Montreal departure

The bus station in the centre of Montreal has the most terrifying diner I've ever seen. Luckily it wasn't the only place I'd eaten in town, although their poutine wasn't at all terrible. For those of you who aren't familiar with poutine, it's a large bucket of chips/fries covered in gravy and really fatty cheese. It's sloppy and extremely fattening, which is why it's a favourite dish in a city as cold as Montreal.

The snow was covering the ground, and I had to drag suitcases through slush and ice to get to the station. Somehow my mobile phone had vanished the night before, while I was out having a celebratory drink in a blues bar the previous night. I went back to the bar and luckily they still had the telephone, and hadn't called any antipodean countries on it. So I was all set to go.

So much has happened during this time in Montreal. I haven't even started to blog about the trip to Quebec city with Jo, Niels and Julien, and our fantastic experience of photographing dilapidated buildings and ice skating in the old centre of the city. I didn't even get round to posting pictures of the Montmorency waterfalls we visited on the way, or the surreal Ethiopean restaurant we dined in when we got back.

Nor did I even get to describe my most unusual professional experience to date; working morning shifts in a factory and teaching evenings and afternoons in high schools and universities. Try preparing a lesson on 20th century short stories while sitting on a bag of rice in a warehouse, between two rushed bouts of loading a truck with pallets. Without even starting on the political discussions these guys get into on their way to delivering in Chinatown.

But I suppose that's what happens when you are living life rather than writing about it. Unlike Sartre's protagonist from "La Nausee", I don't really get to sit about contemplating all this very much. All I can do is stick up a few pictures in retrospective (when I get my camera in order), and tell you that Montreal is unforgettable. The graffiti around the city (take a look at the facebook albums), the snow-capped trees, the unmistakable cafes and the bums in the metro are completely unique. Nowhere else does the teenager bagging groceries in the supermarket say 'papier-plastic-paper-plastic?' when you get to the checkout and are trying to remember which language to speak in. No other city has a Chinatown with shop signs which are bad translations of English badly translated into French, and then back again.

Goodbye to all the wacky people I've met in Montreal, and thank you for the music. Now I get down to supply teaching in London. Won't that be an eyebrow-raiser...? Stay tuned for the next chapter, where guitarist and composer extraordinaire Will Rutter plays Irish melodies while scoring Mariah Carey songs for high school Christmas parties, and takes me running round sphinxes in London's strangest park. The Ghost of Crystal Palace...

Elizabeth: the sellout age

This huge film, destined to demonstrate the hugeness of the humongous history of Queen Elizabeth, sequel to another film entitled Elizabeth a few years ago, achieved the quasi-impossible. It proved that it is actually possible to depict the history of this period with even less intrigue, interest and wit than the first one did. An achievement of cinematographic mediocrity like no other. Just how did they do it?

The thing that fuels my ire the most about this film is that you don't even need to have an original writer to create an interesting plot around this queen's life. The history itself is full of intrigue, suspense, sex, murder, plots, wars, exploration, literary and philosophical originality and the thrill of the British renaissance. You don't even need to fictionalise it; it's all outstanding film material. How they even managed to make this reality boring is quite beyond me.

Elizabeth is portrayed as this snivelling, cold-hearted Queen whose humanity and womanhood nonetheless pours through the cracks to reveal her weaknesses, or what Hollywood would disgustingly caricature as her 'femininity'. During an era of unprecedented literary growth, of science developing beyond belief, and of religious strife tearing families and communities to shreds, the Elizabeth of this movie spends her time moping over Sir Walter Raleigh, in a J-lo meets Britney rich bitch scenario barely worthy of Desperate Housewives. The males in the film - who are incidentally unanimously appalling actors - are tapping her on her regal shoulder, reminding her that the Spaniards are, sort of, coming for war with thousands of well-armed ships, and maybe she should be doing something other than teaching Sir Walter Raleigh how to two-step with her lady-in-waiting. But this isn't even intended as humour. This is supposed to be either good fiction or historically accurate? And Walter Raleigh, who was the most fraudulent explorer ever, is depicted as some sort of war hero, who single-handedly sets fire to the Armada ships, jumps overboard and swims to safety as his horse dives headlong at him. What this was meant to mean I really don't know.

Aside from being historically inaccurate, this film is a two hour emotional porn flick, with even less effort given to plot than a Hugh Heffner would bother with. Scenes of decapitated limbs are cut to larger-than-life philharmonic string sections, between even more gratuitous scenes of Elizabeth wringing her hands over her sex life and the decisions she had to make. No effort is made to display the woman's unparalleled wit, her paranoid delusions, her machiavellian war genius, her obsession with virginity coupled with unbridled sexual desire... Even the sex is shoddy. How did they get that wrong?

It is worth seeing Elizabeth: The Golden Age, just to see how creative Hollywood filmmakers can be at ruining a good story. But if this doesn't interest you, stay home and watch the Simpsons, and avoid the flooded bathrooms of cinema multiplexes where staff dismiss you nonchalantly when you mention that Niagara Falls has taken over the gents' loo. Perhaps they had a hand in making this film

Another week past

I spent yesterday walking around the city again, which is my favourite way of getting things moving upstairs, when I need to think. Keeping the old engine oiled, so to speak.

We headed out after a brunch into the freezing cold air of Montreal, to climb Mont Royal and take some great pictures (I'm hoping Jo will contribute a few to this blog), but also to do some English conversation. Jo is an interior designer who's created a life for himself here for over a year, and has just started in a new job as a technician for a fairly prominent design office. His English is far better than most French people who learned through school, but a healthy dose of conversation will be a bit help for his job.

We ended up walking to the Oratoire St Joseph, which recently hit the Montreal headlines, when a guy entered with a gun and threatened to kill himself, in the middle of a mass (this place is a church). The enormous, cathedral-like building looks like a postmodern blend of a Soviet gulag and a giant temple for a religious sect. The organ is straight out of a Star Trek episode, and the 20 foot high wooden statues of the apostles who glare down at unsuspecting churchgoers, were the object of our fascination and mirth (sorry God, but what with being the creator, we thought you'd empathise with our need to laugh at this morose sight). Still, from the outside, this massive place of worship is an impressive promontory over the city, and certainly makes an interesting walk.

The walk across the cemetary, up to this church, and back round the glitzy Outremont neighbourhood with the floor heating under its driveways (I sh+t you not), led to the inevitable conversation about parallel universes, time travel, and how human decisions influence endless splits in the course of the universe, creating the past as well as the future (retroactive causality...). Then we walked home down the Lachine canal, tried some guitars in a guitar shop, and had a slap-up meal while watching a few episodes of Lost.

The episode happened to be about a character who has flash visions of the future and tries to influence the course of the planet through his actions. The acting is about as believable as a South American jungle island having polar bears, and the plot seems about as likely as Hollywood funding a decent director through a well-written movie this century. But of course, it echoed our conversation pretty nicely.

Any of your feedback on these questions would be useful to me.

- If physical energy is never lost but transformed, what happens to mental energy when we die? (for instance, the fact that we dream, and our dreams influence our mythology and narratives... surely that doesn't just disappear when after death)

- If particles from parallel universes manifest themselves in our universe (and I think this is the dominant school of thought in astrophysics at the moment), then is it possible for us to inhabit several universes at once, provided we can invent a tool which allows us to observe these shadow particles?

and most importantly:

- When I flew to Canada, I travelled a few microseconds in time, since I was further away from the earth while on the plane, and therefore time passed differently for me than it did for most of you. Does that mean I'm in a different dimension to you?

Just a few thoughts for Sunday morning, to get your brains going, or to get your blood boiling, if you have any real scientific understanding of these issues and can correct my misapprehensions. Please write comments, however abusive, to help me out!

Pea soup

Now why is it that pea soup tastes so funny? And the smell... All I want is to fill my newly-proclaimed vegetarian belly with something warm, healthy and enjoyable. Why do the makers of pea soup have to do this to me?

The fridge and the flat stink of whatever horrific products they put in pea soup. OK, so at 1 dollar per can, you can't complain much. But I'm complaining anyway. For the love of God/Allah/Jehovah/Mcdonald's/Buddha please add something artificial and unhealthy which gives the illusion of eating an actual organic substance. As the song says

"Fool me, fool me, go on and fool me"

Give me artificial colouring, artificial taste, artificial anything over the pungent odour of pea soup which currently infests the flat from curtain rod to bed leg.