The only sane lifeform in this house

This image was swiped from www.kateglanville.com. It's very pretty, isn't it.

Okay, I have been sitting on my bed staring at my fish long enough. It is time to do a bit of blogging.

I think Nabla and Himself are right; the fact that I turn the oxygen thingy off every night so I can sleep is giving them brain damage. Currently, they are picking stones from the floor of the tank and spitting them at the glass on the side facing me. I don’t know whether they are spitting them at each other’s reflection, or whether they are trying to get my attention.

I hope it is the former; if I feed them anymore, they will explode. And we’re not really getting anywhere on the communicating with each other front. Apart from ‘feed me, feed me, feed me’, wiggle wiggle O O O type gesticulation from them and head-butting my finger when I put it up against the glass.

At least once a night they wake me up by crashing loudly into something. I have no idea what they do, as it only ever happens when it is dark. But I am not imagining it, as the other night they woke Himself up too. ‘What ‘n the Christ…?’, he started up and then poked me in the side.

‘It’s just the fish, go back to sleep’, I mumbled.

‘What the friggin’ Christ are they up to?’ he wanted to know.

We turned the light on and they were suspended motionless mid-bowl staring out at us, all big-eyed innocence and ‘tum-ti-tum, is it time to get up and feed us already’.

It was four am.

That other great fishbowl of the world, the Oscars, is currently under the microscope of the world’s cameras, but I am not watching because that would entail sitting in the living room with Psycho Bruce. He has been watching tv since two thirty pm. It is now nine o’clock. He does this every Sunday. Last week he watched the box for thirteen hours straight.

If I did that I would throw up.

We staggered in from a night of revelry at two am Friday night and found him sitting staring at it in the dark, with his coat still on. He looked mesmerised. I think he was just really pissed.

Three more Sundays.

Then he will be gone. Maybe I can smuggle the fish tank into his bags and return the house to some form of sanity.

Some Walt to get us through...

As the time draws nigh, glooming, a cloud,
A dread beyond, of I know not what, darkens me.

I shall go forth,
I shall traverse The States awhile—but I cannot tell whither or how long;
Perhaps soon, some day or night while I am singing, my voice will suddenly cease.

O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this?
Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us?... And yet it is enough, O soul!

O soul! we have positively appear’d—that is enough.

In Dublin's Fair City

Garda on Fire
Photo taken by a www.indymedia.ie contributer.

The combined forces of the Continuity IRA, a shower of local scumbags and some professional rioters reduced the main street of Dublin to this today, protesting against some unionists who had the temerity to think it was the right of Irish people, no matter what their politics, to hold a march in Ireland's capital city.

Ireland is completely tarnished; the DUP have been given a fabulous media victory, and the rest of us are embarrassed and sickened as usual.

And I don't care what your politics are. It is not alright to throw petrol bombs at police officers and set them on fire.

Jesus Christ!!

Sigh....

FBPII: In comparison to last February

This is the first month in the life of Percy’s Depressed that Queenie can look back a year and see what she was writing about twelve months ago. Not sure if it’s such a good idea, but it beats coming up with an original one.

Last February, there was a lot of ‘creative’ stuff about Percy’s origins and role in Queenie’s life, some discussion about the role and contents of her man-cupboard; articles about the film festival and going to the theatre; a long piece about Gerry Adams’ duplicity; grief-laden posts about Hunter S. Thompson and Arthur Miller dying, and many ranty posts about newspaper articles in the American newspapers with which Queenie had taken umbrage.

This February, the focus seems to be on the weather, politics, and reading - Queenie has been doing a lot of reading lately. And dvd-watching.

Which leads Queenie to the question: are things better this February than last?

One of her posts last year said “sorry about the delay in this post, but Queenie had a meeting over-run of seven hours today”, so that part of things is definitely MUCH better, as Queenie is out the door at 5pm any evening she wants to now.

Creative arts input-wise, it’s about the same. Except maybe a bit better.

Queenie is profoundly relieved that she has refound the ability to read for hours and hours without losing her concentration. Something to do with the absence of seven hour over-runs she suspects.

Last night, she finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, who apparently is really talented and successful and has won all kind of writing awards without appearing on her radar before now. He has a ‘stunning debut novel’ call Everything is Illuminated that Queenie should probably track down in order to compare with David Eggers’ debut.

Queenie suspects it will be very similar.

The book appeared on her desk in the office one day last week as a reward for her lending Shalimar the Clown to a colleague.

It’s about a boy with some condition along the autism spectrum dealing with the death of his father on 9/11. He does this by embarking on a Quest to find the owner of a key to a safety deposit box which he finds in his dad’s dressing room. All he knows is that it might belong to someone named Black. So he decides to track down every Black in New York City.

There's a sub-plot concerning his grandparents who survived the bombing of Dresden.

Technically, it’s very clever. Lots of interesting tricks that pit themselves against the futility of modern existence in a global world rife with random acts of terrorism. Unfortunately, there's nothing that wasn't pioneered recently on the West Coast by Eggers and his crew.

Safran Foer doesn't chart any new territory in the autistic spectrum point of view either, in fact it's too like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night for my liking. My liking being that new books that purport to be daringly innovative should be.

But it was the bombing of Dresden bit that really really annoyed me. It's an obvious homage to Vonnegut. But unlike Vonnegut, the fundamental message of this book is 'life is shit when global events result in the people you care about dying - I wish it could have not happened', whereas Vonnegut said 'war is crap, we should stop declaring it on each other'.

And at the age of eighty three Vonnegut is still wryly declaiming this irrefutable fact and railing against extremism in his own and other societies. I was lucky enough to hear an interview with him a few weeks ago, where he announced several times that he was going to be dead soon, so he could say what he liked (as if he ever did otherwise), and such was his humanity, his humour and his overall optimism despite himself that I felt that I was experiencing one of the better moments of my life.

Vonnegut I will mourn when he goes.

So, back to Safran Foer, not blaming him personally, but it seems that being talented and daring and clever in New York last year was all about combining the most garish and commercially successful bits of Eggers, Haddon and Vonnegut.

Queenie is very cynical about East Coast literature these days.

We could talk about the theatre and film this February if we wanted.

She went to see The Vagina Monologues recently.

The problem with TVM is that people tend to do it to raise money for women’s charities, which means that the people undertaking the monologues can’t act their way out of a paper bag, but you still have to pay full whack for a ticket and applaud thunderously.

Queenie was really bored and cold, because the Canadian equivalent of the parish hall is just as draughty and dusty, and that’s all she’ll say about TVM. Apart from declaring that she never wants to hear the phrase ‘my vagina’ enunciated in a Canadian accent ever again.

Queenie has seen a lotta lotta movies recently, all pretty good. There’s a bumper crop of cinema being harvested at the moment. One of the benefits of an insane Republican regime in America I suppose.

Recent great movies she’s seen – Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, Capote, Grizzly Man, Brokeback Mountain, The Constant Gardner (is it true you can’t get a table in Chapter One now because Ralphie is eating there every evening?), Broken Flowers, and I heart Huckabees.

Mediocre films she’s seen include North Country and Junebug. Although the acting in both was very good.

This weekend Queenie’s all about lounging around the house watching movies, so she’s rented the Coen Brothers’ The Man who Wasn’t There, which she hasn’t seen, In the Bedroom, which she missed last year, and Millions, a film by Danny Boyle which she only found out about yesterday, but which sounds good.

So the initial conclusion seems to be, slightly better on the work and creative inputs front; maybe too much focus on the weather, and the ranty focus moving from the ‘through the glass darkly’ medium to the actuality due to her increased political involvement.

Queenie should probably decide whether that’s a good thing or not.

February Bleughs: Pairt a hAon

Queenie couldn’t sleep last night, what with the excitement of a new cabinet that includes a Minister for Natural Resources that has his own ATV collection to go with his crocodile skin cuban-heeled boots and all.

She lay awake listening to PsychoBruce cracking beer cans (seven on the windowsill this morning) and thinking of all kinds of erudite and witty things to blog about in the morning. Of course, she should have switched the light on and made a note of them in her little moleskin, because she’s damned if she can remember any of them at the moment.

They’ll come back to her.

It snowed last night. That’s the thing about snow. It’s totally silent. You haven’t a clue that your world has changed until you open the curtains the next day and the world is softly, moistly blanketed in white again.

I do hope that there won’t be much more of it. It’s not that I mind snow – I don’t. It falls; it gets shovelled to one side; it melts. It’s the downward spiral in the temperature, followed by the slow upward haul to bearable, as well as a day lost to leaden skies with no sunshine to break the wind chill that I mind.

I am bored with the Atlantic Canadian winter. Despite the fact that it is in the ha’penny place when compared to Central Europe, or Minnesota, or even Saskatchewan. I have been asking around about potential dates upon which to expect daffodils, etc, the accoutrements of spring.

Typically, my Atlantic Canadian acquaintances haven’t a clue. So they think of the worst possible spring they ever had (whether real or imagined) and then assure me that that is the norm. Those of you who follow this blog will remember that the same crap went on about the winter (and they were all wrong).

I was starting to get upset about it, but then I realised it says more about them than it does me, so I have decided to be magnanimous.

Poor Maritimers – they get the award for least glamorous manifestation of just about everything – weather (none or crappy), work (none or crappy), politics (see Cabinet photo above), scenery (mostly flat), high society (none), bear attacks (none), you name it. So they make up for it by LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH ABOUT HOW BAD THE WEATHER IS.

Apparently, the daffodils won’t appear till mid-May.

If that is the case, then they must have all died off the day before I arrived last year, as daffodils generally last about six weeks and I arrived at the end of June.

Sigh.

In my final moan about Nova Scotian winters, I like my weather to have a soundtrack. There was a gale here last weekend. I lay in bed and the wind howled around the house and it rained a bit. I was ecstatic. It was like a normal windy Friday night at home. But that’s only been the second time I’ve experienced it here in Atlantic Canada.

Maybe I should move to Nunavet.

Apparently, you can make $60,000 a year doing data entry in Nunavet.

Francis, my co-ordinator in the library TESL to immigrants programme, says I have the February bleughs.

Sounds about right.

Find your slot

Isn't it nice to have these all simply defined at last??

And to see that Baby boomers and Gen Xers don't binge drink and say whatever all the time.

Baby-boomers: broadly speaking, includes those born between 1946 and 1962.

Generation X: This grouping includes those born between 1962 and 1981. The X in the title refers to the namelessness of a generation who felt overshadowed by baby-boomers. With their teenage years spent in the patently ridiculous 1980s, it's no surprise that this generation specialise in irony and sarcasm. Many grew up under the Reagan/Thatcher axis, and were marked by events such as the fall of communism and apartheid and, later, the rise of the internet. They dismissively refer to baby-boomers as "hippies", while boomers prefer to pretend that Gen Xers simply don't exist.

Generation Y: The newest cultural generation, Generation Y, refers to those born between 1981 and 2000. They intensely dislike the name Generation Y, as they feel it's too linked to Generation X. It's a bit early to collate any meaningful material on them; however, the baby-boomers think all they do is binge-drink and say "whatever" all the time.

© The Irish Times

Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare

I finally finished Bruce Chatwin’s biography today. Published in 1999, written by Nicholas Shakespeare, it’s a mighty 600 plus page tome that examines every aspect of Chatwin's many-faceted, and carefully pigeon-holed life - the art, the travel, the bi-sexuality, the collecting, the obsession with nomads, the views on anthropology, the obsession with famous people, the inability to shut up - and takes a long, cool look at the damage he inflicted on many people he came across, not least the people who loved him best.

His mother, Margheurita, said she wanted to die before it came out. Which she did.

However, this is not to say he wasn't loved. It is, on the whole, a very positive portrait of a very complex person. His American wife of twenty three years, Elizabeth, was instrumental in ensuring it was undertaken.

Yes, his wife of twenty three years.

I thought I knew a lot about Chatwin. I knew he went to Marlborough. I knew he had had many many affairs with other men, and that he had broken the young Jasper Conran’s heart. I knew about Sotheby's, and his leaving a glittering career there to study archaeology in Edinburgh, and his travels all over Africa, South America, Asia and other places. I knew that his early writing was mired in how difficult he found it to write a book about nomads, and that after many other books, The Nomad Alternative eventually became The Songlines. I knew he died of AIDS back when it was still whispered about.

But I never knew he was married.

And so young.

After the first couple of years where she supported him in university, he mostly lived away from Elizabeth, whom he had settled into a country living style existence in rural England. She seemed to have had a stoic outlook on the marriage. She put up with all his behaviours; sorted out his finances, kept his possessions and tended to the boring mundane parts of his life, while he pretended to be a nomad, or a monkish writer living without possessions in London, or a international jetsetter.

When he became famous he treated her even worse than before, being rude to her which he hadn't before, not hiding his liaisons, interrupting the rhythms of her life on her own, and she eventually had enough, booted him out of their English home and sold it.

When he got sick a couple of years later in the early eighties, he very handily fell back in love with her and she nursed him lovingly to the end of his life, the last bit of which was spent, ironically, in Shirley Conran's house in the south of France.

I dunno, maybe that’s what Elizabeth wanted to believe. Maybe that’s what Nicholas Shakespeare believed. Maybe they concocted it together.

He sounded like a horrendous little shit to me. Spoiled, pretentious, selfish, egotistical. All the attributes we associate with greatness nowadays, without any question as to whether they should be acceptable in anyone, even great people.

I’d have hated him.

Thank goodness I never met him, so I can admire his writing for what it is.

In an interesting aside, the book also confirms what a number of other books have hinted/ tried to get across: Paul Theroux is an obnoxious git. Salman Rushdie seems nice, although there's a bit of kerfuffle when he splits up with a woman Bruce introduced him to in Australia.

There's a great anecdote in the book about Chatwin's funeral, held in a Greek Orthodox church on the day Rushdie's fatwah was announced. Theroux leans over to Rushdie half way through the ceremony and says I suppose we'll all be back here next week for you.

Maybe we’re all too nice to be great writers?!

Or too scared to be obnoxious enough to be great.

Another totally impractical game from Galaxy via Myles' blog

Myles' blog is always full of interesting games. I notice he has a Johari Window up. Brave lad. I notice quite a few of his friends picked the same words to describe him. I notice he has a Nohari Window up as well (lists of negative descriptors). Queenie tried to pick a few, but they were all too harsh.

Lorraine -- [noun]: A person who enjoys the smell of rotten eggs 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Roast beef dinners are the mark of a man

It’s official. I have the flu. Well, my doctor in Ireland (ie my uncle who’s a doctor) says it sounds like I have the flu. That’s enough for me. I feel like I do. Coughing, shivering, shaking, aching, throwing up, sleeplessness followed by hallucinatory dreams, sweats, wobbly legs, dizzy spells when I stand up, nausea when I lie down, and absolutely no desire to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee or alcohol, or to eat chocolate, biscuits or any kind of nice food whatsoever. Despite being presented with all kinds of nice things over the weekend.

Definitely the flu.

The first flu I’ve gotten in years and years and years. The last one I remember was in 1991, although I could be wrong. Normally I get a chest infection due to smoking too many cigarettes and get sick for a few days and take antibiotics and feel fine again.

This is different. This is scary.

Of course, there is no connection between me having this flu and this being the first winter I have gotten a flu jab.

Vaccination works, oh yes sirree bob. I’ll be first in the queue for the avian flu jab when they finally figure it out.

On Thursday night, Himself called to see what the plan was for the weekend. I was in bed, miserable, having just travelled all the way down from Cape Breton in the back of an SUV with the onset of the flu. Although I didn’t know what it was. I desperately wanted Himself to come up for the weekend, but figured he’d be bored and pissed off with me being so ill, so instead of politely explaining the situation to him in order for him to make up his mind about it, I was really rude to him and told him I never wanted to see him again.

In a much ruder way than that.

Next morning I rang work to say I wouldn’t be in, and sounded so much like a castrated bullfrog that the colleague who answered the phone laughed. In a not unsympathetic way, of course. But still, laughed.

I sat up in bed and answered my work email and did a bit of work and didn’t get that ‘11.30am feeling much better’ feeling I usually get when I take a day off work. In fact, I was feeling decidedly ropey. Miserable.

I called Himself, who had sent me a nice text that morning. To which I had responded with a nasty one of course. So I was a bit nervous calling him; the brazen cheek of admitting I needed him and all that…

He said: “I would like to come up and look after you for the weekend. I am going to buy roast beef and potatoes and carrots and peas and cook them for you so you can have a proper Sunday dinner. I want to nurse you back to health because you sound miserable.

I said okay.

Himself said: What do you need from the supermarket? What do you need from the drugstore?”

I said I’d make a list of stuff I needed. Himself said he’d be up in a few hours.

I hung up and wept tears of relief into my pillow.

I know that there are women all over the world who could read this and scoff. Those women have always had male partners who are kind and generous and caring. Those women consider this type of treatment as natural as breathing. Or commitment. Those women wouldn’t countenance anything else.

Many of those women are my friends. Many of the men involved are my friends. I have always been a little jealous when I witness the caring side to the men I am friends with.

But I have always thought that maybe it was something in me that chose men who dealt with me being ill as an irritating, but unavoidable intrusion into their busy schedules; as opposed to welcoming it as an opportunity to take care of me. And always told myself that it had benefits, in that it was the natural outcome of them being happy for me to be hugely independent.

Of course, Himself is happy for me to be hugely independent, and has even accepted that I pay for things some of the time, which is not very Canadian male at all. However, he doesn’t appear to feel that my huge independence should prevent him from taking care of me when I’m a pathetic, shivering, coughing, puking mess.

Despite my best efforts.

Christ on a bicycle giving Mary a crossbar, as my brother would say, I really have had shit taste in men until very recently, haven’t I boys and girls.

I’m sure I’ve insulted a load of people now, but I don’t care.

Anyway Himself arrived up with a slab of roast beef that would feed the extended family on both sides, enough cans of Campbell soup to line the Warhol Room in the Museum of Modern Art, and a bag of Crème Eggs.

And Canadian Lemsip, which is called Citron. Which tastes worse than Lemsip.

And an enormous bag of grapes.

Which sums Himself’s attitude towards caring for me up pretty well – something new he’s thought of that I might like (roast beef dinner that will remind me of home while I’m sick); something sensible that he’s figured out I need (Campbell’s soup), something he knows I really like (Crème Eggs), and something we both like (enormous bag of grapes).
Bless him.

I tossed and turned and moaned and dreamed and coughed all night last night. He claims he slept through most of it, but I know he was awake.

I looked a right state this morning. Finally managed to summon the energy to wash my hair and then put my head down to blast the roots quickly, and sort of fell asleep while I was doing it, so now I look like the wicked witch of the west, with demonic, flyaway, big hair.

But he still thinks I’m gorgeous.

Bless him.

Nova Scotia roast beef is nowhere near as good as Springtown roast beef. But that’s to do with how they feed the cattle over here, I think. But still, it was fine. The rest of the dinner was lovely and it reminded me of home, so then I called the house, and talked to the Queen Mum and Dad and heard all the news about who was dead, and who was sick, and who was seeing who, and who was expecting, and who was winning in the bridge club, and what flowers were up in the garden, and what nefarious constituency wranglings Bertie was up to, and what nefarious bird-murdering wranglings Jabba the Cat was up to, and all that kind of stuff, so that was great.

And he did the washing up while I yacked on.

Bless him.

Reserving my views on education systems

On my second night in Cape Breton we went to the Membertou Reserve Convention Centre for dinner. The Centre belongs to the Membertou First Nation.

From their website - Named after Grand Chief Membertou (1510-1611) the Membertou First Nation belongs to the greater tribal group of the Mi’kmaw Nation.

Membertou is situated in the city of Sydney, Nova Scotia, within its tribal district of Unamaki (Cape Breton). It is one of five Mi’kmaw (pronounced mi’gmaw) communities in Cape Breton, and one of thirteen in the Province of Nova Scotia.

It’s a really beautiful venue. A beautiful theatre and a gorgeous restaurant with a view of Sydney and beyond, the harbour. And of course the complex has a casino too. (There’s a long and convoluted history regarding the placement of casinos on Mi’kmaw Reserves and lots of fors and againsts which I am not going to get into now, not least because I haven’t figured out my own position on it). We had a pleasant few hours there, with dinner and then a meet and greet with local party members, but a few things struck me that night.

Why do reserves look the same?

As we drove into the reserve, one of the other women in the car and I looked up and at the same moment said ‘is this the reserve?’

You just know when you’re in a reserve. Because they all look the same. No matter where you are. Ontario. Manitoba. Alberta. Nova Scotia. A reserve looks like a reserve. Before you Irish readers get all misty eyed and think it's a hearkening back to the old day, a reserve is like a sub-division (suburb). Except there's something I can't put my finger on, that makes you know it is a First Nation Reserve. I was amazed that Canadians feel the same way too - I thought it was just me.

Don't get me wrong - it’s not like in Ireland, where all traveller halting sites look the same because they are all equally awful: grim concrete service areas, rubbish everywhere, scrap metal piled high, newly washed clothes hanging from bushes to dry, top of the range Land Rovers parked willy nilly, mixed with Hiace vans and other vehicles.

First Nation Reserves are not at all comparable to Irish traveller halting sites. They are made up of streets with houses that have decks, and barbeques, and cars parked outside, and children’s toys scattered on the lot – just like all Canadian streets. But they all look slightly different to other suburbs. And they (reserves) all look the same.

Very weird.

Nova Scotian education system

At the meet and greet I met a guy in the education field for whom we had been dealing with an issue, and I asked him whether it was sorted out and of course it was and he hadn't bothered to let me know.

One of the things that really pisses me off about working in politics is when people you help get sorted out and don’t bother to tell you. Why is that? Do they think you don’t care? I always remember how excited the constituency assistants in my old Irish party used to be the odd time they’d get a thank you note from a constituent they’d helped house or whatever.

Never mind.

We had a long conversation about the cost of university education in Canada, and in Nova Scotia in particular. Because it is more expensive in Nova Scotia. of course. There are eleven universities in Nova Scotia, several of which have an excellent reputation and score very high in the annual MacLeans university report card, so they have a net influx of students from other provinces. However, this means that the universities are severely underfunded, because the federal transfers for third level education go to the province in which the student grows up/ is domiciled, not the province in which they are studying.

Talk about a STOOPID policy.

So now, Nova Scotian students are starting to go to Newfoundland to uni, because a) it’s much cheaper, and b) it’s Party Central apparently.

A Nova Scotian will borrow up to $30 – 40,000 to go to university. And then have to pay it back when they start earning. Wages are crap in Nova Scotia, so they all go to Ontario or Alberta to work, so they can earn enough money to pay back their loan.

Talk about a STOOPID policy.

I’m actually going to stop talking about it now, because it makes me so annoyed. And that will make me start uttering heresies about healthcare and who should pay for it versus education and who should pay for it and then I’ll get thrown out of my political home in Canada.

Queenie will just say this: Canadians spend 40% of their budget on free public healthcare from the cradle to the grave, and 21% on education, which is so badly underfunded that students have to pay fees of up to $6,000 a term.

Irish people pay 30% of their budget on health, which is not free for everyone, and 22% on education, which is free up to degree level. Of course, most Irish people also have to pay huge private health insurance fees to enable hospital care, and get gouged by the health system who overcharge the health insurance companies, so it is probably closer to 40%. But that’s a whole other day’s question.

Today’s question is: what’s going on in Canadian education that free education up to degree level is not possible? I smell gouging going on somewhere, I do.

Fugitive Pieces

Fugitive Pieces, the Anne Michaels novel I bought last week, is fantastic.

No really, I am going to rave about this book for months. And months. And months.

I was spellbound.

Michaels is a poet and composer mostly, and it shows in her work. Her language is unbearably lyrical. Her themes include music and language and cadence and pace. Her themes are exposed through music and language and cadence and pace of course too.

Unfortunately this is her only novel; but it's published by Bloomsbury and by Knopff, so people who are not in Canada can get it. The novel is about remembering. And about being able to fall in love alongside the heavy burden of remembering.

Set in Toronto and Zykynthos and drawing on themes from geology, the first part of the book is a description of the lifetime of remembering undertaken by Jakob, a young Polish Jew who is rescued and brought to Greece by Athos, a geologist. The second part of the book is the story of Ben, the adult child of Holocaust survivors who lives in Toronto and who meets Jakob. The elder man's poetry helps Ben to recover from/ recover the memories of his parents and the impact of their experience on their new lives in Canada and on him.

Here's an excerpt from one of her poems, Memoriam, which I have reprinted from her website

I have nothing to give you, nothing to carry,
some words to make me less afraid, to say
you gave me this.
Memory insists with its sea voice,
muttering from its bone cave.
Memory wraps us
like the shell wraps the sea.
Nothing to carry,
some stones to fill our pockets,
to give weight to what we have.

Takin' Tom to Cape Breton

Cape Breton tomorrow.

Finally.

We’re going on a work retreat. A think-in before the House sits again, so to speak. At least that’s what it says on the agenda.

We’re congregating in Sydney. Sydney, Cape Breton that is. Home of the Tar Ponds and Coke Ovens. Bondi Beach it ain’t. One of the most polluted sites in Canada. They’re still fighting over how to clean it up. They’re talking about a mobile incinerator.

A mobile incinerator?

How does one implement the necessarily rigorous health and safety standards to ensure public and environmental safety on a mobile incinerator, I wonder? No problem apparently. Hmmm.

But yeah, Sydney is also one of the most diverse constituencies in Nova Scotia. We’re having an international meal tomorrow night. And it being Valentine’s Night, I have been assured by our host, the king of the poutines himself, GG, that there will be a surprise for the ladeez.

I keep imagining a Cape Breton coalminer’s version of The Full Monty. With fiddles.

It snowed again at the weekend. Dumped another foot on us. When it snows, the city becomes incredibly quiet. Nothing moves really apart from the psychotic jogger types and the snow ploughers.

Then, after it stops, people emerge and start shovelling out their cars and shovelling their pathways and driveways clear.

The snow plough comes along and shoves the snow off the road onto your nice clear path. So you push the snow to the edge of the path. There are little tunnels that we walk through to get here and there. Unfortunately, they run along the path and they don’t clear little pathways out at the sides. So if you want to cross the road or catch the bus, you have to jump into a big pile of snow and hope it doesn’t go up to your knees.

Bah. Very annoying on a Monday morning when you’re grumpy and you don’t want to be standing in the freezing cold waiting for the damned bus in the first place.

Today at approximately seven am the entire city of Halifax, apart from the joggers, woke up and looked out the window and swore as they realised that it had stopped snowing and they had to go to work. Boston got a snow day!!!! And we were supposed to get that storm.

Bah. Bloody Environment Canada getting everyone's hopes up again.

Cape Breton tomorrow but.

We’re allowed bring two cds each in the SUV. I’m inflicting Tom Dunne’s Irish collection on my co-passengers. To punish them for asking whether I had any Pogues.

This is no country for old men

Nova Scotia's ruling Tories elected a new leader tonight; Rodney McDonald.

The Hot-Rod's a former famous fiddler from Cape Breton.

He's thirty four.

Which is younger than Queenie.

He's the Minister for Tourism. And Culture and Heritage. And Health Promotion. And Immigration. All the important stuff. He has a couple of claims to fame. He abolished the Arts Council. Except for the fiddler section, based in Cape Breton. And he oversaw the collapse of the tourism figures last summer when the yankees stayed home.

He was elected today in the second ballot of a staged event in Halifax that was closer to Canadian Idol than it was to any political happenstance I've ever seen. Or maybe the Eurovision, seeing as it was in English and something that sounded like a frog being strangled, but which I think was supposed to be Francais.

In true Eurovision style, there were two hosts; some bloke whose name I can't remember, and Dame Judy Streatch, the 'thrusting new young woman in NS politics' (her daddy is a politico of course, so she's 'new' in the good ole boys' sense of the word). She shook my hand once in the pub, and nearly broke my middle finger bone by squishing it between my index finger and the ring on my third finger. There were light thingys and big screens and all the doodahs that come with 'events' nowadays.

It being the weekend and it not being fair on Himself who had travelled up to see me, I didn't tune in until the second ballot was nearly over.

They were just about to announce the winner. Judy was doing her best Paula Abdul impression, despite the fact that her demeanour and jawline veers closer to a young Margaret Thatcher, and the assembled thousands shouted 'Rawd-nee, Rawd-nee, Rawd-nee' on cue as she gorged on the glory of the spotlight and turned the election of the new premier of this 'noble province' into a dreadful parody of Republican American razzmatazz.

Then they played fiddle music as Rodney made his way to claim his throne, and I thought I was trapped in the Eurovision that we hosted that spawned Riverdance.

God help Nova Scotia.

How it helps us is another day's work, but the pundits were full of Rodney's need to have an election straight off, to put his mark on the party and to get the electorate's permission to rule etc. etc.

So I suppose that's good.

There will be a by-election in my home constituency soon anyways.

Sigh.

I tell myself I came to Canada for a year off and I laugh hysterically.

Oilean na Leaba

Of course, my last post was supposed to tell you all about my weekend down on Long Island. But I am so mithered at the moment I forgot.

My boss was back in work today after a couple of weeks off and he couldn’t remember anything. He kept walking into my office and then looking blankly at me.

Welcome to my world (this week), dude.

Queenie doesn’t know what’s wrong with her at the moment. If she’s not asleep, she’s dreaming about sleep, or lying in bed getting ready for sleep, or lying in bed trying to get up and go to work.

It must be the weather. And the fact that people in work are getting ready for an election again. Of course, Queenie has been getting ready for an election since last August. So maybe this time it will happen and then we can all calm the fuck down for a bit.

Of course, when Queenie was in Ireland, she was like this (sleepy) all the time, so she’s not too concerned about it happening for a couple of weeks. But it didn’t make for an insane weekend on the island.

Queenie was in bed asleep by eight pm on Saturday night and did not go clubbing in Digby like she was supposed to. Which is probably just as well, as she was too tired to go to work on Monday despite having an entire weekend of mostly sleeping and eating.

And walking. We did a lot of walking around in the glorious sunshine on Saturday. We went back to Balancing Rock, and then we drove over to the ferry in Freeport and went to Brier Island, which I hadn’t been too, and went to Pond Cove and then to the Lighthouse. It was warm enough to have a picnic.

Crazy weather.

And then it lashed rain all day Sunday.

Monday I watched movies. I finally saw Junebug and I ( Huckabees. I really loved Huckabees. I was watching the scene between Mark Wahlberg and his wife with my head under the pillow, remembering a recent conversation I had with Himself about letting the engine idle.

For conversation, read completely po-faced lecture.

For Open Spaces, read Sierra Club of Canada.

But yeah, a truly great movie.

Junebug was pretty good too, but I really, really disliked the main character, Madeleine, and her husband. And I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to or not. So I didn’t enjoy it so much. Although I was really taken with the way everyone else in the family just got right back into their groove after they left, even though they (Madser and hubby) probably thought they were the centre of that little universe. And will presumably agonise about visiting again.

Quite a bit to chew on there, alright.

Random, Iberian literature, and Arafat

Well, Queenie’s been sitting in bed with her laptop for about thirty minutes now, fiddling away, finding radio stations and checking other people’s blogs and messing about with her own layout and then deleting it. Because she can’t think of anything to write about today.

OHMYGOD, I forgot to check my site meter… hang on a tic.

That’s better. Checking the site meter – the last bastion of the lazy blogger. I do it for two reasons. One, some day, I will break the invisible twenty five visitors a day barrier the blog seems to have erected.

Why twenty five? It’s so random. And yet so predictable. Does that prove or disprove creationism? The apparent pattern in random circumstances. Or is that chaos theory? If it is chaos theory, that disproves it, doesn’t it? Unless the benign God created chaos theory. People who believe in creationism should read accentmonkey is ainm dom’s latest post.

Or does chaos theory have anything to do with creation?

Queenie has a little brain fart as she realises she has come up against another of the black holes in her knowledge.

Mental Note No. 5,426 to self – read up on this ‘how the earth was created’ shit for once and for all. Or get Myles to explain it to her. Again.

The second reason I check my site meter is because it is very interesting to see why people happen upon my site. Today it was someone looking for a Shakespeare quote that I had used recently. But it can be totally random – either something I mention that they are searching for, such as Jester’s, Bordentown, or Michael Waldhuber.

Islamic jihad for Dummies.

Let’s see how long that will take to hook some unsuspecting fish in Colombus, Ohio.

I have a lot of fans there you know.

I just finished reading a twenty page article in The Atlantic on Yassir Arafat’s legacy, which focused a lot on how he systematically beggared the Palestinian Authority and its citizens in order to be Abu Ammar. At the end, less than 10% of the money pouring into Palestine was being spent on the people there in ways those of us in the West would accept as 'proper governance'. The rest was being siphoned off and funnelled back in through the Fatah network.

Did you know that Fatah spelt backwards is a word for death?

And that Arafat spent an hour every day arranging his kaffiya into the shape of Palestine.

I don't believe that myself.

The article also included the best description of Ehud Barak that I have ever read:

He combines the hyperactive, engaging manner of the smartest ten year old boy on the planet with a cold, analytical way of describing events that suggests the personality of the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I have decided that The Atlantic is the best magazine in the world bar the London Review of Books. But it’s okay because they are complementary. I found a big stack of back issues in the filing room in work today, so that’s the rest of the week sorted, bus-wise.

I have also decided that the reason why I like it so much is because I am a total girl when it comes to non-fiction. Give me a twenty page article on a person or an event that paints the scene in journalistic sentences and I’m happy. Make me read a full length book (unless it is the biography of some writer I really admire) and I’m a bored little Queenie.

Occasionally, I make an attempt to change this. Take down Mental Note No. 2,356 and brush the dust off it. I went into Dulles Books on Barrington today full of good intentions. I was going to buy TWO non-fiction books and I was going to read both of them to the end and I was going to remember some of them and I was going to be ERUDITE.

It took all of twenty five seconds for me to drift over to the Literature section.

Another twenty four minutes and thirty five seconds later, I was standing at the bus stop with an Arturo Perez-Reverte I hadn’t managed to find previously, The Flanders Panel, and a novel called Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels, of whom I haven’t heard before.

The Flanders Panel is a mystery, as all Perez-Reverte’s novels are (apart from series about the sword guy, or the Viggo series, as I now call them). It is an art mystery, involving an inscription on a 500 year old Flemish triptych and an attractive young restoration expert.

A well-worn groove for Queenie.

The other might be a bit different, who knows. And I still have Shalimar the Clown, which I am savouring the thought of rather than reading, as I know when I read it I will immediately want to go to Kashmir, and I can’t do that just yet.

Peres-Reverte is one of my favourite writers. God bless Harvill Press and Jersey Girl, who pointed it out to me one day in a bookshop. Speaking of, I just finished Jose Saramago’s The Double. I discovered Saramago, who is Portugese and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, using the Harvill Press method of buying books.

The Harvill Press method of buying books

Go to a bookshop. Go to the fiction section. Stand at A. Turn your head sideways. Scan the rows of books until you see the Harvill spine (black with a little lion logo). Remove book. Continue until you get to Z. Figure out how many of the books you can afford. Spend an hour trying to get the pile down to an affordable size. Leave the rest on the Special Offer table. Pay for your books. Go home. Read. Repeat as necessary.

Anyways, I had discovered Saramago a few years ago one day when I realised I had gotten to S and had read most of the Harvill books. But I had bypassed him a couple of times. So I brought home The Gospel according to Jesus Christ, against my better judgement, which turned out to be a pile of cack anyways, as the novel blew the top of my head off at the time.

Turns out Sr. Saramago was born in 1922 and only achieved literary success in the eighties, after the military junta in his native Portugal was dismantled. He now lives in Lanzarote, which I have visited a few times, but I have never been able to locate him there.

In fact, he might even be dead now, I have just realised I don’t know.

So many gaps in my brain coming to the fore today.

Anyways, I am digressing terribly tonight due to my lack of a theme for this post. Jersey Girl gave me The Double when I was leaving Jersey this Christmas and I have only just finished it.

Oh my.

What a slow burn.

I kept thinking about it all day today. About who were the bad guys, and who were the victims. And when I started it, the first thirty pages were SO annoying I ploughed through them only because I like Saramago and I respect JG’s judgement in the life of the page.

It’s about a mild-mannered history teacher who is suffering from that peculiar male ennui that comes from being middle-aged, divorced and bored. A friend gives him a video to watch. He notices that one of the supporting actors is his double. He decides to track him down.

As one of the quotes on the back says, Saramago is so talented, he can write about nothing as if it is the most important thing in the world and make it so (I’m paraphrasing here).

A definite recommendation, if you ever spot it.

It's official...

As the Queen Dad said when I was a lot younger than I am today, I am old enough to know better.

You are a Social Liberal (81% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (69% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test

Snow Day's a Slow Day

Snow Day. Halifax shut down this morning after a nor’easter and a foot and a half of snow last night. So no work.

Hurrah.

And I only had to spend a couple of hours digging us out of the house. Three strapping lads living here and Marissa and I were out shovelling snow. I swear, they are the laziest bastards I have ever come across. And grumpy about it too!

We tramped to the garage and got out the snow shovels and dug a path to the kitchen door, then dug a path to the front door, then dug a path to the road, then dug a jogging path past our house and next door’s house (because he’s away at the moment). Because our road is one of the big jogging routes in Halifax and there are dozens of people taking advantage of the snow day to get out for a run.

The wind was rising again and blowing the snow around a bit. Everything was covered in white powder, too soft and loose to make snowmen or even proper snowballs. Some cross-country skiers passed by, swish-swashing along the snow-covered path beside the train ravine across the road. The snow plough passed. The guy driving it pretended to swerve in and push the sludge into my freshly shovelled path. I wagged my finger at him. He laughed so much he nearly fulfilled his own intentions.

Snow Day. A day free from paid work so that the snow, or some of it anyway, can get shovelled out of the way. How else can the province get back on its feet?

Pay someone to sweep the paths? They do in Dartmouth, but not in Halifax.

And they’re reducing property taxes by 5% this year.

Sigh.

On fighting dragons and other scaly creatures

Okay, I SWEAR I’m not going to turn into one of those people who burbles on about their goldfish all the time, but fuck me, Alexa and Peter had a right set to this evening. Headbutting each other into the side of the oxygen maker, and finning each other out of the way over the food flakes, and all that kind of carry on. They haven’t done that before. Now I know what it must have been like to be the Queen Mother, watching me and Baz pull ourselves to our feet for the first time, only to pounce on and beat the crap out of each other for the following ten years.

Very disillusioning.

Having said that, I didn’t turn into her, and wade into the aquarium with a terrifying ‘you think you’re in trouble now he has you in a headlock? Just you wait till I beat him off you, missy’ expression, and a correspondingly terrifying looking wooden spoon. I’m a modern mommy.

I just waved it at the aquarium, but they were too busy scrapping to notice. Next time I’ll rap it on the side of the tank, with a grim expression on my face.

It made me think of the time we were en famille in Portugal on our holidays and they had the equivalent of the Spring Show in Setubal and we visited one evening. There was a stall selling giant wooden kitchen and farm implements (the way there always is), and the Queen Dad bought the most enormous wooden spoon in the world – about six feet high – especially for the Queen Mum, as a joke.

I think we still have it somewhere.

Maybe they’re settling down at last, and they’re just having a bit of fun. Peter is definitely bullying Alexa a bit more too.

Maybe it’s the wrath of the meek. (eh? Jersey Girl??)

Actually, having watched the fighting a bit more, I think it’s all a big scam to get more food.

Unless… oh God, they wouldn’t be trying to make baby fish, now that there’s an over-indulgent food supply, would they?

Euch, okay, enough about the fish, how about the first anniversary of the blog?

Take a bow, Queenie.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

There was a request for Percy to reappear on the magic day. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Maybe later this week. What would he say anyway?

We went to Canada on a Quest to find modern dragons, and Queenie found some and is off fighting them?

There are those who say Queenie could have stayed in her own country and done the same thing.

Possibly.

She gets bored easy, that’s the trouble.

Having said that, there's a certain pleasure in the nearly-familiar yet not quite atmosphere of where she is now.

I wonder how long it will last.

Am I a bad mommy? Already?

Alexa and Peter* are currently amusing themselves by backing up to the end of the tank away from the pump; swimming really fast into the air bubbles; headbutting them, and then reverse swimming very fast. They they just dangle for a bit, before doing it again.

I am convinced that they are addicted to the aquatic equivalent of freebasing cocaine, but as I'm not a marine biologist I can't prove it.

But if I do they are both grounded for a month!


*Alexa and Peter are goldfish, not children, please don't call social services. Feel free to call the CSPA, they might be able to tell me what the hell is going on.

Red Fire Dog

I was born in the Chinese year of the dog. And I am Fire, and I am Red too, according to someone I was talking to the other day. So apparently, this is my big year, starting today. January 29th is the Chinese New Year - and this year is the Year of the Red Fire Dog.

I am very excited about this. So I decided to share it with you all and have appropriated the following text from some random Google desktop thingummy that appears when I log on in the morning now.

"In 2006, wrongs will be righted, the underdog will become an "overdog" and the idle rich may just become the idle poor. Watch and see. From January 29, 2006 until February 17, 2007 the disquiet, just, fair, loyal, suspicious, critical and sometimes pessimistic RED FIRE DOG will reign supreme, creating an overall positive influence.

Hooray! And we'll all live in the Big Rock Candy Mountain no doubt too. Do I get to be in charge is the important question, seeing as I know how to do all this stuff?

Fortunately, we need not BEWARE of this particular dog. Fire Dogs are generally benign, resilient, and compassionate characters--perhaps with a penchant for lust and fierce loyalty to kin and causes. They gripe often, growl when they're angry and whine when they're lonely or hungry. Bottom line? Fire Dogs are a cindery mix of moody combustion and passionate, benevolent concern for their fellow man.

Oooh, er, a penchant for lust. That strikes me as a bit of a stupid sentence, but I can't quite figure out why. I tell you one thing though, passionate benevolent concern never got me anywhere in the lust stakes. Moody combustion on the other hand...

This fiery watchdog will inspire us all in 2006. You'll feel compelled to emulate the playful, loyal aptitude of this great canine pal. Almost instinctually, you'll want to engender the flock's highest mission and work to save the world. You will be obliged to pitch in and give 110%. And you will be rewarded for your labors with a huge cosmic cuddle around hearth and home by the end of this fiery but positive year.

This means that there will be three more elections this year and I will have to work on all of them and it will be awful, but the party will run the world by the end of it.

And I'm not cosmic cuddling anyone I don't like....

Money: The money picture in 2006? Just okay. Don't expect to break the bank at your favorite casino, win the lottery or receive a surprise inheritance. This is not one of those windfall years. You see, a Dog is not the type to easily part with hard-earned cash. It's not that he's stingy. The Fire Dog is a cautious soul. He will definitely inspire you to think a dozen times before impulse-buying anything that you don't actually need.

This is obviously the Nova Scotian in me.

I've just realised I need to rephrase that sentence. That's the Nova Scotian influence on me is what I meant to say.

On top of that, the Dog will beg us all to double our charitable contributions and jingle change into every open hand. Dogs are fervent believers in helping the unfortunate. With so many reasons to give—and there will be tons—try not to give in to too many handouts. You may end up donating all that money you saved.

I'm registering the Nova Scotian Collective for the Integration of Immigrant Women into Society as we speak. I'll have Paypal for all you foreign donors.

Love and Lust: This year, we will all fall in and out of impassioned love at least once...and many people—more than in a long time—will get married, settle down and make a normal life for themselves and their offspring. But beware, although dogs are oddly loyal in most areas of life, dogs are rarely faithful in the matters of sex, and this year may be proof positive. Dogs don't prevaricate often if they can help it. But where sex is concerned, they fib prolifically.

This is not true. I would just like to put that on the record.

Loyalty: Dogs are notoriously faithful to causes, beliefs and institutions, and almost obsessively loyal to family and friends—in fact, they give a warning growl the way a real dog does. The loyalty level this fiery Dog year will reach heights of zeal.

Zeal is such a tiring word isn't it.

In general, the Dog year 2006 will be a time of rebuilding, renaissance, safety and security. It will bring about massive restructuring of everything from bridges and dams to houses and causes. Closer attention will be paid to environmental issues, reducing global warming, quelling warlike behavior, and improving our planet's longevity. Passions will advance and then retreat.

This is actually a bit spooky. I wonder.....

We will embrace new commitments and discover new routes to realize our dreams. It'll be up to each of us – the members of the Red Fire Dog's flock – to manifest our deepest desires for peace and prosperity.

My flock, I like the sound of that... I should write my own Psalm. Queenie is your shepherd, you shall not want/ Deep and green are the grassy meadows she bringeth you along/

.... wouldn't it be hilarious if I were the Messiah! Oh man, I could just refocus the blog a bit and let on I was!!

I should write a self-help guide, shouldn't I? This is the year to do it. It could be bigger than the Bible. I have a title and everything:

Become the Red Fire Dog:
How to leverage deeply ingrained intellectual arrogance, emotional insecurity, and unpredictable moodiness into an extraordinary leadership skillset!

2005's Top Stuff, rather belatedly

These are Queenie’s top stuff of 2005, divided into miscellaneous lists, which she submitted to Frank's in early January. and can only post now, as she had to wait for her Frank’s to arrive.

By the way, Queenie is still FUMING that someone in Frank's mailcommed her and called her taste in music anodyne. She is considering having it out with said music snob extraordinaire by way of the next article. But she is not sure of the protocol of a Frank's fisticuffs. Can you just go straight for the eyes, or the cochlears possibly, or do you have to be all louche and offhanded about the whole thing, whilst amazingly perceptive about Ukrainian belching music.

Please tell me it's the former.

Anyways...

Top Ten Purchased Albums

In no particular order, but that in which they came to me through the shuffle dream

Bloc Party: Silent Alarm
Kate Bush: Aerial I and II
Kuma: Fast Colliding
Mercury Rev: The Secret Migration
Bruce Springsteen: Devils and Dust
Rufus Wainright: Want Two
Elliot Brood: Ambassador
Colin Hay: Going Somewhere
Madonna: Confessions from a Dancefloor
Doves: Some Cities

Top Five Gigs of 2005

Again in no particular order, but as they came to me in a sweetgrass dream.

Mercury Rev, in Vicar St., Dublin. In March sometime, because it was near Trish’s birthday.
Buck 65, in Whelans, Dublin, the night before I moved to Canada, so it was 7th June. And he was late.
Afirorampo, ATP second weekend. A cold weekend in April/ May. And I drove a car in England for the first time. Much to everyone’s horror.
Elliot Brood, The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto ON, on my second night in Canada, so work that one out yourselves.
Kuma, the Bovine Sex Club, Queen St., Toronto. The other gig of the year as far as I’m concerned

Top Five Films

Once more in no particular order but the way I remembered them, which appears to be the order in which I saw them. Hooray!!

The Republic of Love, dir. Deepa Mehta
Set in Toronto, a film version of the Carol Shields novel. A good adaptation of the novel. I saw it the day my visa came through, so I spent most of the film looking at the buildings in the background.

Garden State, dir. Zack Braff
Zack Braff does the chemical dependency thing and then is saved by a mysterious yet beautiful woman. A funny take on a boring genre. And a good soundtrack.

Mysterious Skin, dir. Gregg Araki
Sexual abuse survivors survive differently and finally come to terms with their experience by talking about it together. Healing ensues.

Pretty nasty film, but very impelling.

Water, dir. Deepa Mehta
This Hindi-language film, set at a ghat in Benares/ Varanasi in India, highlights how widows were treated (and still are in some provinces such as Bihar) by the Hindu religion.

Brokeback Mountain, dir. Ang Lee
Even cowboys get beard rash.

Ang Lee explores the male psyche with his usual quiet style. And the scenery is amazing, it was filmed in Alberta.

And there’s a bear in it. Scary one at that.

The worst film by a long ways was Elizabethtown, but it had a good soundtrack.

Top Five Reads

After a year during which I read not one book to completion, I found my ability to read till the book slips from my hand again, much to my relief.

Four of these books are by Canadian authors. In fact, most of the books I have read this year are deliberately Canadian. Buy Canadian fiction. It’s fab!!

The Memory of Running, by Ron McLarty

I already reviewed this last year.

The Wreckage, by Michael Crummy

A young Newfoundland Catholic finds the love of his life in a Protestant village, only to be separated from her when they are caught ‘at it’ by her mother.

He goes to fight in South East Asia in WWII and ends up in a POW run by a Japanese Canadian with a penchant for sadism. She waits, and waits, and waits.

Three Day Road, by Joseph Boyden

Isaac and Elijah are Cree hunters who join the Canadian forces in 1915, and are sent to fight on the Ypres Salient and later the Somme. They become expert snipers and spend most of their time in no mans land waiting for a kill. When Elijah returns broken and addicted to morphine, Elijah’s Auntie, who escaped from a residential school on the reservations as a child, uses all her renowned shamanic power to save him from the evil spirits within.

An Audience of Chairs, by Joan Clark

Moranna McKenzie is a bipolar sculptor living in isolation in Northern Cape Breton. Her bastard journalist husband took her children away when she became ill. Moranna starts every day playing an imaginary piano concerto to an audience of chairs.

Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb

The story of Lilly, an orphaned European, who is raised by a Sufi philosopher in Morocco and sent to Ethiopia, to Harar. When Mengistu takes over, she is evacuated to London and begins the search for her lost love, Dr. Aziz. In the meantime, she co-parents Amina’s children and begins to trust others after a long period of isolation.

2005’s Five Best Days

• Trish and Keith’s wedding day
  
• Tuskett Lake, New France, last weekend of the summer
  
• The day I spent exploring Toronto and it bucketed rain
  
• The afternoon I spent in the courtyard at ATP
  
• The day I discovered New York’s 8th St and its 67 shoe shops.
  

Five things I did this year that I’ve never done before.

• Saw a whale
  
• Moved to Canada
  
• Delivered 63,000 kgs of poplar logs to a photo-paper mill in Northern Alberta. (not by myself obviously).
  
• Lived beside the sea properly
  
• Started a blog. It's Percy’s Depressed’s first anniversary on Tuesday, by the way, boys and girls, if you have any thoughts on how Queenie should mark it.

I suppose an appearance from the man himself would be in order. Oh, I wonder where he is....

At least it's pretty obvious who our overlords of darkness are now.

Queenie's trivia breakthrough

W-e-e-e a-a-r-e the cha-a-a-m-pion-n-n-ns, my fri-e-e-e-nd….

Queenie entered the Nova Scotia world of the trivia quiz and stormed to the top of the tree immediately by winning the Crimestoppers Inc. third annual Battle of the Wits Trivia Quiz.

She has the plaque to prove it. Bottles of booze not being considered suitable prizes for Crimestoppers apparently.

Queenie of course was ably aided by her team, which included a politician, a political activist, a psychologist, and a Canadian military pilot. Who was very calm, knew a lot of stuff, and had a preternatural talent for reading upside down, which is what won it for us really, of which more anon.

OHMYGOD it was the most insanity she’s ever had to spend twenty-five bucks on in an evening. As she said to one of her teammates during the break after round two ‘I’m still trying to get over the fact that this is supposed to be fun.’ Queenie is going to have a pub quiz forthwith and show these people how to do it.

Definitely. She just needs to find a fundraising idea. But of course, there’s going to be another election soon, so there’s no shortage of candidates to fundraise for. Queenie was thinking she would do one around St. Patrick’s week sometime, and have an Irish round, to sort out the men from the boys.

Anyone fancy coming over to be Quiz Master??

The event was held in the Halifax Forum, which is where all the hockey games are held, and the bingo hall is located, so the room was a big barn, and consequently was freezing. Which was not good as Queenie had a sore throat and a fever, due to being worn out with elections and the crap that’s going on at work at the moment. So she was in a right mood from the get go.

There were 36 teams with five members on each team. As normal in Canadian public events, there was an initial, interminable reading out of the rules and thanking of everyone who contributed in any way to the event.

When Queenie has hers, she is so going to thank the parish priest for the use of the hall, and then not explain why.

Anyways, there were twelve rounds, with between twelve and twenty questions in each round. Each round was timed – four minutes, three minutes, one was a whopping six minutes.

But here’s the thing. They don’t read out the questions. They give you a sheet of paper with the questions on it. One sheet of paper. For five people.

Hence the need for at least one team member who can read upside down writing. The Queen Mother would have done very well, as this is one of her talents. Actually Queenie is not too bad at it either. Also, being left-handed meant she could write the answers down without putting her hand on the questions.

But how stupid is it? Where’s the fun in fighting over a piece of paper? What’s the point in having a time limit if it means that not everyone gets to have a look at the questions?

Apparently, the pub quiz is not unknown in Nova Scotia, as everyone I talked to was very excited at the thought of having a proper Irish one.

Maybe Queenie could do her idea of a blind dating pub quiz night here??

Anyways, we came from behind and ass-wiped the Daily News team that had led from the start, which was particularly gratifying, and beat various other teams comprising RCMPs, firefighters, radio stations and other stalwarts of the community. As the Halifax televisual celebrity compere put it, proving that not all politicians are stupid. Gee thanks, Fiona or whatever bland tv presenter’s name you had. Should I point out that we scored more on the news round than the goddam news hounds?