicity, being very obviously of boring European extraction) realises the Asian guy is ahead by a nose: She’s kind of wooden as an actress though, don’t you think, I prefer (didn’t get this name either).

Lisa is not sure about this, but decides to run with it: Yeah, she’s like Gwyneth Paltrow, like, so empty inside, she can be programmed. If I was a famous actress, I wouldn’t be able to play anyone but myself.

The two lads nodded seriously. I felt for them. I really did. I wanted to go over and paint a picture of the next two years of their lives if they scored Lisa the Pakistani Princess. I wanted to scare them so much they’d run away and never speak to her again. Am I being unfair, I don’t think so.

Lisa, secure in her audience’s obsequiousness at this point, went on to explain how she votes Conservative (not the done thing in the Sleepless Goat) because a) her parents, who are very rich and successful and just like, totally don’t understand her, are Liberals, b) Stephen Harpur (leader of the Conservatives, very stiff Al Gore type on a drive to be likeable) is like committed, and c) like, she has more respect for Hitler than for that guy Eichmann, you know, the Nazi who said he did it because he was told to, and voting Liberal is just, you know, being told what to do.

The Asian guy, who had been trying to tell Lisa that she had the wrong Nazi (I think he was right and she was actually talking about Speer rather than Eichmann) to no avail (I don’t think Lisa does getting it assways), gave up in complete confusion at this stage. Looking around, he spotted my shoulders shaking behind my screen and realised that coffee was coming down my nose because I was enjoying the earwigging so much. So he moved them onto another, safer subject.

Bah.

In the afternoon, I generally do some touristy thing. There are a lot of museums here and an old fort and boat trips on the lake. It’s all very tame, but nice.

In the evening, I go out to eat and generally meet up with someone or hook up with Caelen’s dad. I go to bed early, because I’ll be in Montreal next week and then Halifax and I won’t get much sleep because I’ll be hostelling again and will have to share horrible rooms with people who rustle plastic bags at three in the morning.

I am becoming an oldarse I think.

This afternoon I am going on a cruise to see the Thousand Islands, or Manitouana as the Indians called it, which means Garden of the Great Spirit. And yes, it is where the name of the salad dressing came from. The guy who owned the Waldorf Astoria came up with it in his summer home on one of the islands. I tried to go on the cruise yesterday, but it was raining so much I was the only passenger. So they gave me my money back. It’s stopped raining today, so I should be okay.

And now I am officially up to date. Hooray.

As to my ethnicity, I’ve been thinking about this. I think it’s a bit boring to say I’m Irish. So I was thinking about saying, well I’m Scots/ Northern/ Planter Irish on my dad’s side, which is where I get the freckles and the temper from, and my mother’s an O’Neill, so I reckon I’m probably half Tuatha de Danaan on her side. Or maybe some Milesian – that would account for the dark hair.

Whaddya think?

Bleary-eyed backpacker bussing it east

Wednesday 15th was exciting because Queenie and Percy were heading east. At last! A bit of travel. Queenie packed the bags bright and early and lugged them downstairs. Hopefully the next hostel would have a lift (although as Queenie already knew the next hostel was a decommissioned ice-breaker that was unlikely).

The big bag is a pain. Of course, those of you who have been reading Percy’s Depressed from the beginning will have guessed that it of course contains Percy, and all his armour and weaponry, and is very heavy as a result. But when people comment on the size of it – and they always do – Queenie has to pretend she brought a lot of clothes and camping gear. And this makes her look like a twat, which she doesn’t like.

Never mind. One of the advantages of lugging the Big Bertha Bag from Hell around Canada is that random men clamour to carry it for her, to prove how BIG AND STRONG they are.

Men are simple creatures, really. Simple, but adorable. Well, apart from Austrians. But more of that anon.

Anyway, due to the kindness of several random, big, strong, powerful, muscular men, Queenie and Percy made it onto the Montreal bus and headed off to Kingston, Ontario for a few days R and R and a chance to meet Caelen’s dad. Caelen from Springtown, not Caelen from Phibsboro.

The countryside wasn’t terribly interesting. Mostly it was very like home. Lots of pastureland with hedgerow separating big pasture fields. Then we passed through some meadowland, complete with flowers, which was fantastic. You rarely see that in Ireland now, it’s all been pesticided away, hasn’t it. It made Queenie think of that great project on Clare Island, to gather wild flower seeds and sell them. Maybe we should be buying them for our gardens as it is a valid project in more ways than one.

Finally, we passed through some wooded areas, but they looked farmed rather than natural and before long we hit Kingston.

First Capital Day – Queenie stands for God Save the (other) Queen

Queenie arrived in Kingston on one of its many holidays – First Capital Day – which celebrates the fact that Kingston was the capital of Canada for three years. Before they moved it inland to Ottawa. (Lakefront Canadians talk about the great lakes like they’re some kind of ocean. Which I suppose they are, considering that L. Ontario is bigger than Ireland). Kingston has a lovely old English feel to it as a result, its old centre, today’s downtown, meanders along the lakefront. There are lots of lovely Victorian clapboard houses and brick villas, and a substantial city hall and cathedral. Like its Irish namesake though, the waterfront is being desecrated by modernity, and there are a couple of monstrous high rises poking up through the vista, most noticeably a horrible Radisson Hotel. Boo hiss, Radisson.

Anyways, Kingston today is famous for a number of things, apart from being the First Capital. It is a retirement centre for Canadians. It is surrounded by five penitentiaries. It hosts some class of a base or an army training centre. You can’t smoke anywhere in Kingston apart from on the street. As a result, there are a lot of burly men with crew cuts and luxurious moustaches walking around downtown, smoking.

Queenie walked to the City Hall and Memorial Park and headed slap bang into a parade of cadet brass bands. And people walking around in Victorian costume. It was like a mini Vintage Week, without the old cars. A real army officer was overseeing the proceedings and we all clapped dutifully when ordered. I even stood for God save the Queen. A tv cameraman sitting near me commiserated with me – coming all the way to Canada to have to stand for the oppressor’s anthem. I didn’t have the heart to tell him we do it at rugby internationals all the time.

The bands were pretty good, even though the MC kept messing up the marching orders and causing them to bump into each other. One of them played ABBA and The House of the Rising Sun.

Being hit on by other backpackers – oh god I’d forgotten this bit!

Afterwards, I headed back to my lodgings, which are in the Alexander Henry, a decommissioned Coast Guard ice cutter. I’m staying in Cabin 19, used by junior seamen. I have the cabin to myself, oh bliss. There are two bunks, an iron box that can be used as a wardrobe, a small sink with orders not to drink the water from the tap. And a porthole. The cabin is wood-panelled and hasn’t been updated since the sixties I’d say. Although it is a little musty it is lovely. Really cosy. The ship is managed by the local maritime museum and there is a day manager, who is as daft as a brush, and several local teenagers who are the ‘hostesses’ and who stay on board overnight to make sure the backpackers don’t set fire to the place. And let us in after eleven.

There’s a weird system of keys where we don’t get a room key, but they will come and lock or unlock your door as and when you want. Which is really annoying, but I’m sure there’s some Canadian logic to it. I eventually figured out how to lock the door from the inside but it took a while, which is why I allowed the following incident to occur.

Queenie forgot that when she goes abroad she gets hit on by wankers ALL THE TIME. I’m okay now, a week into it, I have the stern look, the piss off hand gesture and the ‘Idon’twishtohaveaconversationwithyouthankyouverymuchallthesame’ tone in place, and when I was being pestered by a drunk US Marine sniper sergeant – who wanted to tell me all about FREEDOM – in the pub last night, I got rid of him in about ten minutes.

Honey, I got all the FREEDOM I need, thanks all the same.

But I forgot about other backpackers. They’re the worst. When I was in Toronto, I used to hang out in the hostel with an Irish Canadian bloke and a Scottish bloke, who were very nice, but who used to take turns to hit on me in a very desultory manner. Which is just annoying, because you know they are thinking ‘two arms, two legs, female, why the hell not’. Which is a little insulting I find. Or maybe I’m just the fussiest bird on the planet.

Both probably.

Anyways, they shared their room with a very strange Austrian roommate, with an unpronounceable name, which seemed to roughly translate into Engelbert. So that’s what we’ll call him.

Engelbert used to get drunk every night in that maudlin, central European way. You know, where they suddenly realise that the world is a terrible place and we should all just kill ourselves. Or at the very least, you should let them cry on your shoulder for a little bit. He was tolerable when the others were there.

I was sitting outside the Alex Henry having a smoke when the Moose bus pulled up and the Moose heads trundled up the gang plank and who should be among them only Engelbert the Depressed himself. So we did the usual pretend surprise that the other person should be in the same part of the backpacker loop and chatted a bit and then agreed to have a beer later. Which we did. One. ONE FLIPPIN’ CAN OF BEER. During which we discussed what we thought of Canada (To give him his due, he came up with the best description of it I have heard yet, which is that it is a kind of Nordic Australia). And then I departed, not wanting to have to deal with a drunk Engelbert on my own. I went to bed and straight to sleep because I was really exhausted after Toronto.

But a little voice in the back of my head said “Queenie, you don’t seem to be able to lock this door from the inside, so put your backpack up against it.” Because just as we were going inside to our cabins, Engelbert the Depressed had grabbed my bare foot ‘to check it wasn’t too cold’.

Yeah.

I woke up about half an hour later to someone knocking on the door. I held my breath, hoping he’d go away. To my utter amazement, he opened the door. The backpack held it closed, thank goodness. To my complete horror, he pushed hard, got the door open and stuck his head in. To be greeted by my head (I was sleeping in the top bunk).

What do you want? No you can’t come in. Get the fuck out of my room. Goodnight. SLAM. I think I caught his head in the door. I hope I did anyways.

I rolled around my bunk howling with laughter. There were two Aussies sleeping in the next cabin. The knocking had woken them up. They were howling with laughter.

Splutter, choke, chuckle “You alright, girl? You need some help?” Howl………

“No, I’m grand.” Snortle…………..

After a while I calmed down and did that usual female thing of ‘did I over-react?’ I decided I’d decide when I met him over breakfast.

Next morning, we played tag as I tried to get into the dining room ahead of him and he lurked in the men’s washrooms, which were across from my cabin. He won. I got in first, but he legged it in after me. I studied the coffee machine for a long time, until he sat down. He busied himself with the toaster. After a while I got pissed off with all the footling, so I just eyeballed him. And do you know what he said to me?

Did you sleep well?

Did I sleep well? Did I sleep well?

I SLEPT FINE UNTIL YOU BROKE INTO MY ROOM, YOU PERVERT!

He didn’t talk to me again after that. And I figured out how to lock the door from the inside.

Sigh.