To Hell with the Consequences. And back again.

Queenie’s very tired. She’s been all the way to Alberta and back. Northern Alberta too. Over six thousand miles in five days. She’s a bit discombobulated.

It was very cold. When she landed in Edmonton last Thursday night it was minus 3 degrees. When she left this morning it was minus fifteen. Yes, that does sound very cold, doesn't it.

You should try having to pee by the side of the road in it.

A weird weekend. Queenie had a big case of the ‘where the hell am I’s’ most of the time. As well as a case of the ‘what the fuck am I doing here’s’. Which is the second time this has happened to her on a trip in November. For much the same reasons. Which is very scary and doesn’t bode well for travel in this month in the future.

I give up, do you know that!!

What would you make of a girl who spent hundreds of dollars on a plane ticket to go thousands of miles to see a bloke who completely blindsided her with a little speech he had prepared earlier, all about ‘I don’t think this is what I want; I think I want to be free!'

It had the usual enormous dollop of 'It's not you, it's me'. Interestingly, this time it was all wrapped up in a big helping of 'I don't want to lose you, just my sense of responsibility towards you, so I am dumping you three days before you fly home to Nova Scotia in order to spend the rest of the time persuading you that we can be friends forever. We can, can't we?'

You'd feel a bit sorry for her, wouldn't you? A bit of a domestic tragedy I suppose, you’d say. You'd understand if she was feeling a little bitter and cynical, wouldn't you?

Quite.

Now, what would you think of a girl who has had this happen to her twice in two consecutive years. In the same month.

Careless girl!

Yup, that’s exactly what I thought.

So there I was, sitting at the kitchen table in Himself’s house in Alberta last Sunday, hand-writing a blog entry because I had not brought my laptop. Sitting on my own save for a bottle of Canadian and a notebook, because everyone else had left me alone for a bit to sort myself out, bless them they're so kind, in what appeared to be an exciting new version of Hell.

“So what’s Hell like, Queenie?” I hear you ask.

Well, it sure as hell ain’t warm, boys and girls. Hell is Athabasca, Northern Alberta, population who effing cares. It was 4.30pm on a Sunday and already minus nine degrees Celsius.

Queenie was having one of her internal dialogues. The really boring one she’s had a few times in her life.

“So what did I do wrong this time?”
Darned if I know girl!

“So what could I have done differently this time?”
Darned if I know girl!

“Is there something I should have said or done differently to make this not have happened?”
Darned if I know girl, but why worry? You know you wouldn’t have pulled it off anyways, being too fond of saying what you think instead of the diplomatic/politic/ manipulative thing that other women seem to be able to say to retrieve these kind of situations and get things back on track with just a few tears and a wobbly chin.

My voices are not very helpful, as you can see.

Man, I am B-O-R-E-D with these conversations.

Bored. Bored. Bored.

And with that stupid question that women always ask themselves as they brush the shattered dreamglass and assorted debris of another classic, eleven-week panic, sixty-to-zero-in-8.3-seconds, male dumping manoeuvre out of their hair. Stand up to feel their arms, legs and assorted inner organs for numbness or bruising. Undertake a survey of the esteem damage done this time. All the time thinking:

Is there something wrong with me?

Queenie doesn’t know why she asks herself this question, because there is no answer. There’s nothing wrong with her: Queenie is just Queenie. She’s halfway to the seniors' home and she ain’t changing now. But she’s pretty happy with herself; she’s mellowed over the years. Not too bitchy. Not too whiney. Not too demanding (but she is a woman, for chrissakes). Not too insecure. A great believer in giving people space if they ask for it, in whatever shape it needs to take (in fact, being cool about her boyfriend moving to Alberta for the winter to sort his head out is a very good example of how understanding she is these days).

Not that it effing gets her anywhere.

And she’s not looking for Mr. Perfect. She gave that up a long time ago. In fact, she wasn’t looking for anyone when this happened. But it did and he was up for it and she thought, fuck it, life’s too short to worry about things not working out. To hell with the consequences.

And now here we are.

Queenie and her consequences.

Back from hell.

Sigh.....

Them’s the breaks, girl.

So, what has Queenie learned?

1. Don’t ever fly anywhere to visit a bloke in November ever again. Ever!


2. Don’t expect a bloke to know what he wants, particularly if you think he should be allowed to decide for himself.


3. Remember that you knew this before, and somehow forgot it. And don’t ever forget it again.
   

So, anyways, Hell. Now that she’s back from there, Queenie supposes it’s worth a paragraph or two.

My first impression of Alberta was terrible. Edmonton is a really ugly, dull city with huge low-rise blocks and a dingy downtown. The West Edmonton Mall, which is the biggest in the Americas, has sucked all its life out I think.

We spent a night there in a hotel populated mostly by cowboys in town for the National Rodeo Championships, which were taking place that weekend. We were too tired to deal with cowboys, so we just stayed in our room and had a couple of drinks.

Next day, we went to the Mall. Jesus Christ, I hate shopping almost as much as I hate spending my road trip savings on a ticket to Dumpville. (Okay, half a ticket). But there was nothing for it; I had to get a winter jacket. I managed to find one that goes all the way to minus thirty but still gives me a waistline for less than a hundred bucks. So I was pretty pleased. Then I had to go to Gap and buy jeans because I have lost the ability to pack a rucksack after four months in the one place. Then out of the shopping mall from hell I did get rapid.

(Having said that, if you like shopping, then it’s the place for you. It’s just not Queenie’s thing. Particularly with a bloke in tow)

Then it was into the truck (vehicle, not lorry) and up to Athabasca, a couple of hours north on the road to Fort McMurray.

Why did Kate Bush put a song about her washing machine on her new album? It is too strange. The second disc is much better than the first, isn’t it?

Man, central Alberta’s some flat, as Himself would say. A flat, endless landscape. And dull. No features. No shadows. A weak November light didn’t even make it to the ground, or so it seemed. All the poplar trees along the way were completely bare, their silver and black barks reflecting what little light there was. They stood in miles and miles of canola stubble and dead grass, a beach of palest barley yellow.

The whole vast expanse of it screamed absence of light. There wasn’t even that tigerish yellow tinge that you get in Ireland at this time of year, something to do with the sun shining through dark blue-grey clouds. Here there was nothing – just pale, non-blue sky, pale fields and pale trees.

As we got further north, the landscape became a little more interesting. Less flat. The Athabasca river is wide and strong and the ice floes building up in it gave it a mottled sheen that was quite pretty to look at. All the green had been leached out of the grass up here too, though. That was what I found really unnerving, and gave me the first sense of ‘where the hell am I’, a feeling that lasted all weekend and has followed me home to dear, leafy, historic Halifax, where it is a balmy six degrees above zero.

I’m scared the same thing will happen here. Everything will shut down its life source in preparation for the cold winter. What am I supposed to do? I keep getting panicky about the winter (not helped by being wound up by psycho-Bruce about being snowed in with him for a week, and some people at home hoping I’ll freeze to death in punishment for escaping Dublin). Then I look at everyone I know here, none of whom are terribly tough (all of the really tough people I know have gone to Alberta where it’s FUCKING cold) and all these wimpish people have done dozens of winter and survived. And so will I.

But I’m really scared.

Not that that's a new feeling for Queenie in November.

And I don't feel it so much now that I’ve done that few days. And survived with not even a runny nose.

Athabasca is a small town spread out across a valley created by two smooth gentle hills that give an intimation of what’s looming in the southwest. Wandering around it in the sunshine on Sunday morning gave me an exhilarating feeling – the one you get when you go skiing – the combination of cold and sun and clean, fresh air a mile and a half above sea level. It made me long to jump in a car and head for the Rockies.

Actually, the whole weekend has given me a serious case of the itchies. In the absence of a major lottery win my choices are a bit limited. Maybe BC? Possibly a bit warmer than Halifax, what with potentially two winter elections coming up.

We'll see.......

Let's get to Christmas. As Jersey Girl reminded me the other day - only 38 days to go!

That's enough for now! I’m very tired and it’s very late and I have to go to work tomorrow, so I’ll tell you all about the logging truck trip as soon as I can.

Five Questions for Queenie

I asked Myles to ask me five questions, as he was doing the same thing on his blog and the results were interesting. So he obliged and here they are:

Five Questions for Queenie

1. [Literature] What's your favourite book from before you were 18 and why?

Too many to choose from. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, because it made me understand the power of simple language, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, by Alexander Solzhynitzen, because it made me realize that the Soviets were evil, Animal Farm and anything else by George Orwell, because it gave me the tools to analyse inequity, any of Somerset Maugham’s short stories, because they gave me my obsession with travel and new experiences.

2. [Life] What have you done today that you've never done before?

Brought a hot water bottle and a bottle of aspirin to work (see yesterday’s post).

3. [History] Describe one turning point in your life. How would your life be if it had turned out differently?

I decided not to try to be a journalist. I was too scared to try. If I hadn’t, I’d probably be a journalist now. I don’t know if my life would have been any better – just different. Possibly my life would have been better in that I wouldn’t have had to wade through the river of self-pity caused by being a complete wuss at one point in my life to the dry land of ‘stop beating yourself up over it Queenie’.

Which took forever.

But I'm there now, so who cares. And blogging is the new journalism they say.

4. [Embarrassing] Have you had pet names for parts of the body? What were they?
No. I have had pet names for parts of other people’s bodies, but, as John Bruton said once, you didn’t ask me the right question.

Smirk.

5. [Distance] What physical thing do you most miss from home?

The Wicklow Mountains. Specifically, Glendalough Valley.
And my car.

A hot water bottle and some aspirin

Queenie’s going to talk about periods today. Hold forth on the curse at length. Mention the menses, so to speak. Talk about interior design, as they say.

So if you’re squeamish, avert your browser.

Periods. Menstruation, menses, monthlies, on the rag, the little red fairies, the painters and decorators, the time of the month, Lady Moonbeam. The curse.

I hate the fact that it’s called the curse, but some months it surely is. The month you get it for Christmas. The month you get it when you're going on holidays. The month you get it the day of that huge presentation you have to make. The month you get it really bad. The month you miss yoga and it's like you never did a stomach crunch in your life before.

The month you get it the week you're going to Alberta.

Once, in desperate need to think positively about the whole thing, after yet another male doctor had listened to my sceal of woe, my need to control this aspect of my life in some way, shook his head patronisingly and told me I’d be grand once I’d had a baby/ gotten one of those injections that stops them altogether and no it doesn't destroy your libido that's all in your head/ stopped drinking coffee/ took 200 evening primroses capsules a day/ whatever the fad was, I bought a book on loving the female cycle.

It was called Red Moon, I think. It was all about enjoying the beautiful mystery that is the cycle of birth and death.

The book said women were a dark moon, or a white moon, depending on your cycle. I was whenever the flippin' thing arrived.

The book said women had four phases – the Virgin, the Lover, the Empress, the Hag. I went from Hag to Virgin to Hag to Virgin. At least I think that was what it was, I couldn't really understand the questionnaires.

I couldn’t summon the will to keep a Moon Log, or have a Menses Circle, or any of the soothing pseudo-Wiccan rituals Megan or whatever her name was suggested I do to take my mind off the pain. And I was thinking this afternoon on the way home, the woman who wrote that book probably never had the day Queenie had today.

In addition, the woman in the book probably has a really caring, slightly ripe but loving male Wiccan life partner who makes chamomile compresses for her and counts her moon blessings with her in the time of the Empress. Queenie’s experience of these things is that although the men in her life are usually up for a bit of TLC during ‘the time of the empress’, so long as it's not too discommoding, but they’re still a bit traumatised by the fortnight of the Hag they've just survived. So they're a bit circumspect. Not quite sure where the tire iron is located so to speak.

Honest to God, or Gaia, or Brig, or Imbolg, or whoever’s fault this is: Queenie has had enough of this shit to last her a lifetime.

When I was in secondary school, I nearly passed out with the pain on a regular basis and was staggering out of class one day to be brought home to bed when I heard one of the lads in her class say “She’s on the rag again, lads!” Effing hilarious you were that day, Billy Dooley. In fact, I’d have laughed myself stupid if I hadn’t been bent over double trying not to throw up or pass out.

If you ‘got caught’ without a tampon in school, (which I always was because I was very disorganised when I was a teenager due to having a growing brain. Apparently.) you had to go to Sr. Nora in the tuck shop and make the international gesture for ‘do you have a sanitary towel I could blag from you as I have no money for the machine in the ladies’ (arm across stomach feigning cramp, vague downward pointing motion with the other hand). She would then make the international gesture for ‘of course, pet’, which in her case was completely exaggerated (eyes crossed in sympathy, mouth silently forming the word curse?).

Then all the boys in the queue would snigger and point as she went to THE CUPBOARD and pulled out a monstrous nappy-shaped object, before beckoning you to the side door and shoving it up the tight sleeve of your school pullover. After that, you had to get yourself and your lumpen arm to the girls’ toilet and retrieve said monstrosity without ripping it to bits. Then you had to try not to walk like John Wayne for the rest of the afternoon till you got home to the box of LilLets.

No! Having an involuntary erection in geography class when you were fourteen does not count as ‘as bad’.

Not by a long shot.

At least nowadays, the poor unfortunate who experiences this would have a mobile phone to ring mammy and get her to come to the rescue. If she’s lucky enough to have a stay at home mum, I suppose. I was lucky. Once I figured out a way home, I always got put to bed with a hot water bottle and a couple of pills and enough compassion to ease the pain so I could just sleep it off.

University was a bit easier in that you could just nip off home when it got too bad. Of course, there was the odd month when you’d drunk the tampon money the night before. Or horrors, the month when you’d drunk the tampon money the night before and then the flippin’ thing arrived while you were still ensconced in some flat that was not yours. Then you had to go scrounging fifty pences from people whose bedding/ couch you had just destroyed till you had the price of one of those blue and yellow boxes that they still put in a brown paper bag for you in some shops in Dublin.

What is it with the brown paper bag???? Am I some kind of shameful hussy for havin’ my bleedin’ period? Do they put Durex in a brown paper bag?

I don’t flippin’ think so.

But the workplace is the worst. When Queenie started work it was fine, but she’s noticed a change over the years. Because we’re all equal now, and the world has moved on and technology is great, so is that part of life not sorted yet? I think that's the vibe anyway.

I should point out that it’s not men’s fault. It’s my own fault. If you tell a bloke in work that you have your period nowadays, at worst you will get ‘carefully arranged compassion’ face and an offer of some ibuprofen. Which is what you get from the average female boss anyway. Usually, you get to decide whether you should go home, unless you're really busy, in which case you wouldn't even mention that you had 'a little bit of a cramp'.

Queenie has fond memories of the old days, when you could mention the ‘cramp’ word to a boss and expect ‘terrified rabbit in the headlights’ face and “Just go home, yeah, whatever”.

Which is of course bloke for Quick, quick, before I faint at the thought of it, ewww.

But with the increase in compassion and understanding, there seems to be less ability to just go home. There seems to be an ‘I understand your pain, no really I do. Remember I worked last week when I had that sinus cold thing. That was terrible.’ vibe around now. Which is a genuine attempt to understand the unknowable. And although it's well meaning, it really pisses Queenie off, because although she will never know for sure, she reckons that if men had the kind of sudden, piercing, cold-sweated, gut-twisting, dinner-churning, spots-before-the-eyes inducing, consciousness swimming in and out of lucidity, this one goes up to eleven, o-o-o-o-w-w-w-w-! pain she experienced for two hours today, they would be sent home in an ambulance.

But Queenie being used to Lady Moonbeam ‘testing’ her, tried to struggle on, reading mind-numbingly boring preparatory documentation for the Montreal Kyoto Meeting that she couldn’t see for the pain, until she realised it was madness and went downstairs to walk around a little. This was to stretch her pelvic muscles, which had started constricting like an anaconda on a buck rabbit, and to try to stop feeling dizzy.

There’s a little coven of women who sit outside the building at lunchtime. By the time I got downstairs, I was faint, so I hunkered down to stretch my lower back muscles and explained my predicament.

Women just get it. There was a sigh of understanding. An immediate consensus on the need for a hot water bottle. One of them said “it’s the lift, too, it affects you when you go up and down”.

It does?

“All that gravity rushing towards you, girl!” This woman talks like the really emotional teacher in Boston Public. She even looks a bit like her.

Marla or whatever her name is decided I needed aspirin. Aspirin is the only thing. Had I tried it? No, I hadn’t. It helps with the - you know - apparently. I didn’t know what the ‘you know’ was, but I would have tried heroin at that point.

Aspirin emerged from a bag. I was really hoping she had a hot water bottle as well, because at this point I just wanted to lie down on the street and go to sleep forever. No hot water bottle. It was decided that I would go to the drugstore and buy one and then go home. So I did. Well I tried to.

Could Queenie get a taxi? Could she ****, as the builder said to the judge.

So, another day wasted. Another day when I could have worked through the pile on my desk, or stared out the window, or gone to the movies, or whatever. Anything rather than lie here all afternoon and evening with a hot water bottle against my back and a stomach full of painkillers.

I have tried every pill, injection, diet, exercise regime and book known to man and the only thing that works is a hot water bottle and some ibuprofen. If I ever run a business or an office, I’m going to put a comfy armchair somewhere, with some painkillers and a range of hot water bottles tucked underneath it. And if any of my girls are having an off day, they can just go curl up on the couch with the hot water bottle and the newspaper until they’re well enough to move. Or the taxi arrives. Or their mammy.

Whatever they decide.

More Yerp than Montreal

I’ve been looking back at some of my entries and I’ve realised I haven’t done much on Canada lately.

The longer I’m here, the more society yields its underlying structures and the glue that binds them together to me. Nothing I knew about Canada was true. Granted, I didn’t know much, just a lot of socio-economic data that I had learned during the Workplace of the Future research period. All of which pointed to Canada being an environmentally pristine haven of post-world war two social protectionism and diversity management that sounded too good to be true.

And guess what?

The truth is that Canada’s quality of life and environmental indicators, while good on paper, don’t reflect the provincial realities, which are all quite different from each other. The good things in life are clustered in Ontario, BC and Alberta, which are wealthy in different ways. The rest of Canada is struggling to keep up.

For example, the main reason why Canada’s environmental indicators appear to be reasonable is because of the vast tracts of BC still under forest. These forests create carbon sinks that, when put against the impact of Ontario’s pollution, contribute to an inaccurate snapshot of the reality. So when you land in Pearson and start to feel the ache in your sinuses that I have only ever felt in Mumbai on a hot afternoon, you begin to wonder whether you are insane.

Then, when you get to the east coast and see what’s happening to the forests here, you realise the environmental indicators take no account of the vicious clear-cutting and unsustainable forest farming that takes place in Atlantic Canada. Because in data terms, a tree is a tree is a tree.

Except it’s not of course.

Atlantic Canada is a totally different animal to Ontario; Ontario is the financial and industrial engine of the Canadian economy, and Atlantic Canada is a resource-based low wage economy run by a coterie of big business families and the politicians who do their bidding. For example, a recent referendum on Sunday shopping was rejected here. I can’t prove it, but I bet the Codfathers (as these families are called) decided they didn’t want it. I know their research found that their shopping interests wouldn’t make any more money if they had to open 24/7. Never mind the fact that it would have created more employment and more financial churn in the economy. Never mind the fact that it would make life easier for working couples. Well, working mothers anyway.

So their invidious influence, which is applied through their stranglehold on the media (one family owns all of the media in New Brunswick for example), turned an economic question into a referendum on family values. Maritimers are traditionally a people who believe in family and frugality and the Sabbath, so they were manipulated enough to ensure the idea was thrown out.

Remind you of anywhere, boys and girls? No? Replace Sunday shopping with abortion information helpline.

There you go.

Queenie’s New World is extraordinarily Old World in some respects.

Frugality is such an ugly word, isn’t it!!! I found a fridge magnet that said that the other day. I immediately bought it and posted it to the woman of whom it reminded me. So it’s somewhere in the GPO now, languishing until the CWU come to their senses. The Irish postal strike should be interesting, shouldn’t it? I always think watching an over-paid, pampered low-skill service sector protectionist trade union strike itself out of existence is like watching a car crash, isn’t it!! Horrendous, but riveting.

Anyways, back to the New World.

Alberta is a petro-chemical/ rancher powerhouse that sucks Maritimers over to the oil patches or the forests every winter (‘going down the road’ they call it) to work the dirty heavy jobs Albertans don’t want to do. The Maritimers do it because they’ve been migrating to work since they were thrown off their lands in Scotland or Ireland or America centuries ago, and it doesn’t seem to occur to enough of them that there might be something wrong with a country that forces them to do it, even though they (literally) helped build Canada, invented Canadian democracy, created the Canadian concept of a free press (before they gave it away), and led the drive to feed and protect Europe during two world wars.

Many of them do realise the unfairness of it. Mostly the women left sitting at home by the phone. The men out there are too tired from pulling a hundred hour week to think about it. If I did anything worthwhile during my time here, it would be to politicise some of the women I’ve met here. Things would change rapidly I tell you, if some of them got their hands on the levers. That pseudo-Calvinist ‘benevolent patriarchy’ shite the Establishment Good Ole Boys go on with here would be hand-bagged into the Bay of Fundy for a start.

Sorry, I get upset when I think about it.

Anyways, back to Alberta.

The guy who runs Alberta is a divisive right-wing wannabe despot called Ralph Klein. He incites selfishness and separatism in Albertans by telling him it’s ‘their’ oil. For example this Christmas, rather than contribute some more to ending the inequality across Canadian provinces, he’s sending everyone in the province a prosperity cheque for $400.

As someone remarked in a letter to the Chronicle recently, it’s funny how it’s always Alberta’s oil, but it was Canada’s BSE.

And apart from all that, it’s probably the First Nations’ oil, if you want to assign an ownership to it.

More on Alberta next week, after my trip.

Manitoba and Saskatchewan are vast, Nordic-populated prairie economies with all the challenges that entails. Despite that, they seem to be run pretty well (maybe the Nordic influence), and we have a joke in work when we’re looking for ideas, which is WWMD (what would Manitoba do?).

BC is the so-called economic and cultural nirvana of Canada, although the growth of Vancouver and its poverty is a big challenge. BC looks west to Asia. It’s a million miles away from the Atlantic in every sense.

The north of Canada is as heavily funded as Northern Ireland is. Instead of the peace dividend, they seem to have a wind chill dividend. As with NI, the dividend seems to be as economically dynamic as a game of golf in Banbridge on a wet Sunday.

And Quebec…

Quebec is the Kerry of Canada. Impossibly beautiful. Incredibly corrupt. A nice place to have a summer house, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

So one of the things that I have learned is that, although there is a Canada and a Canadian stereotype, it really is just a big hessian sack of provincial cats, all spitting and hissing at each other, oblivious to the fact that they are about to be dumped into the river by their American overlords.

And the recent report on Liberal corruption – the Gomery Enquiry – is just another excuse to hiss and spit. God forbid they’d work together and figure a way to scratch out of the sack.

I’m not saying all this to be nasty. I love Canada and Canadians. Mostly. It’s just when you come from Europe and you’ve lived through the immense efforts everyone’s made to create a Union that transfers wealth from the centre to the periphery, and you and your education and your mobility are a result of that effort, you really want to get the Atlantic Premiers into a room and reiterate the need to use transfers to create wealth for everyone, not just the Sobeys and the McCains and the Irvings.

With the tyre iron.

Of course the fact that France is on fire again as I write this could undermine my argument. But I think that’s a separate issue.

Interestingly, although Nova Scotia is not very diverse compared to Ontario, say, or BC, there are a lot of Mediterranean Arab people living here. Which gives it that continental European feel I like so much.

Atlantic Canada is much more like Yerp (a pre-German integration Yerp possibly) than Montreal ever felt to me. Because as we all know, who are watching Paris burn with more than a little sadness, there’s a lot more to Yerp than café au lait. There’s thousands of years of Levantine trading and cultural fertilization for a start.

Queenie's found a sidekick

Finally, Queenie has found a drinking buddy. Which is a good thing, as sitting in the house listening to this year’s hockey season playing itself out in the living room was trying her patience a little. Queenie is sure that watching men in puffy body armour and black helmets skate around a frozen swimming pool trying beat each other up with misshapen hurleys all night every night is probably deeply fascinating to Bruce. Unfortunately for her, the commentators all have Canadian TV accents (which is a nasal version of the Superbowl commentator accent) and are therefore really irritating. And there’s an ad break every seven minutes on ABC.

As Himself in Alberta said in a moment of understanding (which was nice of him because he's a big hockey fan too), the logic of using the tyre iron to smash the tv in was probably becoming more acceptable as the days passed. Queenie didn’t tell him it wasn’t the tv she was visualising under the tyre iron.

Blogs are useful for that kind of thing.

But now that particular source of stress is manageable. Because Queenie knows she’ll be getting out once a week.

We all need to get out once a week.

Anyway, Queenie now has a drinking buddy who’s an architect from Istanbul and who is a great storyteller, so we’ll call her Sharahazad, which we’ll shorten to Shazz.

We were out on Friday. We went to the Economy Shoe Shop, which is the nicest pub in Halifax. It’s an old building with three distinct sections – a big airy plant-filled section at the back, where you go to eat rather than drink; a dark, heaving front bar, which is where all the action takes place, and a smaller snug at the side, which is where all the toing and froing and arguing and meeting and greeting goes on.

Queenie walked in at nine and bumped into someone she knew, which is unusual. So we all piled into a corner and he introduced her to the people he was drinking with, who immediately told her not to go out with him. Under any circumstances. Which was hilarious, for a number of reason, not least because Queenie had already figured that out for herself when she met him first. Something to do with the fact that he starts talking about not being able to find a wife four minutes after he meets a girl. Wedded to an initial overbearing over-enthusiasm for said girl, that morphs into aggressive petulance at the first hint of a brush off. And an arrogance that is breathtaking in one so devoid of social graces. And a completely frustrating inability to take no for an answer.

So they told Queenie to tell Shazz the same thing, but Shazz is a clever girl and figured it out by herself as soon as he suggested she pay for his drinks because of the Armenian massacres. (His ethnicity is Armenian, but still, it's not like Queenie asks all the British people she meets to pay for the drinks because of the Famine, now is it?)

It was very unusual for a Canadian, much less a group of them, to do something like that though. They're usually far too polite. And then they all got up and very obviously went off somewhere else without him, but he was too drunk to notice. After they left, he sat and moaned at us about gay people (an 'I'm not anti-gay but' rant, which really irritates Queenie) for a while, ignoring the fact that we were not interested in his homophobia and were trying to have a conversation. Then he just stood up and left. Without paying for our drinks. Despite having asked us to join him for one. So Queenie had to pay for them, because she had brought the situation into being by being stupid enough to be nice to him once a few months ago.

A bit of a W, as Jenni Diskin would say. He’ll be single for a while, Queenie reckons. He's a whingeing miserable git because he's single and he's single because he's a whingeing miserable git. No way out of that one, is there? Apart from going down the mail order route.

After that, Shazz and Queenie had another drink to celebrate our liberation from the Ehud Barak of the dating scene, and sat people-spotting for a while. We eventually were joined by another woman who was out on her own because her brother in law and his children were in her house and she didn’t want to go home. She told me she was of Finnish ethnicity. She had the whole Finnish ‘get drunk and sit worldlessly in the corner’ trait down pat. Eventually we got bored and made her move bars, as the cute guy Shazz had been eyeing up had disappeared, and we wanted a change of scene. So she brought us to Tribeca which, as the name suggests, is an uber-trendy loft bar in Downtown Halifax, with the obligatory DJ and plinky plink shite they play here.

But it’s a nice bar. We sat in the alcove at the end of the bar and met a young couple from Newfoundland. When the girl heard what Queenie did for a living, she pinned her in a corner and spoke intently to her about the Newfie economy for about forty minutes. Now Queenie loves the Newfie accent. It's really rich and melodic, particularly in the women, who are all really smart and passionate about their Rock. So it was fine for the first while. But her eyes burned into Queenie as she spoke, and eventually Queenie's eyeballs started to hurt from maintaining the eye contact. Eventually it got so bad she had to go home, as digging her nails into her palms stopped working. Her eyes began to glaze over and get that itchy feeling at the back of the eyeball that you get if you stare at a vdu for too long.

What can Queenie say? It’s obviously the start of a long overdue karmic punishment for doing the same thing to some unsuspecting person many many many times in her own youth. Apologies to any of you who were at the other end of one of those rants. Really, Queenie didn’t realise how bad they were.

W stands for Jenny Diski, actually

I love Jenny Diski. I forgot to buy the LRB in September and missed one of her articles. The intro is on the LRB site. I'd say I missed a classic:

W. stands for women,’ cried Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Elaine Chao and Gale Ann Norton at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and in case the Good Ol’ Boy’s good old ladies didn’t get it, a banner explained: ‘The country and my administration have benefited from the strong women who serve as senior members of my White House team.’

‘Sometimes, we complicate policy and processes so much that busy women don’t have time to sift through it all and figure out how it really matters to their lives,’ the Republican communications director said in 2003. ‘We are always striving to find women to talk about our policies . . . Women have a way of being able to boil things down for other women in a way that they can understand.’ Busy boiling things in the kitchen, that would be. Of course, W stands for quite a lot: wanker, wastrel, wanton, woodentop, warmonger, witless and, if it’s the W in the middle of George Bush’s name, terrifying.

Venezuela's doctors to receive 50-per cent pay raise, Chavez says

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Doctors in Venezuela's public health sector will receive a 50-per cent pay raise starting in November, President Hugo Chavez said Sunday. Hundreds of Venezuelan doctors protested in Caracas last month, demanding salary hikes among other issues.

"It's just and needed," Chavez said. The pay raise, which also includes additional bonuses for doctors working full-time in state-run medical facilities, "is justice for doctors," he said.
Chavez made the announcement during his weekly television and radio program, Hello President, which this week was transmitted live from a new campus of the state-run Bolivarian University in the eastern city of Maturin. During a program that lasted about seven hours, (this is true, btw, I have seen this show that goes out every Sunday - Queenie) Chavez said education spending has increased from 3 per cent of gross domestic product to about 9 per cent since he took office in 1999.

He also said a total of 336,000 students, many of them poor, are now enrolled in free higher education supplied by the government, nearly one-fourth of the country's total university enrolment. Chavez said other public universities such as Venezuela Central University are "elitist" and have traditionally denied education to the poor, therefore creating a need for the new network of free government-funded universities.

© 2005 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

This weekend's theme is disappointment

Mykyle was here today. He recommended a book for me to read. It’s called Mutant Message from Down Under by Marlo Morgan. I was sitting here looking at the keyboard, trying to decide how to start and it caught my eye. I had written it down on a legal pad I have sitting beside the computer. And I thought, I must go down to the library tomorrow and see whether they have it. And then I thought, this will be interesting, because you can tell a lot about a person by the books they recommend you to read.

And then I thought, what if I don’t like it?

And then I had some more thoughts along the same lines that I’m not ready to share with you yet, before I went back to my question.

Why did I think that? Why didn’t I think, I bet it will be wonderful! Or, I’m really looking forward to reading a book that he liked, and then talking to him about it. Or even, great, now I don’t have to decide what to read when I go to the library tomorrow.

When I went back through my filing system, I realised I had thought all of those things. But that question is what had stopped me in my tracks.

So the nub of the issue is why did that thought stop me in my tracks?

It’s not like it matters. If I don’t like it, there are a number of things I can do. I can pretend I forgot and never read it. I can pretend I liked it. I can just tell him I don’t like it (which is what I normally do if I don’t like a book) and have a long argument about why not, which he’d probably enjoy anyway because he loves debate.

I don’t want to be disappointed, that’s why.

So if we were really to get down to it, why am I so afraid of disappointment?

I have a theory about it. I can’t really go into it here without sounding like Roisin Ingle. Well, Roisin Ingle if she ever wrote about what was really going on in her brain.

Or maybe she does.

I hope not.

I’d be very disappointed if that was the case.

I’m listening to my Yes, kid, it’s true, I’ve never heard of April fucking Wine, so fucking what! mix. There’s a lot of Bruce on it. The wistful, I’m never going to be twenty again and my job sucks stuff. And Bob. Angry Bob. Not angry about politics Bob. Angry about women Bob. And a bit of Thom. Angry about politics and the state of the world, now that he has a few bucks and a stake in capitalism stuff mostly. And some Jonathan, singing about forests and butterflies and white horses. Why doesn’t he go the whole hog and stick a big horn on the front of that horse and admit he loved Dune?

Cos he’s way too clever, that’s why. And that’s why he’s better than Kate Bush. And why she shouldn’t put out an album just before we all (her original fans) have our midlife crises.

I reckon it’ll break some people, that album, if it doesn’t live up to its promise. I was looking at her fan sites today. Some people LOVE her. In a nice way. Lots of mystical art, you know the kind of stuff; Rob Reiner took the piss out of it brilliantly in Spinal Tap and it never really recovered.

So yeah, disappointment.

That’s this weekend’s theme, boys and girls.

Stop moaning. It’s my blog.

I should do one of those lists. You know, the ones they tell you to do in the self-help books.

Things that are good in my life v Things that suck big weenie

Start with the positive.

1. It’s not the winter yet. The taxi driver today said it gets really cold in the winter and when I asked him what really cold was he said –8 Celsius. Which is the best yet. I could do –8C I reckon.

So that’s a positive.

The other day some ditzoid in a shop told me it got down to –50. And when I looked at her like she was insane, I could see her deciding to go with the lie. So I just shook my head slowly and sadly at her and walked away. And she followed me!

I cannot get two matching 'how cold does it get' numbers, never mind two consecutive matching numbers. These people have no idea how cold it gets in the winter. That’s because they all live in hothouses and drive around in big trucks they leave idling for an hour in the morning to ‘heat up’. And then they moan about the price of energy! They should insulate their houses properly.

Oh that’s right, they can’t afford to.

I have two words to say to that.

Credit. Union.

But it’s not fair – they all get it for free and they’re lazy bastards, and those other bastards are making money off our backs!!

Oh you noticed! That’s what you get, dudes, when you struggle up the greasy pole. You get shat on from a height. And by the way, it’s not true about the other guys. They’re not lazy. They just don’t believe in saving.

The middle classes are very disappointing when you get to them, aren’t they!

Welcome to my world.

What else is positive?

2. I’ve started cooking again. I cooked a really nice Moroccan Chicken dish today. With chickpeas and couscous, neither of which I could ever get to work for me at home. And I made a fantastic lasagne the other day with the three cheeses hand-grated and a perfect Bolognese. And my stews are a cornucopia of vegetables I don’t like, but with herbs and spices lovingly added in the correct quantities to actually enjoy them.

I can’t decide whether the food tastes nicer here in Nova Scotia, or whether I am just enjoying food again because I am no longer slowly dying of stress. I hope it’s the latter, because I know what they use for fertilizer here and it ain’t pleasant.

3. I went out this week. Yes, boys and girls, Queenie had a shower, got dressed, blow-dried her hair, put on make up, went out to the pub with some people, had a few drinks, got introduced to some other people, had conversations about politics and Ireland and Canada, assured several people that John deChastelaine was a great fella entirely and we were all very grateful for the great work he's doing, and went home after one in the morning.

And it wasn't even a work do.

That's a big positive. I need a social life that involves standing in a bar talking. Despite what Mykyle thinks.

Yes, the day to day stuff seems to be ticking along nicely. And I like my job.

Enough superficial positive thinking! It’s just not me, is it? I have a theory about that too, but I can’t go into it here without sounding like my brother’s analysis of my personality after eight pints of Guinness. (His analysis after eight pints, by the way, not my personality after eight pints.) And I am definitely not ready to share that with you.

Suffice it to say that there's enough truth in it for it to be uncomfortable and enough authorial curlicues adorning it for it to be useless.

But it drips with disappointment. The kind of disappointment that makes me hang my head for a bit. And while my hair is covering my face, I'm furiously planning how I'll get my own back on him.

I’ve just had a really evil thought. About someone else. I could dial the weather report in Alaska on the cell phone he gave me, gently place the phone in the corner of my wardrobe, and close the door.

That would bring things to a head fairly sharpish I reckon.

Thankfully, I don’t feel the need to bring things to a head, so I’m going to save him a load of money.

I hope he’s not disappointed with my disinclination to disappoint him. That would be disappointing.

I'm going to watch an episode of Lost now. Which is never disappointing, because even though the storylines are ludicrous, the male totty is fantastic.

Chavez to replace Castro? Bolivarian revolution continues apace!

From the outrageously cosmopolitan Amherst Daily News

"It wouldn't be outrageous," said Ana Faya of her suspicion that Cuba and Venezuela might unite one of these days. After all, the senior analyst at the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL) in Ottawa pointed out, the idea of uniting Latin American countries has been around since the revolutions of Bolivar and San Martin against Spain almost two centuries ago. And she certainly knows how Cuban Communists think: for ten years, until she fled to Canada in 2000, she was an official of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.

The Cuban regime's biggest problem by far is: who succeeds Fidel Castro? The official answer is his youngest brother Raul, currently vice-president and defence minister, but ideologically committed Cuban Communists still have problems with the idea that political power can be inherited. They also suspect Raul of being soft on capitalism.

Fidel Castro has had a remarkably rapid recovery from a fall last October that broke his arm and shattered his kneecap in eight places, but he will turn eighty next August. He has ruled Cuba for 46 years, but he will soon have to be replaced. If the revolution is to survive, his replacement had better be a man with contemporary revolutionary credentials, a man with the charisma and resources to keep the show on the road. A man, perhaps, like Hugo Chavez.

Chavez is Venezuelan, not Cuban, but that may not be as big a problem as it seems. Many people on the left in Latin America, including "Bolivarians" like Chavez and most of the Marxists, have always seen the division of the region into more than a dozen Spanish-speaking countries as a misfortune, not a law of nature. Cuba and Venezuela are already closely tied economically and politically, and Chavez, though neither a Communist nor a dictator, shares Castro's social goals and his hostility to the United States. It just might work.

As an analyst, Ana Faya monitors what senior people in the Cuban regime and in the governments of neighbouring countries are saying in public, because it probably bears some relationship, however distant, to their real intentions. And here is what she has been hearing recently.

On Oct. 5, 2005, at the signing of the 6th Joint Commission on the Comprehensive Co-operation Agreement between Cuba and Venezuela, Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage Dávila said: "Our country has been accused of not having a democracy, but in events like this one we realize that we are one of the most democratic countries of the world, because we have two presidents, Fidel and Chávez." And Chavez replied: "Cuba and Venezuela have joined together, and at this point, the world should know that our fate is sealed, that these two homelands, which deep down are one, are opening a new road at whatever cost."

It could be just the usual windy rhetoric, but suppose it isn't. Suppose there actually is a plan to unite the two countries, with Chavez and Castro as co-presidents, and to leave Hugo Chavez in power over both countries when Fidel, thirty years his senior, finally dies. "Castro has the power and the credibility," Faya noted. "It's a real possibility." But, she added, "It should take place while (Fidel) Castro is still in charge." It's certainly not a plan that would appeal to Raul.

Impractical, hopelessly idealistic stuff, in the sense that Cuba and Venezuela would be only 35 million people together, totally outmatched by the almost 300 million people and twenty-times-bigger economy of the United States - but Washington is severely distracted by its faltering Middle Eastern adventure at the moment.

History is full of surprises, and this could be one that really overturns normal expectations. Uniting with Venezuela would not preserve Castro's system unchanged after his death, for it is old, authoritarian, and out of tune with the times. But it might win Cuba enough time to make a peaceful transition to a democratic system that retains the main gains of his revolution in terms of equal access to education, health care and social support. Chavez will never be a Cuban and he cannot rule that island in the long term - but in the short term, he could save it a great deal of misery.

Sitting home, Tuesday night

I can’t think of anything to write about. I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute and see what happens. It’s very strange when you close your eyes and type. It takes your brain a minute to relax and trust your hands to type accurately.

My brain is having a problem letting go at the moment. It keeps telling my eyes to open and check the spelling. I don’t like using the spell checker on the computer.

Write about what you know. Isn’t that what 'they' say. What do I know?

Several minutes pass. I am just sitting, listening to the sounds in the house. It is quiet, nobody else is making a sound. Bruce is at work. Marissa wafted out of the house thirty minutes ago on her boyfriend's arm in a floaty black strapless number. The boys downstairs are studying or out. The only sound is that of the laptop humming and the weather outside.

I love this time. In about thirty minutes, Bruce will come home and rustle around the house in his waterproof weather gear. He'll talk loudly to himself about his day. He shouts at himself when he's had a bad one, which is most days. It's quite unnerving. Then he'll bang pots and pans, rustle up a foul-smelling, fry up, open some beers and settle down to watch hockey or baseball or football. The sound of the television goes through my head like a car alarm. He tries to keep it down, he's good like that, but I am allergic to the hyperbole of the commentators. I don't like to complain too much. It's his house too.

But now it's fine. It's quiet except for the rain.

I am sitting in my bedroom. It is warm and dry. Too warm. I put the heat up earlier because the house was chilly when I got home. I should turn it down, but I am too comfortable sitting here with the laptop propped against my bent knees.

I have been reading Ian McEwan's Saturday, but its half-hearted attempt to be Herzog for New Labourites at the dawn of the twenty first century is depressing me, so I have left it to one side and am faffing.

It is raining steadily outside. The intermittent sound of water dripping over the lip of the blocked gutter above my window is adding to the sense of warmth and comfort inside. Every few seconds the wind hurls rain against the window, reminding me that I am sheltered from the storm. An undulating nor'easter, apparently a separate entity to the one playing with the rain, gusts through the trees in the garden once in a while. It makes me restless. I want to go outside and stand under them and listen, although it is too wet and dark to do so.

We have maples in our garden, and tall pine trees of some description. They darken the deck and the lawn and make the mornings dank and moist. But in the summertime they were really comforting in the sunlight, providing shade from the heat and the neighbours.

The garden stretches up a steep slope to the hill behind, upon which three houses are perched looking down at us. But I never feel overlooked, primarily because of the trees.

My room is smallish. Dark, despite the fact that I have two windows. The walls are a dark creamy yellow colour, like a faded tempura. My curtains are a burgundy lace attempt at something that Jill my landlady saw in a magazine. I have Roman blinds as well, to block out the eyes from the houses above. I use them now because the autumn darkness makes it necessary for me to switch the lights on when I come home.

I don’t use the overhead light. I hate its inefficiency, the way it just floods the room with light rather than direct it onto the work in hand. Instead, I use three lamps. A large golden-shaded antique monstrosity, a present from Jill, with an energy efficient bulb that does nothing for my eyesight, squats on my bedside table. It is far too big for the table or the room. A smaller modern desklight with a harsh glare that I use for work is my main source of light for reading and writing. I have turned the bulb upside down to bounce the light off the ceiling in an attempt to make it softer. It casts a deep shadow on the batik of Ganesh that hangs on the wall. I brought the batik with me from Ireland, rolled up in the bottom of my bag. A something to remind me of the home I abandoned for a new world. I have another smaller, mushroom-shaped sensor lamp positioned on the floor to light up the far corner and make interesting shapes on the wall. The room feels like a cave lit by firelight with this arrangement.

Bruce Chatwin would have interesting things to say about it if he were still alive.

I am lying on my bed. It is a large double bed, new and comfortable. Jill bought the bedding. A dark black and cream geometric pattern, with lots of pillows. I would never have chosen it myself. I prefer plain cream, with the pattern intrinsic to the material, not silk-screened onto rough cotton. I bought a cream throw the other day to cover it, but it’s too small. I don’t mind though, I quite like the pattern's masculinity. It gives the room shape, forces me to tidy up so the lines of wall and window and floorboard and bedding, the curves of lamp and handbag and jewellery box, are all able to stamp their presence in the room. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a Matisse painting. An early work, knifed onto the canvas in thick stripes from Jackson Pollack's colour palette.

The floor of my room is covered in a strawberry blonde wood. I love it. It glows softly in the light and is always warm to my feet. I love the feel of walking across it, the way my feet squeak softly when I turn. I never wear shoes in the room if I can help it.

There isn’t much furniture apart from my bed. The wardrobe is typically North American - a little chamber off the room. I keep the door open, so that the clothes inside will add colour to the space. All my bags and scarves and belts are piled on the door frame, the handle, the hooks. They clutter things a bit, but there’s no helping that. My books are piled on the floor. Despite my best efforts, and regular trips to the library, the pile is growing.

There is a 1950s tall boy, an elegant piece made of dark and creamy lacquered wood. Its top is covered in jars and pots and containers for make up and jewellery. They share the surface with a large framed photo of myself and Tracy, a gift from him.

The photo was taken by his brother. It’s a really good one, we’re in deep deep shadow, so all you can see clearly is the light bouncing off my hair and my cheek. You can hardly see him, his face is buried in my hair. But you can sense our smiles. We were at a party, on the night of a full moon when you could still stand outside and smell the sea.

As well as the tall boy, I have a small modern black computer desk, with a pull-out ledge for the keyboard that just gets in my way as I have a laptop. And finally, beside my bed, a little side table, upon which I have thrown one of my pashminas. The dark red one. To pick up the curtains. It too is piled with books, diaries, drawing pencils, and the deitrus of projects I’ve started and forgotten about.

This is my room. My most intimate world. This is where I spend most of my downtime. After I leave it, this room will stay burned into my memory forever, filed alongside all the other rooms in which I have sat alone over the last few years. Resurfacing when a particular emotion comes over me. I wonder whether or not I am spending too much time alone. I enjoy it most of the time. I read The L-shaped Room when I was very young and impressionable and the feeling of independence the author felt in her little garret stayed with me long after I forgot her name or her story.

Yellowstone's new wolves alter park's ecology

Article from Jim Robbins in The New York Times

Hiking along the small, purling Blacktail Deer Creek, Douglas W. Smith, a wolf biologist, makes his way through a lush curtain of willows.

Nearly absent for decades, willows have roared back to life in Yellowstone, and the reason, Smith believes, is that 10 years after wolves were introduced to Yellowstone, the park is full of them.

He says the wolves have changed the park's ecology in many ways; for one, they have scared the elk to high ground and away from browsing on every willow shoot by rivers and streams.

"Wolves have caused a trophic cascade," he said.

"Wolves are at the top of it all here. They change the conditions for everyone else, including willows."

The last 10 years in Yellowstone have rewritten the book on wolf biology. Wildlife biologists and ecologists are stunned by the changes they have seen.

It is a rare chance to understand in detail how the effects of an "apex predator" ripple through an ecosystem. Much of what has taken place is recounted in the recently released book "Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone," by Smith and Gary Ferguson.

In 1995, 14 wolves from Canada were brought into the park by truck and sleigh in the dead of winter, held in a cage for 10 weeks and released. Seventeen were added in 1996. Now, about 130 wolves in 13 packs roam the park.

Yellowstone, says Smith, is full.

Over the next 10 years, elk numbers dropped considerably. One of the world's largest elk herds, which feeds on rich grasses on the northern range of the park, dropped from 19,000 in 1994 to about 11,000. Wolf reintroduction has been cited as the culprit by hunters, but Smith says the cause is more complex.

Data recently released after three years of study by the Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of Minnesota found that 53 per cent of elk deaths were caused by grizzly bears that eat calves. Just 13 per cent were linked to wolves and 11 per cent to coyotes. Drought also played a role. The study is continuing.

Scientists do say that wolf predation has been significant enough to redistribute the elk. That in turn has affected vegetation and a variety of wildlife.

The elk had not seen wolves since the 1920s when they disappeared from the park. Over the last 10 years, as they have been hunted by wolf packs, they have grown more vigilant.

They move more than they used to, and spend most of their time in places that afford a 360-degree view, said Smith. They do not spend time in places where they do not feel secure - near a rise or a bluff, places that could conceal wolves.

In those places, willow thickets and cottonwoods have bounced back. Aspen stands are also being rejuvenated. Until recently, the only cottonwood trees in the park were 70 to 100 years old. Now large numbers of saplings are sprouting.

William Ripple, a professor of botany at Oregon State University, calls the process the "ecology of fear," which has allowed the vegetation to thrive as a result of behavioural changes in the newly skittish and peripatetic elk.

Though the changes now are on a fairly small scale, the effects of the wolves will spread, and in 30 years, according to Smith, Yellowstone will look very different.

Not everyone is convinced. "Wolves have a role to play," said Robert Crabtree, a canid biologist who has researched wolves and coyotes in the park since the late 1980s. "But the research has ignored climate change and flooding, which have also had an effect on vegetation. Their work isn't wrong, but it's incomplete."

Where willows and cottonwoods have returned, they stabilize the banks of streams and provide shade, which lowers the water temperature and makes the habitat better for trout, resulting in more and bigger fish. Songbirds like the yellow warbler and Lincoln sparrow have increased where new vegetation stands are thriving.

Willow and aspen have brought beaver back to the streams and rivers on the northern range. In 1996, there was one beaver dam on the northern range; now there are 10.

© 2005 The Chronicle-Herald - Halifax. All rights reserved.

What do ‘they’ know?

They say love is blind. What do ‘they’ know?

Love is not blind. Love is x-ray vision.

And who are they, anyways?

Sometimes Queenie thinks ‘they’ could well be a species of elegant, wasted aliens who watch us from an unseen holding position, somewhere in the midst of the vast rubbish tip with which we have marked our presence. Hovering there in a spaceship shaped like a martini glass, mourning their own recently destroyed home planet, whose spoilt, petted, overwrought-through-overindulgence civilisation hobbled and swayed in capricious, overpriced shoes to an apocalyptic conclusion.

Bereft of a homeland, they circle ours, sending trite messages of encouragement to us through their manipulation of our international media satellites. Exercising a peculiar kind of mind control over us by creating a global pandemic of sex/ marriage/ parenting/ citizenship/ new man-dad/ groovy urban chick gurus that surely signifies the almost end of everything here on Earth.

I know this sounds a bit far-fetched, but I can’t think of any other explanation for Roisin Ingle’s success.

But that’s probably just Queenie’s overactive imagination. Probably ‘they’ are just some people her mother/ friend/ the woman on the bus made up when she is trying to comfort her. No small task when a girl is inconsolable.

But never so inconsolable that she doesn’t want to give ‘they’ a smack for being wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

No, you say?

Ahaa, says Queenie. Want me to prove it?

‘They’ say there’s plenty more fish in the sea.

NOT ANY MORE THERE ISN’T!!

Sigh… A girl could spend her life trying to figure out who ‘they’ are.

But not today. Today she’s going to figure out the meaning of love. She's been meaning to do it for a while.

It’s Sunday in Halifax. The confluence of the tail-end of Hurricane Wilma and the beginning of hurricane Alpha has dumped a lake-full of rain on the city; there’s nothing to do, so Queenie’s making a mix. It’s called the Love is X-Ray Vision Mix, and it’s dedicated to all those people out there who are once bitten twice shy. Well, one in particular.

You know who you are dude! Just go for it, will you. Do I have to send your little brother down there to sort you out?

Yes, I know that would be nice. Let’s not go there today. Queenie doesn’t want to be sad today.

Anyways, the mix.

A Punch-up at a Wedding (No No No No No No)
Radiohead: Hail to the Thief

This song has a long heavy summer evening of an intro, opening with a piano-led riff that makes you want to put your head on an anvil and beat it with a hammer, thereby inducing the same feelings as those accompanying a bad relationship, whilst Thom gets going by intoning the immortal lines:

I don’t know why you bother
nothing's ever good enough for you.
(by the way) I was there and it wasn't like that.

Oh yes, we’ve all been there.

That’s the thing.

We---have---all---been---there.

You know when you get stuck in a relationship with one of these types…. passive-aggressive dude, or superior-smug-supercilious dude, or sneaky wanker guy, or plain ole crazy dude. Or girl. What’s the female equivalent of a wanker?

Anyways, relationships like those are lethal to a person’s confidence. But because you had a bad relationship doesn’t mean they’re all going to be bad, now does it?

Lightening doesn’t strike the same place twice, as ‘they’ say. Yes, I know we’ve established that ‘they’ are wrong in the fish case. Okay, I accept that lightening can indeed strike twice. Actually, I think you already proved that this summer didn’t you!

I’d say three times is probably a long shot, though. Wouldn’t you agree?

A Pair of Brown Eyes
Christy Moore: Live at Vicar St.

A rovin’, a rovin’, a rovin’ I’ll go
For a pair of brown eyes.

I love this song. It always reminds me of summers at home.

Now it reminds me of that night we had the party down at Flour Cove. For reasons I won’t go into. Suffice it to say that we Irish are very alike some times.

I’ve just remembered I have the remains of a bottle of vodka in the freezer. Maybe that would take the edge of the horrendous mood I’m in today. I hope I have some orange juice.

Alice
Tom Waits: Alice

I did, but then I forgot to have the drink. I hardly drink at all at the moment. And I don't feel any healthier.

Okay, let’s see if we can get this mother finished before Desperate Housewives. I’ve been fiddling with it all day. So bored. Dark wet Sundays. At least I don’t have to go back to boarding school. Which is what I used to have to do one year on dark wet Sundays. Scarred for life by it I am.

Ah no, I’m not. None of my psychic scars have anything to do with my upbringing. They are all completely my own fault. All that crap yer man Biffa spouts in The Observer every week – I don’t believe a word of it.

It’s dreamy weather…
Along an icy pond with a frozen moon

I’m flying to Edmonton in a couple of weeks. We’re going to go to the West Edmonton Mall, which is of course, the biggest shopping mall in the world. It has an ice rink and a lake and a funfair and lots and lots of shops. It will be cold. And I may skate. I don’t think I’d be up to skating Alice in the ice though.

I’ll be seeing icy ponds that weekend anyway, and frozen moons.

Well, maybe not. I’ve been needling Himself in Alberta all day. Due to being bored mainly, but also due to my usual weekend bout of ‘what the hell am I doing going out with someone who lives in Alberta? Come home or else I'll needle you to death!’ Anyway, the needling finally worked. He didn’t text me back after the last one.

Oops…

I never learn, do I?

But that doesn’t mean you can’t, dude! Change the patterns of a lifetime. After all, she’s not moving to Alberta, is she? Far from it, I hear, if my spies are correct.

I just don’t think I’ll ever get over you
Colin Hay: Going Somewhere/ Garden State soundtrack

This guy used to be the singer for Men At Work. Remember them?

I don't want you thinking I'm unhappy
What is closer to the truth
That if I lived 'til I was 102
I just don't think I'll ever get over you.

This is a beautiful song. It’s about a man who cannot get over his lost love. Unfortunately, the sentiments behind the song are the kind of sentiments that drive me UTTERLY BONKERS. Because it is nothing but a big cop out of the sort that women don’t do. Women just get up off the floor, pull themselves together, put on a bit of slap, go out and find another bloke eventually.
Because they know that love is not blind.

That love is in fact x-ray vision.

Men sit around and mope. Then they go out and get laid. Then they mope some more. Then they get laid some more. Then they meet a nice woman. Then they panic. Then they use the ‘I just can’t get over you’ excuse as an escape clause.

We’re onto you guys! Okay. I’ll say nothing more.

Come Pick Me Up
Ryan Adams: Heartbreaker

I wish you’d make up my bed
So I could make up my mind
Try it for sleeping instead
Maybe you’ll rest sometime
I wish I could

I think Ryan Adams is a bit Garth Brooks, but this is okay. I’ve put this in because this is the kind of music they should be playing in Legends. Not that R n B shite they were playing the night we were there. Oh, you weren’t there, were you!!

Never mind. You didn’t miss anything. Which is another point I would be ramming home if you had rung me like you told your mother you were going to.

IO (This Time Around)
HELEN STELLaR: Below Radar EP

HELEN STELLaR is a band from California I think. I like this song. It reminds me of the stuff Kevin Shields wrote for Lost in Translation. Lots of tricky piano melody, with a good guitar underneath and dreamy repetitive lyrics.

This time around
You can be anyone

That kind of sums it up really.

Except it’s not true, really, due to the truth of the fact that love is x-ray vision, which I keep alluding to and which I will get around to eventually if I could just sit down for more than four minutes without googling or getting up to get something to eat or just faffing.

CALM DOWN AND FINISH FOR CHRISSAKES, SO WE CAN ALL GO TO BED!!!!!!!!!!

Ain’t Got Nobody
Stereo MCs: Supernatural

I put this on because the sk8ter kid’s foot started tapping madly every time he heard the Stereos, that weekend when I played the twelve hour mix. Which reminds me I have to write my Frank’s article this week. Damn, damn, damn. Why is it that I always forget? I’m planning an article dedicated to the sk8ter kid, entitled No, dude, I’ve never heard of April Wine! That’s as far as I’ve got.

Ach, it’ll come to me one of the days.

Anyways, x-ray vision. X-ray vision is conceptually the polar opposite of beer goggles. X-ray vision is what occurs when you see a person at their worst or close to, and you decide you love them anyway. That’s why true love is never blind. It’s x-ray. It cuts through the surface, down to the core.

And if you’ve got that kind of love pinning you in a corner somewhere, it’s pretty scary. There’s nowhere to hide.

But think of the benefits. I’ll leave you to think about them for a minute while I groove to the Stereos, who always bring me right back to when I was nineteen and thought I was a goddess.
So much simpler being thirty-five and being burdened with all the administrative responsibilities that that entails.

Smirk.

Ain’t no Sunshine when she’s gone
Bill Withers: Just the two of us

Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone
And she’s always gone too long
When she goes away

Is that how it feels? If it is, then you know what to do, don’t you?

After Midnight
JJ Cale: Naturally

After midnight, we’re going to let it all hang out
After midnight, going to shake your tam(my)bourine

I crack myself up sometimes I do.

I’m just really bored. You know what I’d give my left arm for? A weekend away in a cottage, with some good friends. And a big fire. And loads of nice wine. And a slap up meal cooked by Eileen. And some good tunes. And a great chat.

And then coming up with something crazy to do after midnight. Something to talk about for weeks afterwards.

I have yet to find a Canadian who shares my love for all of these things. I have found Canadians who like some of these things. The wine is the killer. They don’t seem to have the gra for wine that we Europeans have. Unless it’s fucking April Wine.

Nevermind, the search continues. It strikes me sometimes though that I’m not going to find it here in my bedroom.

All the way home
Bruce Springsteen: Dust and Devils

I like this album even though when I play individual songs out of context, I only like two of them - this one and the title track. This is an old one he's shaken up a bit.

Well now our old fears and failures
Baby, they do linger
Like the shadow of that ring
That was on your finger
Those days they've come and gone
Baby, I could walk you all the way home

The Boss knows what he’s talking about. He messed it up royally once, but then he found Patti and he’s grand now. And he’s The Boss.

And he says 'baby' in a really cool way.

I remember being at his Tunnel of Love gig in the RDS in 1989 (my nineteenth birthday actually), and seeing the way he was looking at Patti, and just KNOWING….(that whatsername was on the way out).

Lay Lady Lay
Bob Dylan: Nashville Skyline

I can never believe its Bob singing on this. It doesn’t sound like him. Well, it sounds like him singing whilst being strangled by the Blob.

How’s the blob doing by the way? Has it covered all the lobsters yet? Or are they still crawling into pots like there’s no tomorrow?

Monkey
Low: The Great Destroyer

Oh my my
Little white lie
I swear I’m going to make it right this time

Great song. I prefer Low when they’re playing their guitars LOUDLY. I checked out their website today and they have pictures of their daughter signing their new cd. Cute or puke, depending on what part of the moon cycle you’re in.

A big penny just dropped on my head while I was listening to this. Where did that come from? Dunno…maybe I imagined it.

I believe their sister SubPop band Comets on Fire are playing ATP weekend one next May. I am hugely conflicted about ATP 2006. Never mind the fact that I will have to cross the Atlantic if I want to go, which is of course not unheard of in the annals of ATP-dom, but I will want to go to ATP weekend two because The Shins are curating. And everyone else will want to go to weekend one, because Mudhoney and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs will be curating.

Maybe I could go to both….
Maybe that could be construed as gallivanting.
Maybe I don’t care what people construe anymore, because caring never got me anywhere except up a cul-de-sac populated by people like Liam Lawlor.

I’ve just realised I don’t have this song. Where the bleedin’ hell is it gone? Never mind, I’ll stick in -

A Thousand Kisses Deep, by Leonard Cohen instead.

A bit of Canada for you, dude. See, not all your music is terrible.
Listen to the Master. This guy knows what he’s talking about.
It’s so sad he’s lost all his money, isn’t it.

Although, as a Buddhist, he shouldn’t really care, should he.

Caring is Creepy
The Shins: Oh, Inverted World

Welcome to The Shins, my new favourite band. From the same state as Wattser. Who is forty years old this past week. Happy Birthday, Paul. Which weekend are you going to?

The Shins are what Bloc Party would probably be if they lived in Oregon. Would I be considered crazy if I said they remind me of The Smiths in some weird non-political or rather the personal is the political way?

One day I'll be wondering how I got so old
just wondering how I never got cold
wearing nothing in the snow.

I know exactly what he means. I think.

Last Days of Disco
Yo La Tengo: And then the World Turned itself Inside Out

I took a little break to watch Desperate Housewives with Bruce. It’s our only shared tv experience. He gets everything about ten seconds after I do, mostly because he doesn’t get women. At all.

It was very good tonight. Lots of new characters and plot twists, which is a relief.

A Woman’s Worth
Alicia Keys: Songs in A Minor

My stock has sunk way below that of a European blue chip into a pile of steaming you know what tonight, judging from the silence on the phone end of things.

Past caring kind of shrug…..

Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out)
The Hombres: Elizabethtown Soundtrack

This happy clappy groovy song, which Cameron Crowe put on the Elizabethtown soundtrack, is from 1967 apparently. I was trying to find out something about The Hombres, and I came across this web interview, which I thought was cool:

http://www.markprindle.com/mcewen-i.htm

Don’t I Hold You
Wheat: Hope and Adams/ Elizabethtown soundtrack

Don’t I hold you like you want to be held
and don’t I treat you like you want
and don’t I love you like you want to be loved
and you’re running away

Some of us are not capable of allowing ourselves to be loved without pushing the other person to the absolute limit of their patience. Don’t be one of those people, dude. It is just a sign of emotional immaturity.

If 'they' were here now, they'd say 'Physician, heal thyself'. At which point I would resurrect the tyre iron.

Have I told you lately (that I love you)
Van Morrison: Avalon Sunset

So there you are dude, that’s my advice to you. So if you haven't already sorted it out, sit back, play this to her and Van the Man will sort it out for you.

I have to go and put the bins out now and see if I can get a glimpse of Tom Selleck, who’s filming at the end of my street tonight.

Night night all.

PS – This was fun. I would love to be Mariella Frostrup with toons if someone would like to pay me a vast salary to do same.

PPS - The phone just rang.

Queenie + Percy's Top Ten Heroes - No. 6

Number seven being one bear-sprayin' Albertan already mentioned this week!

From today's Observer:

I stand by my words. And even more, I stand by my right to say them

Five years ago, Orhan Pamuk wrote a novel about a poet who is snared in a political intrigue from which there is no escape. Nine months ago, Turkey's most famous novelist was pulled into just such an intrigue.

It began with an off-the-cuff remark in an interview with a Swiss newspaper. While discussing curbs on freedom of expression in Turkey, Pamuk said that 'a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in this country and I'm the only one who dares to talk about it'.

He was soon to be reminded why. Although most of the world acknowledges the genocide as historical fact, the official Turkish line has been that 'only' a few hundred thousand died during the internecine conflicts of the First World War. To suggest otherwise - or even to use the word genocide - is to insult the nation's founding myth and therefore Turkey's honour.

So the day after his interview appeared, the Turkish press launched a fierce attack on Pamuk, branding him a traitor, accusing him of having used the virtually illegal word genocide (although he had not) and inviting 'civil society' to 'silence' him. Following several death threats, he went into hiding abroad. He returned to Turkey late last spring, hoping it had all blown over. It had not. Last August, an Istanbul public prosecutor charged him with the 'public denigration of Turkish identity'. The trial is set for 16 December. If convicted, Pamuk faces three years in prison.

When the story broke in early September, it made headlines all over the world, with writers, politicians, academics and human rights groups joining the writers' organisation PEN to condemn the prosecution. The governments of Europe were aghast, with the case raising serious questions about Turkey's attempt to join the EU. As his translator, I was only too aware that this was a bitterly ironic twist for Pamuk, who has long been a supporter of Turkey in Europe and European-style social democracy in Turkey.

Like many of his friends, I suspected that his prosecution was the work of nationalists in the judiciary who want neither. Thanks to another law, Pamuk was obliged to keep his own views on the matter private. He faces an even longer prison sentence if he talks about his case before it comes to trial.

Meanwhile, all of Turkey is arguing about the Armenians. Last month a group of Turkish scholars broke 90 years of official silence, braving court orders, death threats and fierce condemnation in the right-wing press to hold a conference in Istanbul. For the first time, Turks dared to ask Turks what happened to the Ottoman Armenians. This had a huge impact on public opinion. Although many maintain that the genocide was a fiction created by the nation's enemies, it is at least no longer dangerous to question the official line.

It was in this context that Pamuk decided a week ago to give his first interview on Turkish television since his life became a novel. It provoked strong and varied responses, with many applauding his defiance and others wishing he had been more defiant still. In one right-wing newspaper, selected quotes were rearranged to suggest that Pamuk had retracted his original statement, although in fact he reiterated it.

In some reports, there was also the suggestion that he had softened his statement in the hope it might lead the authorities to drop his case. A similarly worded article that had no byline found its way into the Guardian and other newspapers across Europe last Monday.

And so the noose tightens. What to do? Speak out and risk a longer sentence? Or stay silent and let parties unknown feed the world lies? When I met Pamuk yesterday in Frankfurt, where he is to be awarded the German Peace Prize, he was in no doubt the time had come to speak out - about the Armenians, about the law under which he has been charged, about curbs on free expression in Turkey and, last but not least, about his case.

'It goes without saying that I stand by my words,' he told me. 'And even more, I stand by my right to say them.' He went on to point out that the right to free speech was guaranteed by the Turkish constitution and that more and more people in Turkey were keen to exercise that right. 'I am very encouraged by this conference. I'm very grateful to courageous scholars such as Halil Berktay, Murat Belge and Taner Akcam who have been researching this subject thoroughly and honestly for so many years and who spoke the unsayable truth. Most of all, I'm pleased that the taboo - what happened to the Ottoman Armenians - is beginning to crack.'

It was, he warned, going to be a long and painful process. 'We are confronted with an immense human tragedy and immense human suffering we did not learn about at school. So it is a fragile subject.'

Which brings us to the word genocide. It is, he reminded me, a contentious subject even among the Turkish historians who believe there was planned and systematic slaughter. Those whose primary aim is to educate the Turkish public point out that to use the word is to shut down any possibility of a national debate.

'I said loud and clear that one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey, and I stand by that. For me, these are scholarly issues,' said Pamuk. 'I am a novelist. I address human suffering and pain and it is obvious, even in Turkey, that there was an immense hidden pain which we now have to face.' He went on to remind me that the biggest obstacle right now was Article 301. This is a new law and how it found its way into Turkey's new and supposedly EU-friendly penal code is a subject of heated speculation.

Earlier this month, Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was tried under the same article by the same public prosecutor who brought the case against Pamuk. He was found guilty and given a suspended sentence.

'Dink is the most prominent representative of Istanbul's Armenians and after his case and mine it is obvious that if we are going to enjoy freedom of expression in Turkey, Article 301 should be reconsidered,' said Pamuk. 'This law and another law about "general national interests" were put into the new penal code as secret guns. They were not displayed to the international community but nicely kept in a drawer, ready for action in case they decided to hit someone in the head. These laws should be changed, and changed fast, before the EU and the international community puts pressure on Turkey to do so. We have to learn to reform before others warn us.'

But what has Pamuk himself learned from the last nine months? 'In the beginning I felt very isolated,' he admitted. 'But I've seen so many people back me, in Turkey and in the international community. I am flattered and honoured to be the focus of all this concern. It is thanks to their support that I can defend freedom of speech.'

This, he said, was the burning issue in Turkey, and it was, and would continue to be, a subject dear to his heart. In his speech today he will be arguing that the novelist's most important political act is the imaginative exploration of the 'other', the 'stranger', the 'enemy who resides in all our minds'. Politics in the art of the novel is the author's identification with the downtrodden and the marginalised. The Kurd in Turkey and the Turk in Germany.

And the prize? 'I hope it is not just a political gesture but also a celebration of my years of humble and devoted service to the novel. I have been writing novels for 30 years, like a clerk. Though, unfortunately, not in the last month. I hope I can return to my desk soon.' But Pamuk is not looking for a pardon: 'I'm going to face this case.'

In this regard, at least, he hopes to part ways with Kar, the poet in his novel Snow. Pulled into a political intrigue and feeling 'trapped on all sides', Kar's response was to try to run away. 'He was an unhappy person who was forced to be cynical,' Pamuk said. 'But I am a happier person. I embrace the responsibility that has fallen on me and will pursue this to the end.'

Pamuk: a life in writing

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul on 7 June 1952 and, apart from two years in New York, he has spent his life in the same district of the city and now lives in the building where he was brought up.

His first novel to appear in English was called The White Castle, about an Ottoman astrologer who buys a Venetian astronomer as a slave.

His novel My Name is Red, set in the 16th century, tells of murder and artistic intrigues among the Islamic miniaturists in the Ottoman court. Its success, by Turkish standards, was astronomic and his publishers opened a court action against a newspaper which refused to believe published sales figures of 100,000 copies. The book sold half as many again.

His seventh and most critically acclaimed novel is Snow. It deals with what happens in the margins of the Western world.The Canadian author Margaret Atwood called Snow 'an engrossing feat of tale-spinning and essential reading for our times'.

His books have been burned at a nationalist demonstration, and his photograph was shredded at a rally. Hürriyet, Turkey's largest newspaper, called Pamuk an 'abject creature'.

Liam Lawlor is dead!

I'm keeping my thoughts to myself on this one.

Former Fianna Fáil TD Liam Lawlor (60) has died in a car crash in Russia.
The Irish embassy in Moscow confirmed an Irish citizen had been killed on the main road from Sheremetyevo Airport into the capital Moscow. The crash happened early this morning, Moscow time.

The Department of Foreign Affairs does not confirm the identity in such circumstance but ireland.com understands the crash victim is indeed Mr Lawlor.

The Department said it and the Irish embassy were providing consular assistance to the family of an Irish citizen killed in the car crash overnight.

Mr Lawlor has led a controversial career in politics and has even served time in jail for his refusal to co-operate with the Planning tribunal. He resigned from Fianna Fáil and did not not seek re-election as a TD in the last general election in 2002.

Born in October in Dublin in 1945, he was educated at Synge Street CBS and the College of Technology.

The Lucan man was elected to the Dail in 1977, lost his seat in 1981, won it again in February 1982, but lost it yet again in November 1982.

Mr Lawlor's controversial appearances at the Planning Tribunal saw regular conflicts with the inquiry.

© 2005 ireland.com

Rory Carroll

I woke up too early this morning and lay in bed thinking about him. People like him are the reason I keep reading newspapers, despite the centralisation of ownership that has ruined them.

He's a remarkable person and probably has the inner strength to survive this, but I hope he's not too scared. I hope they treat him with some respect.

As is usual with Ireland, the web of connections is multi-layered. We went to the same university at the same time. Everyone knows his dad, who's a journalist too. People I know went to school with him. People I know work with his sister.

He's the same age as my brother. Works for the same organisation.

I hope it's just a ransom they're looking for and he's home safely soon.

Michael Waldhuber is a HERO two times!!

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. And the man in this case was Michael Waldhuber, 29, Calgary, who made a brief appearance on Percy’s Depressed back in August when he made the papers for saving his buddy from a mean old grizzly she-bear.

And then he saved Percy.

From Queenie.

Not to mention Queenie.

From herself.

Whilst googling himself (which is allowed if you’re a HERO), he came across the blog and left a little message, to the effect that he’s okay and his buddy’s okay, but still doesn’t have the use of his hand. So nice healing vibes out to his friend. And a big cheer for the first official visit to our blog of a HERO.

And he complimented me on my collection of bear articles. I'm sure it was a compliment. I mean, he's Canadian. They don't do sarcasm. Unless they do in Alberta.

Nah, I can't imagine a man who is man enough to fight off a she-bear in a towering rage with a can of pepper spray would be bothered with something as effete as sarcasm.

Percy’s made up.

Those of you who have been following this for a while will remember that Percy and Queenie came to Canada for a lot of reasons (on Queenie’s part) and just one on Percy’s part – to find heroes and go on a Quest. There’s been a lot of faffing around on Queenie’s part since they arrived – backpacking around, finding a job, finding a house, making friends, settling down, getting laid, etc. and Percy’s been very patient.

Then the whole ‘I’m not blogging anymore’ quagmire of crap landed on his head and he’s been very put out. Spent all last weekend wandering aimlessly around the house, banging his helmet against the wall, while Queenie lay on her bed eating chocolate, reading a Michael Chabon novel pretending she wasn’t miserable because she wasn’t blogging.

It was Summerland, by the way. The novel. A children’s story about baseball and ferrishers and a flying car and saving the planet from the chaotically evil Coyote. Which they did without a tyre iron, I hasten to add.

They used a baseball bat.

So Percy’s banging around the room now, wiping the dust off his armour and getting his fighting gear together while Queenie blogs. He’s going to Alberta. To find Michael Waldhuber. Of course, he doesn’t know that he was going to Alberta anyway. But not to Calgary. Up north, to Athabasca. In three weeks. So he’ll be flying into Edmonton. Home of the Oilers. Home of the greatest hockey player that ever lived. Whose name I can’t remember. Ever. Groesky…. Something like that, I think.

We’re playing our October mix. Which is Elliot Brood’s new album Ambassador, which is great Canadian alt-country a la Cowboy Junkies. Go see this band if they play Ireland. And two soundtracks – Garden State, which has been our second favourite film this year, and Elizabethtown.

Which is a pile of steaming gack with nothing to redeem it, not even watching Orlando Bloom doing his four facial expressions and going ‘oh, that’s the one from Fangorn Forest’, ‘oh, that’s the one from the Rohirrim drinkfest’, ‘oh that’s the one when he thinks Aragorn is dead’ and ‘oh that’s the one at the end when he lets Aragorn know he’s just gotten lucky’. I swear to God, that kid is supposed to be able to act and I have yet to see a single sign of it. Even though William swears he was good when he saw him in Oxford.

Maybe he has a stage presence that doesn’t translate to the big screen.

I’m feeling very charitable this evening. This is despite spending an hour on the phone with a woman from Cape Breton who was very exercised by the Dept of Environment and Labour and some company that dug a trench from their sewage lagoon into her brook what she gets her drinking water from. It's all a Liberal plot, apparently.

Whatever.

And the fourth album is Dark Side of the Moon, which is as great as I remembered.

I went to see In her Shoes tonight. It should be called (Camera) In Cameron's Tits. There was a breast shot of Cameron every thirty seconds. Which is a pity, because it wasn’t a bad film. But it has started the breast obsession thing with me again. I thought I was over it. I mean, who cares if they’re real or not, or if they’re wearing a push up thingy underneath, or why their nipples aren’t showing, or whatever. Or if they’re bigger on the poster.

I got a good dose of (free) therapy about this recently, so I am very disappointed that it's reared its ugly nipple at me again.

But not surprised.

Why do I obsess about stupid things like bears and wolves and other women’s breasts?

Who cares.

Well, actually I do, because obsessive people often do it to the extent that they draw interesting conclusions or write about them and then they get to obsess for a living. Whereas I obsess about stupid things in my downtime, when I could be doing more interesting stuff.

The Elizabethtown soundtrack is actually really good. Lots of really good tunes from people I've never heard of, apart from The Shins, so lots of following up to do.

I’d say Cameron Crowe lost his way in the film, which has a number of good setpieces and some storming acting from one of the supporting actors but little else, because he was obsessing about the soundtrack the whole time. I get like that sometimes. I’ll start imagining a plot or a story of some description, and then just as I scope it out in my head and get to the point where I should write it down, off I go on a three day scroll of iTunes trying to find the perfect mix of songs to play while I write it. And then by the time I’ve done that, I’m bored with the whole thing and I just give up.

Discipline. That’s what I need. A big dose of ‘for fuck’s sake grow up, sit down, write the stupid thing and get it out of your system’. From someone I’m suitably scared of.

The person who can scare me into writing a novel does not exist.

I’ll just have to make her up, won’t I!

There’s a challenge.

What would she be like?

Well, she’d have to be tall, because I need to be physically intimidated. And glamorous and attractive, because I’m a sucker for that kind of gloss. And uber smart. And funny, with an edge to it. And a bit cutting, but in a deliberate way, not in a bull-in-a-china shop way. Because that’s forgivable. And be able to withhold approval in order to get me to do stuff. Because that’s my button, of course. I go crazy when people are ‘disappointed in me’.

I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I’ll be getting ‘this is a very disappointing post’ comments now from Tall 'n' Glamorous of Goatstown.

Actually, I've read that back and it's rubbish. A woman like that wouldn't intimidate me. In fact, all the women who've intimidated me in the past have been shorter than me. And when I think about it, she should probably be a he. Because all the people I’ve ever been truly intimidated by have been men. Which annoys me no end, I can tell you.

Speaking of glamorous, intimidating women with gravity-defying breasts that I get obsessed about, I’ve been watching Desperate Housewives. One hour of telly a week is okay, isn’t it? Which will go up to two when Lost comes back. The new series is good, but it has settled into slowly exploring a range of issues that have crossed over from the first series, so it has the potential to get a bit boring.

The difficult second series.

Speaking of which, in the relentlessly innovative way that my brain has of preventing me from writing, the latest thing it came up with was ‘there's no point, as the second novel will be too difficult’.

I mean, come on!!

No wonder I can’t give up smoking. My brain just run rings around me.

Anyway, boys and girls, sorry about the hissy fit. Nice to be back.

Talk to you soon.

That's it!

Right, that's it. We're not doing this anymore. For reasons outlined by Abraham Lincoln one time long ago. You know, that tricky some-all human interface.

Thanks to Myles and Polly and Colombo and Jersey Girl and Trish and everyone else who had the manners to use the comment function when making a comment.

We'll be taking it down later this week, after we figure out a way to save it.

Queenie and Percy
xx