I wish Canada a happy birthday

Yes, Canada. That is you. If anyone had told me four years ago that I would be living in Canada, I would have laughed and laughed. If I had been told that I would be a) married; b) married to a Canadian; c) married to a Canadian scientist; d) married to a French Canadian scientist and living in Canada, I would have laughed even more.

Still. Here I am. I am still surprised I am here, but it is growing on me. (For e.g., I get very very cross if people are rude and ill-informed about Canadians. Anyone had a look at the economy here recently? Yes. Also, Michael Ignatieff might the Prime Minister here one day!! An academic-historian-writer who is also quite handsome - Prime Minister!! Swoon.)

If you have never been here, you are probably wrong about it.

I haven't seen:

A Mountie in uniform
A beaver
A moose (apart from a very great distance in a wildlife park)
A bear (see above)
Bryan Adams
People routinely hanging around in canoes and wearing hats with flaps on
Snow all year round
People being nice and polite the whole time
People going "eh?" the whole time, or saying "abooot" instead of "about"

I have seen:

Irony, everywhere.  In Top Five Nations Good For Irony, is Canada.
Real maple syrup
Snow like I have never seen before
People not going on and on like idiots when it's -20
People working normal working hours
Space. People running about outside because it's fun not because they have to or 'should'
People who can ski and skate, and I mean lots of people, not just people with money
People wearing check shirts
8 million people who I knew existed but not in such numbers who are Canadian, but speak French
A lot of Celine Dion
Space. Even the cookers are bigger.

Anyway, thanks for having me. Here's a bit of Gordon Lightfoot. He's Canadian. (Talking of which, you will be surprised by who's Canadian.)



Also, here are some very funny cartoons found by the incomparable Katy Newton, who I love, at the very most excellent Hark, A Vagrant. (Click on the link for a better view of this and some other excellent Canadian  stereotype comics.)

I share my views about golf and do some veterinary work

The French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist to whom I am married and I are looking at the telly.   There is an ad on featuring some men with decisive side partings high-fiving each other on a golf course.  They are selling a bank.

Me: If you ever take up golf, I will leave you.
Pathologist: No need. I would leave myself.

Earlier that day, the cat - one of two, gigantically stupid and called Corndog - catches a bird. As she has the gait of a three-legged morbidly obese rhinoceros, it is a miracle that she has caught anything, let alone a bird.

Me: Is it dead?
Pathologist: Probably.

Time passes.  A dog barks distantly on the horizon.  A twat on a Harley goes past, and a gigantic cry goes up from next door, where our neighbours (nudist gardeners and growers of speciality vegetables) appear to be having a party involving touch-football and sausages in buns.

Pathologist: Can you help me?
Me: What with?
Pathologist: The bird.

I pry my crazed eyes away from "Real Housewives of Jersey Shore" and turn to find the pathologist two feet away from me, holding a tiny blackbird who is clearly not at all dead.  "Getthatbirdawayfromme." "Don't be stupid. It can't hurt you." The bird blinks.

"It has a little hole in its face but otherwise is fine, so I am going to give him some antibiotics to give him a fighting chance."   He goes upstairs, still holding the blackbird (who is not exactly smoking a pipe by the fire, but is not over-excited either), and comes back down with some drops.  We go over to the window; the pathologist opens the bird's beak; I put in three drops.

Me: How do you know how to get a bird to open its beak?
Pathologist: I spent a long time at the raptor clinic.

I dare not ask what a 'raptor clinic' is, and I learnt a long time ago not to ask why it is that we have things like bird-ready antibiotic drops in the house.  Instead, I watch the pathologist take it outside, listen for the sound of frantic squawking, hold it up in the direction of the racket and say, "here you are mother blackbird, here is your baby".  The squawking stops. The pathologist puts the baby bird on the fence, and wanders off.

It disappears very quickly, so quickly in fact that we think it has fallen off the other side and into a clump of weeds. But no, it has not fallen off the fence; it is in fact returned to the hedge at the back of our house preparing to either: a) follow the pathologist around the garden in the manner of the blue birds in Snow White for evermore; or b) like its mother and extended family, sit in the hedge outside our bedroom window and squawk like a bastard at 5am until I am forced to get out of bed and throw books at it.

I fear that it will chose the second option, and that I will regret ever giving it drops.

*Update*: Photographic evidence of a) tiny blackbird being held by pathologist (NB bandaged finger); and b) immensely fat cat who, by the looks of things, should only be able to catch slugs and/or blancmanges.

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I get the best of all the presents in the post

MonkeyMother often sends things in the post from either France or London, depending where she is. Decent crystallised fruit for cakes at Christmas. Hypoallergenic wipes, suitable for both "face and bits".  Tiny monkeys.  Good postcards.  Tights.

And these! This the second time and I hope it will not be the last: a catering pack of the finest of all confections, the splendid Bendicks Bittermints.   Swoon.

I give you a recipe for ice-cream

This is ice-cream that does not need an ice-cream maker. It has no rubbish in it. It melts fast, but that doesn't matter.  The deliciousness/ease of making ratio is completely skewed, because it is stupidly easy to make and very very delicious (and rather elegant too, in some ways).

It is a nutty ice-cream; you could probably add other things but not too many or too much, because it is held up by air and too much other stuff would weigh it down and make it sag.

It is designed to be frozen in a loaf tin (or whatever plastic box you have hanging around), turned out and sliced when you have fancy friends round. Alternatively, you could just stick your spoon in and shove it in your gob in front of back-to-back episodes of "Real Wives of Jersey Shore".

Nut Ice-Cream

This is I think originally a Sue Lawrence recipe for Cobnut Ice-Cream.  I don't think I would know a cobnut if I fell over one in the street and it bit my ankle, but other nuts will also do, she said, so it is now a Generic Nut Ice-Cream.

2 tablespoons nuts of your choice (cobnuts, pistachios, pecans, hazelnuts probably best)
3 eggs, separated
4 tablespoons caster sugar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/2 pint double or whipping cream

1 x loaf tin/tupperware box
Clingfilm
3 x bowls
Whisk (hand or electric)
Big metal spoon

1. Take the nutty nuts. Chop them roughly. Toast them (I do it in a pan on the stove watching like a hawk). Whilst still warm, sprinkle on the brown sugar and stir it in. It will melt on the nuts. Allow to cool.  (Also nice is a big pinch of Maldon or similar.)
2. Whip the egg yolks and caster sugar together until pale and thick. 
3. In a separate bowl, whip the cream until it is also thick. 
4. Combine the cream and the egg yolk/sugar mixture (sort of fold it together but don't worry too much about keeping the air in). 
5. Stir in the cooled nuts. 
6. Whisk the egg whites until stiff
7. Fold the egg whites gently into the cream/egg/sugar/nuts mixture with a big metal spoon until all combined.
8. Pour/spoon into a loaf tin/tupperware box lined with clingfilm (let it hang over the edge) and give it at least 6 hours in the freezer.  

Very, very nice by itself, but raspberries are always nice with nuts I think.  I made it with pecans, and used maple sugar instead of brown sugar. Also added a bit of chopped crystallised ginger.  It was magical and like a dream of perfection and unicorns.

Pip pip!

NWM

P.S. I have started putting the recipes I sometimes post in a crazed style here. I will also put links to recipes I like a lot up there and update it now and then. You will like it a lot. I know it.

I am in Toronto and it is the G20

I am only just in Toronto, though, because I am at the airport on the edge of the lake. It is a magical place that you travel to by ferry; from it, you leave Toronto on a tiny aeroplane with propellers drinking wine given out by ladies in 1950s air hostess outfits. I am going home to Montreal after a week that was long and strange, spent mainly, as it was, in a room on the 41st floor in an hotel, wondering why people leave their office lights on when they go home at night.

Toronto is empty at the moment, like the City of London at 4am on a Sunday morning, because the G20 is in town (or about to be) and everyone is working from home for fear of being jumped on by the ragged protesting hordes, despite the fact that the protests aren't due to happen until tomorrow.  There are policemen everywhere moving around in great clumps, ambling through the streets in knock-off RayBans eating sandwiches and sipping from paper Tim Horton's cups, ready to protect and serve and save us from people with beavers on strings. 

But not all the policemen drink Tim Horton's coffee. Some of them are in Starbucks, particularly the one on the corner of Yonge and King.  Regular readers will be aware of my views about coffee  (broadly the same, even after all this time), but Starbucks to me is the worst of all,  because it talks in the language of coffee but makes a drink that smells of despair and things in tins.

I am in Starbuck's because there is nowhere else to get coffee-approximate substances and food, and it is early and I must eat and drink.  I have ordered something called a "triple no-fat Venti latte", aka a large cup of lukewarm skimmed milk with coffee-scented devil jizz in it, and am clutching a sandwich of inderminate content and provenance, waiting for my 'coffee' behind five policemen in matching outfits of soft above-the-knee shorts, baseball caps, Nike ankle socks and Asics trainers.  

"Triple grande no-fat vanilla iced coffee?" "Yes!", says Policeman 1, who is approximately 6ft 2 and wearing a perky cap. "Grande caramel Frappuccino?". "Yes!", says Policeman 2, who is like Policeman 1 but a bit shorter. "Venti no-fat mocha?". "Yes!", squeaks Policeman 3, who would probably not be tall enough to be a policeman in Holland. "Venti soya cappuccino, extra froth?" It is now the turn of Policeman 4, who is a lady who I think likes Policeman 1 (a man).  "Iced dark cherry mocha?". "Me!", shouts Policeman 5, who is halfway through an enormous pink cupcake. 

"What is Canada like?", asks an Englishman later that day. He is thinking of moving here with his children. It is a big question, but all I can manage is: "Nice. The policemen wear shorts and drink Frappuccinos". 

A day after I wrote this post: there's rioting on Yonge today, just where the policemen in shorts were drinking iced cherry mochas, and it's not looking good.  The policemen (and women) in shorts are probably in riot gear today. I hope everyone in Toronto is safe.