Rain, music, and tea, not crappy

I forgot to buy coffee yesterday.

I hate hate hate getting up on a Saturday morning and not having any fresh coffee.

I mentally reminded myself about sixteen times yesterday to buy coffee, in between begging my colleague to take Shazz' teenager on as a job shadow so that she would then take Kitty (both teenagers having monumentally failed to find a job shadow for Tuesday), making a million phone calls, going to the bank, having a good bye lunch for my colleague who left yesterday, doing my Friday meetings, calling Kitty to remind her to bring her bag, money, phone numbers, etc with her down to the island (she has gone home for the weekend), and playing phone tag with lawyers and various other people who are moving in our destiny over the next couple of weeks.

So I walked straight past the coffee shop on the way to the liquor store to get a bottle of wine so I could go home and collapse with exhaustion in front of Children of Men.

Of course I was so mithered I forgot to go into the Liquor Store.

By the time I got home and collapsed in front of the iTunes playlist, getting back up to go into the sitting room to put the dvd in the machine was too exhausting.

iTunes it was. Time to review new stuff and rank some stuff anyways.

After a few minutes of that, all I could manage was a text to Himself.

Buy some beer.

Which he did.

He's good like that.

Then he proceeded to drink most of it of course.

So we sat in the dining area on the hard chairs and shot the shit with each other all evening, because we knew once we sat on the couch we'd both be asleep.

We crawled into bed at the insanely late hour of eleven o'clock, having had the luxury of a conversation about stuff that wasn't interrupted every ninety seconds by 'can I make banana muffins' or 'can I call XYZ' or 'I'm bored, can we go and play basketball', or 'I can't get the hot water tap/ Internet/ stove/tv in my room to work'.

This morning, the alarm went off at six as usual. I got up with Himself because I was already awake. The people upstairs had dropped an enormous rock or something on the floor above my bed at four am, waking me out of a wonderful dream where I was hanging out with the Queen Dad doing whatever, which I couldn't get back into. Which made me really cranky.

And there was no coffee.

Only crappy.

Which is what I call the shit Himself purports to call coffee.

I had a cup of crappy.

Eeuwch..

I made a pot of tea.

Slightly better.

So now it is 7.50am and I have tidied the apartment, read the newspapers, checked my email, checked everyone's blog for updates, had my breakfast and I am on my second pot of tea.

What the fuck am I doing up this early?

It's pissing rain outside. It's going to rain all day. Kitty is not here. Himself is not here.

Why am I not in bed?

Because I'm Canadian now I suppose.

Canadians get up early.

Rock thrower upstairs is already gone off with a backpack and a walking stick.

Everyone else on the street, which I can see from my desk, is up and around.

Sigh...

Rainbow ahead in polls already

The alternative government of Fine Gael and Labour has moved into a strong position to win the forthcoming general election, according to the latest TNS mrbi opinion poll carried out for The Irish Times . It shows a big swing to Fine Gael and another drop in support for Fianna Fáil, writes Stephen Collins , Political Editor.

An increase of 5 per cent in support for Fine Gael since the last Irish Times poll in January means that the Fine Gael-Labour alternative has pulled four points ahead of the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats coalition. If the Green Party is included, the alternative government parties have a lead of 10 per cent over Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats.

The adjusted figures for party support are: Fianna Fáil 34 per cent (down 3 points); Fine Gael 31 per cent (up 5 points); Labour 10 per cent (down 1 point); Sinn Féin 10 per cent (up 1 point); Greens 6 per cent (down 2 points); PDs 3 per cent (up 2 points); and Independents/others 6 per cent (down 2 points).

I'm not even going to try to pundify the poll numbers that are out in Ireland this morning. I have been away two years; I am used to reading vastly different polling numbers, and I have too much emotional investment in the forthcoming general election to be unbiased.

But I will say this: very confused electorate which is about right for the time of the cycle.

The Greens are down 2 points, and the Independents are down 2 points and Labour is down 1 point, so that could be all the FG support going home. Which if the coalition pact works well could be okay, as it will go back to the Greens and Labour at the end of the day and get them over the line.

You could say the same about the FF drop - if it went to SF and the PDs, then presumably a good vote management system will get it back in such a way that it won't matter.

The core vote for the parties is: Fianna Fáil 32 per cent (down 3 points); Fine Gael 23 per cent (up 4 points); Labour 7 per cent (down 1 point); Sinn Féin 8 per cent (up 1 point); Greens 4 per cent (down 2 points) PDs 2 per cent (up one point); Independents/others 5 per cent (down 1 point); and undecided voters 19 per cent (up 1 point).

The real concern here is the continued slide in the Labour vote and the surge in the Sinn Fein vote.

Because it's all about momentum isn't it.

The Queen Dad and I had talked about this recently and figured a Fianna Fail - Labour coalition would be the probable outcome, as Labour's continued decline will probably not get the numbers to get FG into power.

But now I'm not so sure.

Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein?

Fianna Fail will have to emasculate SF in order to stop them growing more.

What better way to do that then to enter into coalition with them?

They'd get rid of McDowell and the PDs.

How much will SF grow in the next two months? I imagine FF have hit rock bottom now; I can't imagine them going below 30 per cent. So they'll probably get back up to the core vote necessary to manage a respectable showing.

Who will SF take votes from to keep growing? If in fact that is what happens?

Last time it was Fianna Fail. They have gotten all they can from them, so who will they take from now?

It has to be the Greens and Labour.
Long silence.

Don't like that at all. No sireebob. Neither would Mr. Collins, which is why he hasn't even mentioned it I'd imagine.

Kitty is very sociable

Apparently.

That comment came from everyone. With a kind of resigned smile and a lop-sided grin. The one you use when your no good boyfriend does something no good in front of your best friends.

When she's in class, added Mr. Harrison the gym teacher.

Having said that, Mr. Harrison spent five minutes telling me what a great kid Kitty was while searching frantically on his page for her name (and identifying squiggle I imagine). Then he found the name finally and said 'oh yes, Kitty' in a 'that's who she is' tone of voice. He paused for effect and looked up at me (he's very young. Very fit)

... Kitty's very sociable.

Apparently, I said. This being my fourth teacher.

But not all the time, he announced triumphantly, having something to say finally about a student he couldn't remember! I have... mmmmm..... four skips!!

My heart missed the corresponding number of beats.

If I was her I would definitely not be skipping her gym class.

And she could do with doing her homework a bit, said Ms Nichol.

She says she doesn't get any homework, I told her.

Ms. Nichol looked at me sympathetically. She was young too. All made up with bright red lipstick. She should be an elementary teacher really, she's wasted in a high school.

She gets lots of homework, she en-un-ci-at-ed clearly to me.

Apparently.

But her first history project was fantastic, she said.

I made a mental note to pass on the congratulations to the project manager. Himself was very proud of the imaginary island he spent a week building.

But the essay part of it was very weak.

I hung my head IN SHAME.

And she's missed two big project deadlines, said two of her other teachers.

When I got the dates they corresponded exactly with when Himself went back to work.

There was a lot more.

I went to see the dreaded Ms Dodson, who is old and evil and nasty and has a voice that gives Kitty a bad headache, which is why she's been skipping class.

Apparently.

Terrible things headaches.

Himself and I have a big one now.

Ms Dodson was lovely of course, a small soft-spoken woman in her forties who knew exactly who Keisha was and pointed out where she sits and didn't say she was sociable.

She's a terrible chatterbox isn't she, she said.

I nodded numbly.

I've been going easy on her up till now, but I'm done with the chatting in the corner so I am going to move everyone around to try to stop it.

Kitty comes home every day and moans and moans and moans about this woman. She doesn't talk in her class ever and she is being picked on.

Apparently.

I didn't want to moan at that point. I just wanted to crawl into her lap and weep with gratitude. A teacher who cared. Perhaps she's just older and wilier when it comes to parents. I didn't care at that stage. I needed positive affirmation that it was all going to be okay.

The drama teacher looked like a drama teacher. I took an instant dislike to her.

Well, Kitty's no actress, she said.

She saw my face.

Of course, that's not what my class is about.

Of course, I mumured, gratified that I can still drop them with a glare.

Even if it is only a drama teacher.

Ms. Martin so obviously didn't care a whit about Kitty that I didn't stay long with her.

We'll get her out of her shell, yet, she called after me in a motivational Mallory Towers kind of voice she probably perfected in drama school.

I kept the thought that maybe the other teachers wouldn't like that so much to myself.

I wandered the halls looking for the Lifeskills teacher.

Parents were milling everywhere. An imposing African Nova Scotian in a suit was patrolling the halls in vice-principal like fashion. He kept smiling at me. I wondered whether I should go over to him and talk about Kitty. Then I figured I'd end up on the fund-raising committee so I didn't.

Bad parent.

In one of the queues I met a guy who is a widower with two teenagers. He looked wrecked. It's so hard to be the good guy and the bad guy, he said.

I tried to think of something but he rushed on. She won't do a thing I say and I try to be her confidant but sometimes I need to punish her and I find it really difficult to switch gears, he said.

And she knows that and she's playing you, I added, helpfully I thought.

He looked horrified. Would she do that?

I said, there isn't a daughter alive doesn't play her father.

He sat chewing on that until he was called in to see Ms. Martin.

Who just loves his daughter.

Apparently.

I've just noticed the word apparently contains the word parent.

It should contain the words towering rage.

Back to originals.

I had two dreams last night about people in Ireland.

In the first dream, Polly came to stay with me and Himself in our apartment in Toronto. And threatened to leave because Himself was so messy and she was sick of sharing a room with him because he insisted on walking around naked all the time.

????????????????

I think I was sleeping on the couch. I can't remember why.

In the second dream, Eileen and Stevo came to visit us here, just for a day, and I couldn't get any time off work. So I drew up a tour of Halifax for them to do with Himself but he wouldn't do it because he knew he'd get lost. So I had to explain it to him over and over again and then I missed work anyway. And Eileen was annoyed because I had ruined her holiday.

Thoughts, anyone?

Ammonite left a comment on my blog that reminded me that I am talking too much about the teenager. She didn't say that, but it did remind me.

Of course you just blog about what's in your brain.

Also, there is a lot of stuff going on in my brain that I can't blog about for privacy reasons of one sort or another.

Some day, maybe.

But I won't blog about the teenager today. Particularly as I have my first ever Parent Teacher meeting tonight, so I shall hold off and tell you all about how much fun that was some other time.

I'll moan about work instead!!

Hurrah, says everyone.

I always have an up and down relationship with work. I am one of those people who feels that if I am to spend eight hours a day in an office with some people moving paper around, then it should be meaningful and fulfilling. There should be efficient communication, and consultation, and a certain level of consensus about the day/week/month ahead.

Unfortunately, life's not like that, is it.
Also unfortunately, I used to teach people how to do that in a previous life.

So I'm probably more fussy than most.

But Jesus on a bike carrying Mary on the crossbar, is it too much to ask that someone walk down the corridor and have a conversation with me about work? Why do I have to get endless emails that obviously took four or five minutes to type, when a little trot down the corridor would do. Plus there would be eye contact, and body language, and all that non-verbal communication that helps to prevent conflict, because you understand where the sentiments of the communication are coming from.

And respond accordingly.

And shoot the shit a bit too. Thereby imparting important information on what's going on really.

WHICH IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT OF MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORKERS IN A KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY.

Unlike cold, impersonal emails. Which cause my hackles to rise and my back to go up and all that other non-verbal stuff that results in a snotty response. Or none at all.

I am blessed in work that there are a lot of good people in the office, who are great individuals, who share life's ups and downs and make the day go by a lot faster. I am also blessed that I have a 'board of directors' as diverse and colourful as the Nova Scotian weather, but who are not there all the time, thereby ensuring we never get tired of them.

But I find the fact that certain people, who live just down the hall, who would prefer to send me twenty emails a day rather than spend five minutes talking to me, profoundly depressing and demeaning. Is my company so bad? Am I so boring? Do I drone on and on and on about stuff?

It means that there is no sense at management level regarding what's going on in my private life. Unless I say something. And then of course I am ASKING FOR HELP and there has to be an intervention and more emails. When really I just need a pat on the arm and a 'don't worry, it'll be fine'.

And of course it also means that there is none of that in the other direction. Which is also important.

And the overall outcome is that the staff either join together in feeling crap about the situation or snipe at each other. Which is what happened yesterday.

I hate being an annoying bad-tempered bitch in work.

But when that's your experience, it is inevitable that there will come a certain stage at which you stop feeling undervalued and start feeling bolshie.

Early mornings

So Himself doesn't have to get up until six am now. Em, hurray, I think. But it does mean that waking me up is not so cataclysmic, it being bright anyway. And if I get up and have a coffee with him, then I have half an hour in the morning to myself. So hopefully I will get a bit more blogging done.

I had very strange dreams last night, but I can't remember them. I just have that feeling of unease that comes from a restless night.

It was very hot too. Well, hot for April.

Then a wind started up around four am, which is still howling around the house. Whoooooooooo - ooooo. One of those screechy, witchy ones you get in Ireland in the autumn.

Which may be a sign of something, because I got called the Wicked Witch of the West yesterday.

Yes, the pushing of the envelope episode didn't go quite as I expected. Kitty 'forgot' to call and then her phone 'died' and so she HAD to stay with her friend another night and got into all kinds of trouble the next day when she came home and said airily, 'I haven't slept in two nights!'

Neither had Queenie of course, but for different reasons.

So on Monday she had to go to my office after school and sit there and write an essay about why she had ruined my weekend.

The essay consisted of a foolscap page of reasons why it was not really her fault with an 'I'm really sorry' tacked onto the end. For self-preservation.

Then we left to do the shopping.

In the corridor we met Leonard and his son.

Leonard and I discussed punishment essays as the teenagers squirmed. It was Leonard who had given me the idea to do one.

Leonard's son announced he'd never written any. Leonard said he thought he might have seven or eight at home from him and smiled at me knowingly.

The teenagers were squirming a lot at that stage so we said our goodbyes.

Kitty and I got into the lift then and as the doors were closing she said, loudly enough, 'he's really HOT!'

So I'm sure Leonard had a good laugh at that.

So we went and did the shopping and I talked about trust and what it means, and how important it is, and it all went in one ear and out the other because there were five types of chili pepper in Pete's so could we get one of each.

Making the salad, she wanted to put the peppers in so I said she should scrape out the seeds, because they were really hot. 'I'm going to eat one!!!'

I said 'they're really hot'.

In it went. A seed from a Harbanero pepper. Her mouth went numb for an hour.

He he he...

Then later on over dinner when the feeling came back into her mouth, I was being argued into a cul de sac by what I call the Himself method. You use the Himself method if you are arguing with someone who is better at arguing than you. You just sit there saying nothing, lulling the other person into a false sense of victory. Then, when they make their killer statement, for example, 'if you do this, then you'll lose your job and we'll be homeless', you say, 'well I don't care'.

Works a dream for him everytime. Completely stumps the professional debater.

So I was moving in for the kill; something to do with homework I think, and consequences. And Kitty threw the 'I don't care' line at me and I laughed because it's just like her dad. Then I leaned forward and said 'I'll get you some day you know', just to make sure she knew that I was working on a block for that particular argument.

And quick as a wink, she scrunched up her face and said in a witchiepoo voice 'and your little dog too'.

There was a momentary pause as we both realised what she said and then we fell about laughing for far too long.

So God only knows what level of disdain she holds for my authority now.

But we both needed a belly laugh.

Moving on to grown up things, Julian Gough has won the UK's National Short Story Competition and £15,000. Well done to him, but his short story is the opening section of a novel, and if the NSSC is supposed to save the short story form, then I don't see the point in awarding it to a novel chapter.

But that's just me, I suppose. You can hear it on the BBC website. It's very Flann O'Brienish, if you're a fan of that kind of thing.

I'm sounding really mealy-mouthed... I don't mean to.

Anyways, time for breakfast..

Daydreams...attempt 1

My nice daydreaming was just interrupted by Kitty calling to stretch the envelope.

She didn't know when she'd be home. Maybe tomorrow.

I said I'd think about it and get back to her later in the afternoon.

She said it was okay, she had decided to take the weekend off work and hang with Shataya.

I reminded her that we were invited to Mike and Kates for dinner tonight.

She said she didn't think she'd bother, her and Shataya were going to stay home and use the computer.

I said there was a computer here, and Shataya was welcome anytime.

It took her a second, but she said that was okay, Shataya's mom wanted her to stay home tonight.

To my continued surprise, I find the fact that she thinks I'm completely numb in the head really insulting...

I let it slide for the moment. They're headed for the mall, which is where she'd be headed anyways at this time of day.

But I sent her a text message. It said 'no weed, no booze, no boys. Or I will hunt you down and put you on a bus to boring island. Understand?'

No answer.

Strike one.

I had a sudden thought. I sent her another one. It said 'and nothing else I may not have thought of in my last message'

I remember being sixteen, so I do. More importantly, I remember how my mother dealt with the situation. Cover EVERY angle ALWAYS.

No answer again.

Strike two.

It's psychological warfare, this teenager-raising business.

She's heading to the mall, drunk with freedom and the glorious sunshine. She thinks she's won. PUNY MORTAL! She's forgotten about my secret weapon, which is Himself if he thinks his little dove might be heading for the door of the gilded cage.

So she has until about six pm, which is when he gets home and hears about the phone call.

He he he...

The Midwife takes a coffee break

I am sitting at the computer on Saturday morning with my coffee, and I have just finished reading the Guardian and the Irish Times and The Chronicle Herald (I shall read the Globe and Mail in paper format later today). The sun is streaming in the window.

Lovely Saturday morning.

Best Saturday morning in months.

I am alone.

Just me and the Qawwalli music blaring from the stereo - Mer Ali and Sher Ali to be precise, what I downloaded from eMusic the other day.

I do love a bit of Pakistani funeral music when I'm blogging.

Kitty is staying with a friend. I don't know the friend, and there is a small part of my brain that is thinking I should have been more circumspect about letting her out for the night, but her friend is her drama partner, and they both got great marks in the class, and Kitty must be sick of the sight of me and Himself every evening. So the bit of my brain thinking those things joined forces with the bit of my brain thinking 'Saturday morning to myself' and routed the circumspect bit.

If it all goes pear-shaped I shall be the one dealing with it, so I guess I am making the right decision.

Raising a sixteen year old is a constant stream of Hobson's Choice type decisions.

Himself is at work.

Himself LOVES work. I never see him anymore. He springs out of bed at 5.30am every morning and has his coffee and cigarette and then runs to the car to get to work. And he stays there until eight in the evening every night.

At work, there are lots of blokes who do blokeish things, and call each other blokeish names, and play blokeish tricks on each other, and jostle for position in the manliness stakes (in which Himself appears to be doing quite well, being a manly man).

And there are impressions to be made in terms of being willing to do overtime, so that the company will take an interest and keep him on and promote him.

And there is work to be done, which involves power tools and dangerous situations involving hazardous waste and confined spaces and oxygen masks and complicated instructions about not trying to save the other man if it comes to that, which Himself is always telling me he will of course ignore if it comes to that.

I just nod sagely when he does. I learned long ago that a man when he is being manly doesn't want to hear 'but the rules are there for a reason, dearest'.

And the skill set includes strength and cunning and strategic thinking and planning, and all the other hunter gatherer skills that Himself loves to practice.

And there is nice food and wages and on top of that pretty good overtime payments, which result in money to take Queenie out at the weekend and buy her nice things, and consequently feel even more manly.

And on top of all that there is the new best friend, who is a Brazilian called Nitro (because no one can pronounce his name properly). Nitro's English is not so great. And so nobody would talk to him for a while. So Himself decided to offer him a cigarette one day.

Now Nitro dances the salsa with Maurice the hip hop king from Dartmouth when he's working, and teaches Himself Portugese phrases and Spanish swear words. He sings Portugese love songs, and talks constantly in broken English and exaggerated hand gestures. It's his birthday on Monday so I have been dispatched to get a suitable present. We have studied the map of Brazil in detail and looked at Igassu Falls, which is where Nitro is from, although he hasn't been there because he is scared of heights.

His Mexican girlfriend is seeing someone else, so he is single and needs a girlfriend, and Himself has already picked one out for him from among my female friends. So we are to have a barbeque soon in order to get this on track... (I don't know whether to warn my friend or not)...

I love the way my man can't meet a bird with a broken wing without sitting down to whittle a splint for it. And I benefit too. My dream of us buying a Harley and driving to a Brazilian beach on it is making a lot more sense to him than it did before. Although I think we're going all the way to the Argentinian border now.

At the same time, I can't get the image of a Haligonian oil refinery version of Midnight Cowboy out of my head when I think of the three of them being involved in the refit of a major environmental hazard.

So I guess I won't ever see him again. I have lost Himself to the job and the new best friends.

Today, I couldn't care less.

Today I am alone.

And I feel that I have helped deliver Kitty and Himself into their new lives here in Halifax fairly successfully. So I can sit here with my coffee and daydream like I used to.

What SHALL I daydream about...

When the writers get mad, you know the Tories are in power too long!

Yann Martel went to Ottawa for a celebration of fifty years of the Canadian Council for the Arts and was insulted by the Conservative Government during a reception and introduction in Parliament. He was insulted because Stephen Harper didn't even look up when fifty of Canada's greatest artists were introduced, and because hardly anyone turned up to the reception. He is also insulted because the CCA only gets $5.50 per Canadian in grant money.

Yann Martel has decided to get even as only a writer can. He has decided to get his revenge through the use of gentle encouragement of the reading of great literature. He is mailing a book to Prime Minister Stephen Harper every second Monday with a letter on why he should read this book. And putting all of this on a website of course.

http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/

I hope he sends him Jane Smiley's chapter on reading from her book on writing.

I wonder what Rodney MacDonald is reading?

And Bertie Ahern.

And Dubya.

I get really pissed off when writers have to take time off writing to protest at the philistine management of conservative governments, when they should be writing. There are politicians whose job it is to make these protests.

Speaking of CanLit, Ondaatje has a new book out this week. Hooray!

Why are the weekends so supersonic?

The weekends go by so quickly, don't they?

One minute it's Friday evening and it's all ahead of you and the next it's eight pm on Sunday and the shopping's done, the laundry's done, the apartment's clean, the hike is over, the dinner is cooked and eaten, the lunches are made, the long, lovely breakfasts are eaten, the bottle of wine is drunk, the nice meal out is over, the arguing over jelly nails versus a new jacket to replace the one left somewhere in Truro is on a time out, the precious few hours with Himself are nearly gone, the sleep in is over, the after-work drinks are forgotten, the dishwasher is on, the blogging is ongoing, the telephone calls didn't get made, the craft work didn't get done, the beds are changed, the clothes are back in the wardrobe, the new handles are on the chest of drawers, the new basketball didn't get a run out, the neighbours have been chatted to, the front steps have been sat on for a coffee, the Tims' cup was a 'please play again' disaster as usual, the alarms have been set, the hot water has all been used to clean an already clean girl, the Iwo Jima documentary is nearly over (TG), and it's all about Monday morning all the time now.

Never mind.

We still have disc four of Rome.

Caesar is about to go back to Rome with Cleopatra and the child that's probably not his, and we are all dying to see whether Varenus can lose the furrow in his brow and what Marc Anthony will be up to this episode.

Thank goodness for Blockbusters.

Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.

Kurt Vonnegut died today.

So it goes.

Here's a great excerpt from his memoir:

In this exclusive extract from his forthcoming memoirs, Kurt Vonnegut is horrified by the hypocrisy in contemporary US politics

Saturday January 21, 2006
The Guardian

"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show

But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana.

Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
"As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.
"As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say. "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon?

Give me a break!

It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law!

It is the US Constitution.

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone
Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".

George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them?

And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves!

Privatise the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it.

This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.

The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on.

I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.

In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.

In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.

And with good reason.

In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O'Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the first world war. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the first world war so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?

© 2005 Kurt Vonnegut Extracted from A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America, to be published by Bloomsbury on February 6, price £14.99

I am officially older than young, but I still need my parents

I am no longer young. Although I am not sure exactly what you could call that, because as Shazz and I decided last night, we are not middle-aged yet, although we are heading there at a rate of knots.

We decided this while sitting digesting our lovely roast beef Easter dinner that I had cooked, while Himself washed up and the young people watched tv on Kitty's pink tv in her bedroom with the lovely new green and cream fern patterned comforter.

We were wondering at the strange turn of events that had led us in the course of one year to be ecstatically happy that we were just sitting in an apartment doing this instead of out dancing around a pool table in Bearly's Blues 'n' Ribs, which is what I think we were doing last year.

It's been a long weekend...

And then I read the Irish Times this morning and find that less than 5% of young people know the first commandment: Remember the Lord is thy God and thou shalt not have strange gods before Him. Which I know of course, as well as the other nine, in the right order, although I tend to get coveting and actual adultery mixed up. Because they're the same thing, aren't they?

So I am definitely not young anymore. But today, at least, for the first time in three months, I don't feel ancient.

Sometimes you have to break on the wheel to get off it.

Coming into this weekend, I was in pretty bad shape. The trip to Ireland had flattened me emotionally, which is why I've never actually written about it. Financially we were in a very precarious state, as we were facing into a job search for Himself and had to spend all the wriggle room money to buy a car to facilitate his being able to actually get to work in the city of crappy bus services.

Despite all that, I was fairly positive about the search: I knew he'd get something that would have a future for him in it; it was going to be all about how long we would have to stretch the budget.

Until next Thursday as it turns out.

So we knew when we got on the plane to leave Ireland, which was the hardest thing I think I've ever done, that it was going to be a tough couple of months. Then just to turn the wheel a couple of degrees tighter, just to be sure I got the point of whatever lesson Saturn is supposed to be teaching me about life, we came back to the coldest January and February this girl has experienced.

And a new member of the household.

Unrelenting mornings at the bus stop shivering in minus thirty windchill, scrambling to and from the bank, the post office, the Legislature, in howling winds that felt like they were peeling the clothes off you; and none of my clothes worked properly. And of course, I couldn't buy any new ones.

If you haven't done three months of minus temperatures and severe wind chills with absolutely NO body fat on you then you have NO idea what the hell I am talking about.

Add to that the two month job search. Which turned out great in the end, but which then involved waiting for the weather to improve so the job could start and then the usual Canadian bullshit about the payment cycle. Which is some chrissake insanity about always starting a job in the middle of a payment cycle and then having to wait weeks and weeks for your turn to be accepted onto the cycle and then it messing up and then finally getting a pay date when you're at your wits end and then that being a mistake etc, etc, blah di fuckin blah...

It happened to me too when I started working. The bastard Government still owes me two weeks wages. I will get it when I leave apparently. I won't get the effing interest I suppose.

This country suffers from the crappest administrative sector on the planet because they leech off the back of their unbelieveable resource wealth. They wouldn't last ten seconds in Ireland, most of them. There would be rioting in the streets if people kept back two weeks wages until you had left your job.

You betcha there would be.

Add to that finding a school, furnishing a bedroom, being a mother from scratch to a girl who thankfully is a very forgiving person, finding a new way to live all together with no outside because it's covered in snow and ice, and no trips to the movies or the mall or anything to ease the drudgery...

I didn't know what to do to fix all of this, so I did what I do when I don't know what else to do.

I worked.

And I cooked.

And I cleaned.

And I ordered people around relentlessly.

And I thought about where the hell my life was going. And how I had ended up in this place.

But I didn't say a word to anyone.

Which is where I made my big mistake of course.

I am a shit hot cook by the way. I can make a three course meal for three people that includes every bit of winter nourishment necessary for facing a day of minus thirty and driving hail out of a can of chick peas and three carrots and what's in my stores cupboard!!

I should be a quartermaster.

I can marshall the combined possessions of three people in a small apartment and render them invisible to the naked eye.

I can predict to the second when the bathroom supplies need to be replaced, and remember where I saw them on special offer, and remember to bring the coupon card with me and get the effing store to pay me to take the stuff off their hands.

I can manage the bills so that they get paid but we still get to eat that weekend.

I can do all of this on NO CREDIT.

And we still found the money for the pink television and the Japanese comforter.

Because I rock. And Himself rocks. And we are unstoppable when we are together.

The reason I could do all this is because about half-way through February I had decided to stop thinking about my life and get with the project. Seeing as I was the project manager.

In lieu of thinking, my brain started to get obsessed with my hair. A Canadian winter does nothing for your hair, and I hadn't been for a 'do' for a long while anyways, so my grey was starting to show. I had long, wiry, orangey, matted piles of the stuff that wouldn't do anything except squeak into a pony tail that made me look like the old English Royal that they had locked in the attic.

My brain started a little mantra in my head - want the hair done, want the hair done, want the hair done, want the hair done. Getting my hair done became a mythic milestone in my crappy life.

When I got my hair done, everything was going to be okay and the summer would be here, and Saturn would stop kicking us in the nads and we would sit outside in the sunshine with a beer and a steak and watch Kitty hang out with her new friends and Himself would caress my shiny, soft, brown hair (which he had stopped doing because his fingers were getting caught in the matts), and we would smile at each other in the knowledge that yet again the combined forces of the universe, despite their best efforts, were not able to tear apart what Himself and I have put together so carefully and lovingly.

Of course my brain, being my brain, had a second, lower mantra going about the new Shiseido eye cream Eileen had advised me to try. Which is still a pipe dream. All this because as well as having the hair of a shetland pony, I had dark circles under my eyes that were starting to evacuate south to my jawline.

From work.

Work....

On top of having a totally pointless winter session of the Legislature, we were renovating in work. So we had to move our offices around and live out of boxes for weeks on end and endure buzz saws and builders walking around yelling into their mobile phones and no kitchen and the smell of carpet glue and dust and general mayhem for six weeks.

Then everyone in the office got the stomach flu.

Except me of course.

And then we had to get ready for the Spring Budget session, which is a test designed to suck the will to live out of a person.

A month of ten or twelve hour days, stressed colleagues, stressed MLAs, a disinterested media (the worst possible audience for needy politicians), a population who are just trying to get the hell to the opening of the fishing and BBQ season in one piece, and no real issues to get to grips with. Just endless hours of droning by Ministers who seem to be capable of dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back for running this province into the ground.

And still the wind howled every day around Downtown Halifax, pulling what was left of my life force out of me, piece by piece.

I couldn't really focus on the vitally important issues of the day, being a little focused on getting us all through this winter, so it became increasingly difficult to put in a productive day. Then a money-making scheme I had concocted, whereby I would do extra work that needed to be done for extra cash, was refused by the powers that be. A simple decision; based on regulations I didn't know existed.

No discussion. Sorry about that.

They'll probably never understand how close I was to going postal that day.

Consequently, I lost the ability to sleep at precisely the same time Himself started work and had to set the alarm for five thirty am. We would go to bed early, fall asleep fine. Then I would wake up around three am, bathed in sweat, head screaming PANIC, PANIC, PANIC, PANIC, about whatever... carefully, carefully I would wriggle away from Himself's arm, do my yoga breathing and try to calm down, nearly be asleep and then my brain would JOLT me awake again. I would get to sleep around four thirty. Then the alarm would go at five thirty and that would be it until 6.55am, which of course is five minutes before I have to get up.

Isn't it always the way.

But it was okay, because Himself was doing brilliantly in work, first person to get taken on full time after all the training was done; liking the work, making new friends and generally getting on with things.

We had made handmade cards out of my photos and I was selling them in work and I was bringing in a few bucks every week, which was the fun fund. So we were starting to have some actual fun at the weekends. In a middle-aged, boring sit at home with a bottle of wine and a dvd kind of fun way.

And Kitty was doing great in school, scoring As all over the place and making new friends and earning more money than us in her job.

So I just kept moving along; one foot forward at a time. And pushed it all to the back of my head and lectured myself about all the women in the world who have bad months every month and how this was a good learning experience.

And the winter dragged on and bad things happened to people I care about and there was nothing I could do to help. And new babies came into the world, and I couldn't even send a card.

But that doesn't matter, because it doesn't make me love them any less.

And it was at the bit of the winter when you can just see spring around the corner, because you had a hike in the sunshine and you could hear the birds building their nests.

Then when Kitty got paid for the first time (after she had finally made it onto the pay cycle of course), she tried to give me some money for the bills. Because she knew I had had to pay my immigration fees (over a thousand dollars) that week and she felt bad because I was worried about money.

That was the moment when I realised I was going to need more than a hair do to fix the hole that self-enforced frugality had opened up inside of me. But I pushed that thought to the back of my head and said it was her money and she was to keep it for herself and do what she wanted with it.

Which is to buy a Razr phone of course, which I think is a stupid waste of money of course. Which is under negotiation at the moment.

I am nothing if not inconsistent in my parenting.

And then my mother texted me and said she'd put some money in my credit card account for Easter.

I was sat in the gorgeous Gabriel's stylist chair getting my grey covered and the bottom eight inches hacked off before you could type MUMS R THE BEST!

Easter was here and I had four days off and I was going to get lots of sleep and it was all going to be fine the week after because it would be the last week of the parliamentary session, and the pay cycles would kick in together FINALLY and we could buy the BBQ without having to sell a kidney to do it, and the sun would shine and the winter was nearly over and I was GOING TO MAKE IT (WITH MUM'S SPOT ON TIMING AS USUAL).

Saturn must have been laughing his moons off...

The weather forecast had been mumbling about snow for a few days, but I had been studiously ignoring it because in my world it doesn't snow at Easter, even though when we went to Costco to get the Easter roast I nearly fell over with the wind. And then on Friday, when I went to get my hair done the furies were HOWLING around downtown and rain was pelting itself against the windshield of the car.

That night I couldn't sleep. Spent the whole night awake worrying about my immigration status. Over which I have no control.

Next day, Kitty went to work and Himself suggested a drive up the Musqodobit Valley to scout canoe and camping locations for the summer and get some fresh air.

I think he thought that the drive would have a soporific effect on me. Like it does on a cranky baby.

We were going to take the scenic route home down the Eastern Shore, which is magical.

Halfway up the valley there was a break in the hills and we could see as far as Pictou County.

Well we could have if the BLIZZARD bearing down on us hadn't been in the way.

Turned the car round, drove like maniacs back to the city.

That night, a foot of snow dumped itself on Halifax.

And I fell apart. Finally.

Colombo called. To see how I was. The effort of not telling her set me off finally. I wept down the phone, silently. She just chattered on so I could pull myself together, but the genie was out of the bottle.

I wasn't going to cry. No sirreebob.

So I yelled at Kitty. Then I yelled at Himself. Then I realised what I was doing, so I stomped out into the snow and stood there yelling at the effing universe until I was blue with cold, then stomped home and lay in bed, trying not to cry.

Then my mother texted me to say that Smoothie's Version 2 had opened that night, and everyone was there, and it was great.

So I thought for a long moment and then decided that there are some things that you can't do by yourself so I sent out an SOS by text and she called and I wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept and wept down the phone at her.

She said, I wish I could give you a hug.

I wept a bit more.

She said, just imagine I'm giving you a hug.

I howled.

The way I should have the day I left Ireland and I thought my heart was going to break into a million pieces. Instead of wrapping a sheet of ice around it so I could keep going.

And eventually she made me stop crying and laugh instead and the Queen Dad got out of bed (it was two in the morning in Ireland) and grumbled about politics and ice hockey and made me feel like I was the most special girl in the world as he always does, and then I was able to make them put the phone down and go to bed. And I had a glass of wine and helped Himself celebrate the Maple Leafs squeaking into the playoffs.

And then I went to bed and slept like a baby and got up and lit the Easter candle because it is the symbol of a new beginning, and cleaned the house and cooked supper for Shazz and her boy who is in Kitty's class in school and we all ate until we were stuffed and then we watched Blood Diamond and thought about how pathetic our problems really are.

And now I'm still a bit sniffly and tired, but it's all going to be fine.

So what have I learned from all of this.

A family can live quite easily on a small amount of money, but it wears you out after a while. So those of us who are more fortunate should always bear that in mind when we think about the way other people spend their money. Sometimes something as useless and tawdry as a pink television can represent a lot more than plain old consumerism.

When you are in trouble financially, and you are trying to work your way out of it, be very careful whom you ask for an opportunity to do that. Being casually turned down is soul-destroying.

I already knew that people who purport to care about the working poor generally don't have a clue what they're talking about. Now I know it to be true on two continents.

If I hadn't had to do Lent as a child, I probably wouldn't have been able to do this. There was a reason other than religion why we had religious ritual. And we need something to replace it. An Observer Magazine frugality drive is not quite what I have in mind.

I live in a society where there is very little to do without money and a car.

I know who my Canadian friends are. I had figured I did, but now I know for sure.

Rabbit stew is very nice with fennel. But it is just as good without it.

My parents ROCK! (But I knew that anyways) If I can give Kitty half the life skills they have given me she will do fine.

She and I are going shopping today for a new pair of sneakers which she needs, and then we're going to look at phones which she wants. She has bowed to the inevitable, poor girl!!

At least her inevitable is not that she's no longer young.

Happy Easter!

That wind didn't shake my barley!

Spoilers included.

I might have known that Ken Loach and I wouldn't agree about what happened in the Irish Civil War.

Why is it that people who are slightly to the left of you, are miles and miles away, whereas people who are slightly on the right of you are only slightly to the right of you?

Not that I mind really. Except for the fact that I know there's a whole cinema full of Canadians who now think that my grandfather and his fellow Free Staters were bastard mercenary pigs who only fought the War of Independence to protect the rich and perpetuate the capitalist system that ground the poor under.

Also they think that a shower of west-Cork Republicans would think nothing of having a Jackeen socialist member of the Citizen's Army fight with them.

Which is of course much more ludicrous than the idea that my grandfather fought for anything other than what he thought was the best for his people.

However, as most of the dialogue in the film was conveyed in a thick Cork accent, I can only hope that they are confused. As most Canadians are about Ireland.

Even Himself. Who has had several lectures on the subject. As we left the cinema, I was explaining why the Free Staters had shot their own people, using a reversal of the England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity argument.

"They thought that the British government would use the continued Civil War as an opportunity to re-invade the south."

Himself considered this, then said, 'but they did anyway.'

"No, they didn't."

"Yes they did."

"Ehhhmm, no.."

"So there were no British soldiers in Birr when you were growing up?"

"No!"

"Oh."

Silence descends as we walk to the car and I try to think what I might have said to make him think that.

The first springtime hike was uphill - finally!

We went on the best hike today. We go most Sundays, but this one I researched properly and it was a winner - it actually had an UP bit.

That's one of the things I miss most about Ireland - walking in the Wicklow mountains, or in the Kerry mountains, or the Mayo mountains. There are no mountains in Nova Scotia. Nothing you have to climb for forty heart bursting minutes until you get up onto a bit of a ridge and see a view and have a breather before the next leg-destroying six miles. In the rain.

Here, it's all flat marked trail.

B-o-r-i-n-g...

But I searched and searched and searched and found the Salmon River trail.

One of the things I love about Nova Scotia is that this trail is four miles outside Preston, the African Nova Scotian community on the edge of Dartmouth. So it is less than forty minutes from the house and still it is pure back country.

The first part of the hike is a scramble over dead trees littering the lakeside and a haul across an old bridge that's been pretty much destroyed by the winter. The lake is still frozen but all around the sound of the ice cracking and splitting and LEAVING could be heard. Then it was straight up for twenty minutes, up an old Mi'k Maw trail onto the top of a barren.

A barren is a burren with moss, by the way.

This was like a mini-Ayers Rock. When we got to the top, we had a spectacular view of the valley. Bald eagles are really common here apparently, but it was still a little early for them to be fishing. Next time, hopefully.


The sun was really warm at this stage, so we sat for a while and enjoyed the view and had some water - first time I needed water on a hike since I got here - and then we made our way down to the river.

It is unbelieveably peaceful to be making your way along a river bank trail that exists because people have been making their way along it for various reasons, mostly involving food, for ten thousand years at least, safe in the knowledge that this bit of the earth hasn't changed all that much in the meantime.

As we were walking along the riverbank, Himself started to notice a plethora of gnawed sticks.

Beavers, he said.

I love beavers. They're really industrious for absolutely no reason in the world. They spend all their time cutting down trees to dam rivers that don't need to be dammed because trees are going to fall into them eventually anyway.

No wonder they're the Canadian national emblem...

Then we rounded the corner and there it was, a bit scruffy after the winter, but a big dam all the same (picture down a bit further on the blog). Looks like the guys have a lot of gnawing to do this summer.

Then we saw a pair of wild ducks poncing around in the river, so Himself went to scare them into flight, so I could catch them on the exciting new action zoom lens. Despite his best efforts, they ignored him and sailed past in a stately manner.

Not being used to humans and all that.

It wasn't until we were halfway up the river bank that we met three other people. One of whom was our neighbour Lyse. We always bump into Lyse on these hikes. She of course had hiked about fifteen miles already, but we like to stop and take photos and potter and collect gnawed stuff etc., so we are a bit slower. She was with Gear Guys, who had their GPS locaters attached to matching shoulder straps on their hi-tech Mountain Equipment Co-op rucksacks. They were spotting fly-fishing spots for next week, when the season opens.

Then we stopped for lunch, which was great today because Leonard had organised it.

Walking is a fun time for Leonard and as he is from India originally (although he has been Canadian since he was a teenager) fun involves interesting food and drinks. Hooray! We had to stop him bringing nice bottles of white wine on the walks as I was getting too sloshed to walk properly and starting to fall over a lot. Which I don't like as it is supposed to be the time of the week when I am healthy.

Today he brought samosas and other interesting Indian foods and oranges and (heavy) bottles of Orangina for our lunch .

Because his daughter makes Christmas candles from the bottles.

I work for Leonard as a researcher and he is my favourite politician on the planet ever and I love Leonard (but don't tell him) even when he's annoying me to death, by making me do work I don't want to do because I am lazy...

But I particularly love him when he's walking.

Pinstriped trousers tucked into Dr. Martin boots. A completely inappropriate (for walking) sports bag full of food slung across his back. And a half-gnawed beaver branch for a walking stick this time.

I wonder what Gear Guys made of him?

By the time we finished eating and chatting and drinking Orangina and coffee and having some almond and cranberry granola bars and chilling out the sun was starting to go down behind the old growth pines on the riverbank so we set out for home. I stopped to take a photograph of some nice lichen on the limestone with some icicles hanging off it and Himself sat on a rock with his beaver branch that he'd found too and said, I don't want to go home.

I know how he felt.

So it's Sunday night now and Himself is in bed because he has to get up at 5.30 and Kitty is puddling round in the bathroom and I should sign off and go get ready for another week of mayhem.

But hopefully amidst all the beaver activity that is the Estimates debate next week, I will hold today in my heart.

For a few days at least.

Lichen and ice on the side of the Barren

Beaver Dam on Salmon River

Book reviews from winter reading

I am reading a lot at the moment, having rediscovered the joys of the library in an attempt to encourage Kitty to read. However, she seems to be getting books from school, so mine are going by the wayside.

Having said that, she doesn’t think much of the books from school. One would think being in a position to allows you to force a teenager to read, i.e. a teacher, you would give them something GOOD to read.

The library on the other hand, is full of great books and even better librarians who treat every teenager in there as if they are made of solid gold. Consequently, the young adult section is full of them reading and watching movies and working on the computer.

However this is Boooorrrrinnnggg…. Apparently.

How do you get a child to read? There’s the question for today…

Anyways, this girl, who didn’t want to do anything else but read when she was young, presents this lot for your review. Here’s the scoring system.

A+ = glad I read this book. You should read it. The world is a better place for the presence of this book.
A = interesting in terms of subject matter or style. Glad I read it for that reason, but not really adding to my understanding of my reason for existence.
Ho hum = self-explanatory
UNCSYWYLRTB = under no circumstances should you waste your life reading this book.

I’m going to put the score in before I review the book and then see if I remember it right by reviewing the book. If I’m wrong I’ll rescore it.

Animal Dreams
Barbara Kingsolver
A

Codi Noline returns to her Arizona home town to keep an eye on her father, who has early stage Alzheimer’s. She works as a biology teacher even though she is a doctor like him. Her altogether more together sister Hallie is in Nicaragua working with peasant farmers to increase their yield organically, despite the Contras attempts to stop her. As Codi falls in love with Navajo local, Loyd Peregrina and begins to enjoy teaching, can her rubbish self-esteem or other circumstances in her life and past hijack her new-found happiness?

As with all Kingsolver novels, the themes are environmental issues and filial responsibility. She writes novels about having to start being a grown up in your early thirties, about how crap it feels to have to fulfil family and societal duties, and each one of her novels put forward the premise that, at the end of the day, building a strong family and caring for the environment are the only worthy concerns.

Reading a Kingsolver novel when you are feeling crap about being a selfish thirty-something in the dark corners of your soul is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you don’t feel so goddamn alone and that takes the edge off the selfishness. Which is not such a good thing when you’re supposed to be trying to eliminate it. On the other hand, you get to the end of the novel and think, mweh… the alternative sounded pretty cool.

So why do I keep reading them? Well, firstly, they’re pretty goddamned popular. Lots of copies in the library, and I like to keep up with the Oprah book club types. Secondly, I like writers who write from their place in the world as much as I like those who concentrate on the art of writing or imagining. And unlike many female literary types (as opposed to chick lit), Kingsolver is a good writer who always throws in a couple of interesting side issues and teaches you a lot. This novel focuses on the Pueblo people of Arizona and New Mexico, their art and the amazing pueblo cities they built and still live in. Sounds like Arizona would be a good holiday trip someday.

Be Cool
Elmore Leonard
UNCSYWYLRTB

I do not get the point of Elmore Leonard. Also, I can’t read his novels now without thinking of John Travolta. And since Chili Palmer has a lot of sex in this novel, I found it quite off-putting.

In this novel, Chili Palmer (hero of movie Get Shorty) is thinking about doing the third instalment in his three movie deal, and like the previous two (Get Leo and Get Lost), writes the script by living it. Enter a former shylock colleague who gets topped while having lunch with Chili, some Russian mobsters, a potential Americana star from Odessa Texas, a totally corrupt music executive called Raji and his sidekick, the gay Samoan bodyguard, Eliot Wilhelm.

Much mayhem ensues, Chili dabbles in the music industry, despite nearly being thrown out a window by the Samoan he wins out in the end and the new movie goes into pre-production.

Boring drivel.

The Dead of Winter
Lisa Appignanesi
Can’t remember a thing about this book, but it is on my bookshelf so I must have read it.

The Globe and Mail said this was a cleverly conceived plot about the strange and terrifying power of love. Now that I read the back cover I remember: this is a crime novel set in Montreal and rural Quebec. Rural Quebec is this year’s planned road trip, so I think that’s probably why I bought it.

Madeleine Blais and Pierre Rousseau are childhood sweethearts from rural Quebec. Madeleine becomes a famous movie star and dumps lawyer Rousseau heartlessly. A couple of Christmases later, she turns up hanging in her grandmother’s barn. The police decide it’s suicide and close the case, but Pierre knows it’s murder because she had called him just beforehand. That must be how you know, then.

Pierre’s investigations in Montreal get the killer on his tail and the usual mayhem ensues before the plot is satisfactorily resolved.

Ho hum, although there are two satisfying twists to the tale that I only saw coming about half a mile off.

The Island Walkers
John Bemrose
A+ (but I’m not sure why).

This is a debut novel that got nominated for the Giller, Canada’s big literary prize, a year or two ago. Set in south-western Ontario, it charts the decline of an industrial town called Attawan through the eyes of a young man Joe Walker, whose father Alf gets involved with labour agitators who are trying to organise the town’s textile plant workers.

The labour agitator is an Irish guy called Doyle, which is a nod to the fact that many Canadian union activists and organisers of the fifties and sixties were in fact Irish immigrants. Pity they never get any credit for what they did at home in Ireland. Better keep that for the Democrats in the States, I suppose!

The town is bisected physically and class wise by a river, and it is on its edge that most of the action takes place, from the teenage couplings and rivalries described in the early part of the novel, to clandestine union activity. The mill is taken over by a Montreal company who bring in the usual productivity changes (ie redundancies), and try to root out any attempts to organise the workers by buying off their natural leader, Alf Walker, with a supervisory position.
Alf married above him (an Englishwoman he met during the war) and finds himself caught between his principles and her desire to move up a class in the town.

The portrait of Alf is very compelling, of Joe less so. I found myself seeing my father in Alf’s struggle, which is strange, as they are not alike really.

Alf’s desire to provide for his family leads him to an act which may or may not betray his comrades and lead to the death of a friend. The author switches viewpoint from Joe to Alf for this part of the novel, and Alf’s struggle with his guilt is the best third of the novel.

The first two thirds, which focus mostly on Joe’s perception of the town and his family and developing the movement of the story, are a little laboured. I never got into Joe’s skin, or developed much empathy for him. The whole plot could have done with a bit of a cull.

However, Alf and his co-workers and union buddies are very well drawn. They were all from the same ‘character group’ though, if you know what I mean. Bemrose needs to work on his range. If he can pull a group of diverse well-drawn characters together for his next novel, and go easier on the water imagery, then he’ll have a cracker on his hands.

I’m downgrading this to an A for Alf. Good starter novel though!!

The Secret River
Kate Grenville
A

Speaking of dads, mine gave me this over Christmas. Dads are generally very predictable, aren’t they? The Queen Dad usually gives me novels about a) Australia or Southern Africa, which are b) rural in setting, c) mostly historical or set in the recent past, rarely contemporary, and d) thematically, generally involve some discussion of how the principal European colonial powers messed up the rest of the planet for everyone who happened to be there first.

Sure enough, The Secret River is mostly set in colonial Australia, circa the turn of the nineteenth century, and involves transportation and other colonial outrages. This one has lots of boats, though, which gave it an additional kick of interest.

William Thornhill is a happily married waterman on the River Thames, who gets into a spot of bother due to the big freeze of 1806, steals some lumber, gets caught doing it and is sent to Australia.

Thornhill uses his waterlore to throw off the yoke of servitude, buying a sloop to bring supplies upriver to the early settlers. Eventually he makes enough money to buy his own land, which he settles with his family (who chose to be transported with him).

Trouble is, his land is sacred to the local Aboriginals.

Thornhill’s intuitive response is to try to manage the conflict and build a dialogue with the locals. Unfortunately, not all the settlers agree, and their views push him into an unfortunate choice when the conflict reaches a head.

The initial part, set in London, is an excellent description of the watermen of the Thames, not a subject of which I knew anything. And the descriptions of the Australian outback are so vivid that I felt I was there without ever having visited Australia.

Brilliant characterisation and unfolding of the eventual conflict between Aboriginals and settlers. With lots of sloops. Excellent read. Particularly if you like boats.

The Pick Up
Nadine Gordimer
A+

Because of the Queen Dad (see previous review), I have a deep interest in South African and Australian writing. Nadine Gordimer is my second favourite SA writer, after JM Coetzee who is the MASTER of contemporary, post-conflict literature (better even than our own Ronan Bennett) and who consequently should be read in detail by everyone on the planet.
Coetzee has a dark emptiness inside his stories that is so terrifying and bleak, I can’t figure how he controls it enough to write sentences, never mind complex, demanding novels. Sort of like Murakami, or Pamuk, but with a Western European sensibility.

Anyway, enough about Coetzee.

I got The Pickup in the library and have sent it back, so consequently I won’t be able to remember any of the characters names. I never can. But the book is about a rich South African white woman who falls in love with an illegal Muslim immigrant from an unnamed African country (Saharan though), and who accompanies him back to his village as his wife when he gets deported.

I thought about this book for a long time after I finished it. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you why I did without spoiling the ending.

Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers

When they get back to the unnamed country, the SA woman has to live in the family home with him, in a village on the edge of the desert. She falls in love with the desert and the lifestyle, and begins to think how they could develop wealth in the town with her trust fund. Hubbie meanwhile puts the kaibosh on that, as he spends all his time trying to get a visa to somewhere else.

Finally, he gets a green card and celebrates a chance to make it in the States. Only thing, she’ll have to live with her ditsy mother in California while he drudges in Chicago, as he’s not going to expose her to the seaminess of being an immigrant to the States. She hates her mother, so on the day before they leave, she announces that she’s staying with his family. He is astounded and furious, but leaves without her.

The end.

The dichotomy between her need to escape the capitalist wealthy countries of which she’s a privileged member, and his fierce desire to get into any of them is one I had never thought of before. Gordimer highlights this beautifully in the context of an unlikely love story.

The Wildfire Season
Andrew Pyper
A

“Ross River is a town clinging to the outside world at the end of the Yukon’s loneliest road. It is also the hiding place of Miles McEwan, the town’s hard-drinking, fist-fighting fire chief. But the slow burn of Miles’ self-imposed exile is about to explode.”

That’s the blurb on the back. This book is great for three reasons:

1 – it deals with bush fires, and the people who start them. A large part of the novel deals with the crew that fight this fire and the investigation into how it started.

2 – one of the principal characters is a total mother-fucker of a she Grizzlie. I dreamt about her for nights afterwards.

3 – one of the other characters is a watcher – sits in a big tower for months on end, spotting fires. Currently that is my ambition in life.

A rip-roaring read, excuse the pun. People who know tell me it’s exactly what the Yukon is like. Next year’s road trip maybe. Pyper has two other novels, Lost Girls, and The Trade Mission, which got excellent reviews too.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Marissa Pessl
UNCSYWYLRTB!!

“Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark, strong drink” – Jonathan Franzen. Yeah, well you’d know all about foam, Jonathan!

Some nice person bought me this for Christmas, and I can’t remember who because I opened my presents when I was a bit drunk on Christmas Eve and forgot to write the name of the gifter on the novel, which is how I normally remember. So apologies if the gifter reads this. The book itself is a beautifully presented hard-backed edition so I will treasure it for that reason, but ...

... what a (huge) pile of annoying shite.

Dazzling debut my arse! This girl has been writing this novel since forever. Every book she ever read is in here somewhere, the whole enterprise feels like a series of book reports, book-ended by her diary entries about the teacher she had a crush on.

Plot in brief: Precocious grade 12er with handsome witty academic dad moves to new private school and meets astoundingly charismatic teacher who has select group of cool students round for supper every Sunday. Precocious girl tries to get in with the ‘in’ crowd. Weird, murder-related stuff happens, with completely OTT ending involving the Minute Men. Sound vaguely familiar in parts to anyone who has ever read the Secret History?

Ms Pessl says in the afterword (when did they become de riguer) that she thanks ‘my amazing husband Nic, my Clyde, who graciously watches his wife disappear alone into a dark room with her computer for ten or twelve hours at a time and asks no questions’.

I don’t think Nic is the one needs to be asking the questions love, if you don’t mind me saying. What is Nic doing while you’re in the dark room, eh?

And by the way, if you arrange your chapters as Core Curriculum (Required Reading), with such chapter titles as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Madame Bovary, would it be too much to ask that there be a CONNECTION between the chapter title and the content?

I present my case on this novel with a random excerpt:

“When I’d raised my hand in AP English to answer Ms Simpson’s question regarding Primary Themes in Invisible Man (Elison 1952) (which turned up on Summer reading lists with the regularity of corruption in Cameroon), incredibly, I wasn’t Quite fast enough; another kid, Radley Clifton, pudgy, with an eroded chin (BTW - That novel that E. Annie Proulx wrote about a guy, pudgy, with an eroded chin, i.e. The Shipping News, was very popular and often re-read by people, by the way, so you should probably think twice about ripping off lines from it again, Missy!), already had his fat hand in the air. While his answer wasn’t brilliant or inspired, it also wasn’t crude or Calibanesque, and it dawned on me, as Ms. Simpson handed out a nineteen page syllabus only covering Fall Term, perhaps St. Gallwey wouldn’t be such Child’s Play, such Easy Victory.

Sigh. Five hundred and four pages of this shite. With drawings.

You’ll be glad to hear that Radley beat her to valedictorian. Naturally, there were extenuating circumstances, of the kind you’d find in that US magazine that keeps track of UFO sightings and Elvis and such like.

UTTER SHITE.

Three Days to Spring - here's the first Fly of the year

This morning is typical Paddy's weekend weather.

Wet. Grey. Dull.

Enough said about the weather. Spring is coming in three days. The entire population of Canada is as stir crazy and sick of winter as I am, so the spring equinox is A BIG DEAL here.

Just to put the tin hat on the crappy sports day that was yesterday, Montreal beat Toronto to get into the playoffs and Toronto are out.

This is a big deal apparently. Himself is very upset. As is the boy wonder nephew Branden.

I'm talking about ice hockey by the way.

I watched a bit of the game (game, not match, doncha know) and as far as I could see Toronto were the best at beating the other team up, but apparently that doesn't count. Also, while Toronto were beating up the Canadiens, the umpires just stand around and watch. I asked Himself why they didn't stop the fighting and he said they wait until the players fall over before they intervene.

For guys on skates they can fight on their feet for a remarkably long time.

And apparently it's okay to ram another player at speed into the goal uprights.

I have no time for any game that involves body armour.

The Queen Parents called at some unearthly hour of the morning (for them, not me) to comfort me in my hour of woe and the Queen Dad informed me that Ireland had knocked Pakistan out of the Cricket World Cup and were into the last eight. So not to worry about the rugby outcome.

And then I saw Luke had put the same comment on my blog this morning.

This is what I love about Irish people.... they find comfort where they can get it.

Here's a thought... if by some miracle Ireland gets into the World Cup cricket semi-final will you all get time off work to go to the pub and watch the match?

I mean it would only be fair to support the cricket lads the same way as the football lads, wouldn't it?

And then Roddy Doyle could write a book about Fitzer and Paddy Mac and whoever paddling to the Carribean in a souped up Ford Transit van and how they got in with the reggae heads and had a few smokes and realised that not all foreigners were terrible.

Anyways, enough about the weather and the game, I got the first Fly of the year the other day.

I mean The Stinging Fly. It's a creative writing compendium from Ireland. Accent Monkey bought a subscription for me for Christmas. Nice pressie. You get told about it. You forget about it. Then one day you come home from work and there it is in the mail box.

The name comes from a Plato quote (about Socrates): God has especially appointed me to this city, so as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of some stinging fly...

Edited by Declan Meade, it contains essays, creative writing, poetry, reviews, photos and new lyrics. This issue has an excerpt from Eugene McCabe's new novel in progress, which is about nuns and which is a perfect short story in itself.

Good stuff generally. Particularly the poetry. However, I am at a loss to understand the three short stories in the review. I never did get the point of short stories if they weren't written by Alice Munro. I didn't really like any of these ones. Someone should tell me sometime what the current thinking on the short story is, as I am too lazy to research it myself.

And the two essays were not essays as I understand the form, although maybe the form has moved on and I have not realised.

However, as always in Ireland, the poetry more than makes up for any weakness in the prose writing end of things.

I'm trying to pick a favourite, but I can't, so here's one of the ones I liked, and I'm a big fan of Caroline Dowling's writing anyways, with apologies for printing it here if it's not a good vibe, etc.

The Cardigan

Her face flushed

When he gave it to her

unexpectedly on

Christmas night.

He'd picked darker colours,

brown and black

trimmed with a

cream crochet thread.

He said it suited her.

She said it felt tight.

Hemmed in her shoulders

strait-jacketed her arms

chest bursting when

fastened. Weeks of

wearing helped her grow

into it. Moulded to her

shape she felt every

knitted row - cable after

cable of blanket stitch,

garter stitch, back stitch,

stocking stitch, coiling into

patterns of Mondays and

Tuesdays, wash days and

Mass days. On Saturday

nights out she'd leave it

open, her underneath top

cheering on her red lipstick.

Sometimes after chips on

the way home he'd tell her

to button it. She could

do it with her eyes closed

It costs fifty euro to be a patron of The Stinging Fly. They don't have enough patrons. There's your birthday and Christmas presents sorted for a year or two.

Off you all go then.

Happy Paddy's Day my arse

This afternoon, after a poxy cold wet icy morning, I eventually venture out into the aftermath of last night's ICE STORM to go shopping. I have to endure OIRISH music in the supermarket and stupid drunk people with shamrocks painted on their cheeks saying 'top of the morning' to each other. I have to endure the racist taunts of the wanker wearing the union jack jacket in the Liquor Store. I have to endure Blockbusters on a Saturday afternoon which has NO MOVIES I WANT TO SEE.

And then I finally get home and check the news and find out that we've lost the Six Nations Championship by a whisker, a mere three points.

Again.

WHAT DO WE HAVE TO EFFING DO TO WIN THE EFFING SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP?

WHAT?

We're the second best team on the planet and we still can't effing win the poxy six nations championship. In a single season, we cannot beat England, Scotland, Wales, France and Italy.

WHY?

Those perfidious French BASTARDS stole our six nations championship away from us again!!!

By scraping a victory against us a few weeks ago, they edged to the top of the table today. And beat us by three points!

BUT THAT'S NOT WHY!

France had to beat Scotland by twenty four points or more to win the Championship.

So Scotland let them win by twenty seven points.

Just to be on the safe side.

THAT'S REALLY WHY!!

Our so-called Celtic cousins, forever more to be known in my house as wee skanky traitors , helped them.

IT WAS ST. PATRICK'S DAY, you miserable sheep farming bastards...! Could you not kick the effing ball straight for once in your wee lives?

Accent Monkey's over there for the weekend, I hope she's giving people a piece of her mind!