I wish you all a premature happy Halloween

I welcome you to the world of Canadian (specifically Quebecois) Halloween cakes.  It will be nearly impossible for you to distinguish between those from the pikey rural supermarket and those from the fancy-schmancy patisserie,  of that I am sure.

My particular favourite: take an Opera cake (more or less), cover in fondant icing and call it "Phantom of the Opera".  NB: some of the Phantoms of the Opera have one eye, some two.

I still do not have photograph of our smashing top-rate wedding in which you can actually see our gurning faces

But here, to whet your dirty appetites, is a picture sent by my oldest pal Anna with the accompanying note: 

"I'm thinking the flash effect looks like the sparkling of a hundred fairies at the moment of Love".

I think she is right!!

(Multilingual readers will have noted with joy the "Exit" sign hovering over both our heads. Yes indeed.)

I haven't got any interesting photos, but we are married

In the absence of any vaseline-rimmed shots of me and the pathologist looking over our shoulders and/or kissing under a fruity maple tree, I offer you the scant pickings of my own camera.


 You will have to wait if you want to see one of me looking like Queen Victoria; we did not have a wedding photographer, choosing instead to spend the money on crystal meth and biscuits, so are hoping for the goodwill of friends with cameraphones to instead create us a virtual (and semi-focused) wedding album that we can look at when we are old and smell of wee.


(And yes, we had a lovely time.)


Here are the wedding cakes that I made with my own monkey paws.
















Here is the extraordinary cushion our friend Sarah made for us:

And here are the medals, made by our friend Charly and given to and worn by all 79 of our geeeests. (I am still wearing mine, and refuse to take it off.)  We have kept one aside for Captain Sir Dave Shelton, responsible for so many of the things that have made us happy in the last few months (and years).

More to come, including what happens when you put a 3-piece Quebec folk band and 10 dancers in a room with 30 English people and an open bar, and what happens when you introduce 30 French-Canadians to fake moustaches and noses from the joke shop on Upper Richmond Road. 

WEDDING COUNTDOWN: Day 3

Many years ago, when things were bleak and there was not much to look forward to, a friend of mine - a sensible woman with an eye for fashion and colonic irrigation, but otherwise full of common sense - gave me a birthday present that I was not expecting: an hour with a psychic.

Now, this psychic did not reside in a tent at a fair, or in a caravan in a parking lot.  She did not reside in a shady side-street in Bournemouth, or up a dusty stair in Soho; she was not at a 'hippy festival' and did not wear shoes made of tofu. There were no mirrors on her headscarf and nowhere could I see bells, crystals, eyes in pyramids, scented candles, velvet curtains, etc etc. She looked like a secretary and worked at a rather grand health spa place off Oxford Street.

I do not believe in this stuff. It doesn't make sense, in the same way that lots of things don't make sense: God, ghosts, the Immaculate Conception, Uri Geller bending spoons with his head, astrology, etc.  But then there are things like hypnosis and acupuncture, or women working together all going on the blob at the same time, or people going a bit bonkers just before thunderstorms that shouldn't make sense but sort of do, and that are proven fact-type-things*.

The thing was, five years ago someone who knew nothing about me (that I had lived in France when I was a kid, that I had sworn I would never live outside Britain again,  that I was single,  that I didn't care that much about having children , that I had a funny tooth or two, etc etc) told me that:

1. I would move to North America;
2. I would speak French regularly again (but she couldn't work out what that had to do with North America);
3. That, if I wanted to, I could have children with a little difficulty;
4. That my 40s would be where "it all began to make sense";
5. That my grandfather, my unlikely spirit guide, said not to let the dentist take out the tooth.

I am not saying ANYTHING but may I remind you all, adoring readers, that I have moved to Montreal,   and am marrying a French Canadian two days before my 40th birthday; that a week after I saw her, a tooth split and my dentist offered me extraction or re-construction that may not hold (and that is still holding 5 years later).

Spooky!!!!




* Homeopathy is absolute nonsense, however, and I will ignore any comments that are about for e.g. my dog was cured of rabies with a distillation of 1,000,000th of actual rabies in a droplet of wee; so saying, if you believe it works it probably does make you feel better, even if you are actually mad and probably also believe in fairies at the end of the garden.

 

WEDDING COUNTDOWN: Day 2

I have been writing this web-blog for over three years.  Readers have come and go (talking of Rolf Harris rather than Michaelangelo); the seasons have changed; I have moved to Amsterdam, and then to Montreal; I have seen gigantic classical cocks, got chewing gum caught in my ladygarden, spent night after night sharing a house with a Genesis tribute band, and begun a no doubt life-long project involving cooking my way through a set of 1967 Marguerite Patten recipe cards.

But in that time, you have never seen my REAL FACE. That is because the illustration(s) of me that you seen strewn about the place, drawn by the exquisite Mr Dave Shelton, reflect better who I truly am; they are an exact replica of the mental image I have of myself, jaunty fez and tiny little monkey hands and all.

The truth is darker.  But the truth must now be revealed, because there is something that must be shown to you as a matter of some urgency. What is the thing? It is a wedding card, the gift of my beloved colleagues, that is so excellent, so well-done, and so generally brilliant, that keeping it to myself would be like owning the Sistine Chapel ceiling and only opening it once a month for private picnics.

Here it is, front and back. (Regular readers will be familiar with the little monkey in the snow.)  And yes, that is me on the front, pulling a face.  As you can see, in real life I am very beautiful (almost supernaturally so), and look not unlike a young Peter Sarstedt. 

The card is full of Quebec jokes that I will not try and explain but that I get, and that gives me a very nice feeling inside, like Marmite on toast and a nice cup of tea.

Thank you, Jean-Luc and Andrea.