I go to the fireworks

 It is all "go" in Montreal all the moment, what with the Jazz Festival and all of that. It is also the International Fireworks thing, and we like fireworks, so we travel to the Parc Jean-Drapeau (after a dinner during which the too-fast service - with its implication that one would want to drink a gin and tonic at the same time as eating a betroot and apple salad - irritates me beyond measure), walk and walk, go through a fairground, find our seats, listen to warnings about bits of flying fireworks and ash*, drink cold beer from plastic cups and wait. And then it is on!  Fireworks, set to music, across the water.

Last year, we saw Great Britain do fireworks to popular theme of Men and Women. (Shania Twain sings; the fireworks go off.  "Damn (whoosh!) I feel like a (zapp!) woman (bang! Whoosh! Fizzzzzzzzz!")  This year it is Portugal that we see with our two dear friends, and I cannot tell you if it was better or worse than Great Britain because it does not matter. Why? Because it is fireworks, and fireworks are probably the best thing in the world, better than cake or the thought of Sting with his tongue caught in a mangle.

An hour's journey back on a bus and a metro and walking and walking picking ash out of our eyes, gunpowder off our clothes and bits of plastic out of hair is all worth it, every scrap, and should I ever need fireworks I shall phone Macedo's Pirotecnia ("The Sky Is Our Limit") and ask them to "do the business".

* Update!!! Nearly 24 hours later, I feel something in my eye. Is it grit? Not it is not. I pull my lower eyelid down and there is a - I gag as I write - a burn on my eyeball (under the iris bit) and on the lower lid where the hot ash has flown in.  It is very weird and vomit-making, but no harm done. I am sure that, in no time,  I will recover and my monkey eyes will be out and probing the darkest corners of the universe to bring you, my adoring readers and/or fans, reports from the "frontline" of the mundane. 

Pip pip!

I have une fraise pornographique

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.

]

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.