I am returned from my weekend break

"Do you know what this means?", says someone, pointedly encouraging me to repeat a splendid Quebec expression that means something along the lines of "being a woman that lives off her husband because she has single-handedly undone all the hard work done by the previous generation, thereby being not only tantamount to a whore, but also a betrayer of the sisterhood".

"No", I whimper, wishing it were lunchtime or suppertime and not a fucking brunch, a meal occasion at which it is, apparently, inappropriate to drink heavily. My 'husband', the French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist, magnificent enough to get me to move from London (in England) to Montreal (in Canada), stares at the table. I do something that I think is described in bad novels as 'knitting your brow'; either way, I am getting a headache.

It is a family (fucking) brunch and, like the family dinner the night before, it contains people who are not in my husband's family. Some of them have Quebec accents that are a little more dense those that I am used to; some of them have enormous moustaches and tell jokes that I do not understand. Everyone laughs. I do not, because I don't understand: my very-much-second language, in an accent I am still not used to, cock-full of cultural references and gags I may get if I live here for 100 years. It would be like sending a French person who had learnt English in London to a party in Newcastle. It is also, I realise as I look at a dumpling in potato juice, the worst thing about living in the abroad.

It goes on, this time with an added soupçon of distain. "So what you're saying is you couldn't just put up with the situation? You had to resign? Without a work permit?", as if I am, as well as being entirely irresponsible, a traitor to the sisterhood and a money-sucking whore, a complete fuckwit. "It was to do with preserving my self-respect", I reply. For a while there is silence; I get a "that is a good enough reason", and then, as if by magic, it starts again. "Maybe you can use some of this time off to improve your French - it really does need a lot of work."

I am well brought up and have very good manners (on occasion), so I laugh (ha ha ha), and suggest that I could perhaps wear a sandwich board and parade up and down St-Catherine with the words "Virtually illiterate unemployed immigrant needs free French lessons" sprayed across my chest. The new cat is brought in; someone brings in a maple cone; the subject is changed.

Some time later, we are driving along the road and I cheer up. Why? Because first of all, there is a person who is selling a car which, I think, comes with a free plastic horse:





















Further down the road is a person offering for sale both leeches and hub-caps, a business idea that I intend to replicate in a series of franchises across North America:



After that, things up cheer up considerably and we go and look at what Canada is really good at (nature, landscapes that make you think no human has ever been there before, sky, vastness, houses spaced out a lot, gigantic roadside fruit, etc). Here are some pictures for you to look at - in red is my 'husband', who does not normally wear red - unless he has seen a shop that sells leeches and hub-caps (at the same time).




Pip pip!

NWM