I deal with neighbours

I have just composed this letter to our neighbours. It is cowardly, but I have no choice, other than taking archery lessons and remaining open to being imprisoned for animal cruelty.


Dear Neighbours

I am sure you know that your dogs are noisy. After all, you have to live with them. But that is your choice. It is not our choice to live with them, and yet somehow we feel that we do.

For about $5 you can buy a water pistol (Toys R Us is good, but you may be lucky at Loblaws). With that water pistol, you can train your dogs to stop barking so that we can get some sleep after 10pm and/or sleep past 6.30am in the morning.

This is how you do it:

1. Put water in the water pistol.
2. When the dog barks (but is NOT looking at you), squirt him/her with water.
3. Repeat until the dog(s) figure out that when they bark, bad shit happens.

You may have to do this for a couple of weeks before they get the message, but it’ll be worth it (for the entire street) if you do figure it out.

If you don’t want to spend $5 on a water pistol, the recycling goes out on Monday night. I’m sure you can maybe get a used washing up liquid bottle from someone’s box and use that.

A Neighbour


It is a sure sign that I am 40, which I am; other signs include:

- arthritis medicine and indigestion tablets in the bathroom cupboard
- aching joints
- going 'aaaah' when I sit down
- thinking young people are idiots
- thinking I should get a pension
- doing embroidery
- knitting
- making jam, bread, etc
- actually enjoying Oprah magazine (whilst remaining healthily British about the whole thing)
- waiting 'until we've got the money to do it properly'
- not seeing the point of holidays involving rucksacks
- tutting at the neighbours
- ordering M&S tights online from England
- starting to read murder mystery books (does Kate Atkinson count? And someone gave me a Barbara Vine that looks tempting)

Hoorah! I'm going for a little nap.

Zzzzzz.

I share with my adoring readers one of the finest wedding speeches ever written

There is more to come on the subject of our wedding (for e.g. some more photographs). In the meantime, we have been remembering (with great fondness) some of the miraculously good speeches made by our dearest friends: so funny in parts that I weed my Spanx, and so English in others that the French Canadians could do no more than mutter "quoi?" and focus on their cheese(s).

Here is one of them, written by our dear friends (academics, comedians, parents of our god-children, and purveyors of all that is right in the world). I have edited it very little. I hope you enjoy it. (Regular readers will know that my true name is Lucy, and that the pathologist goes by the name of JM, when he is not being called either Boris or Master.)

"We like to think of Lucy and JM as the Sapphire and Steel of Montreal, the Laverne and Shirley if you will, the omelette and the fruit of the breakfast plate, the poutine and the chips, the Céline and the René.

JM is a creation straight from the pages of a modern romance novel, a Mills and Boon vision of manliness dreamt up by a fruity female writer. Picture the scene. An athletic mountain-biking French Canadian vet with a wide knowledge of Californian wines and the inside track on a lamb’s uterus, sweeps the Lady off her feet in the misty, cobbled streets of the ancient English cathedral town of Canterbury. (When I say 'sweep off her feet', I of course mean ply her with 6 gin and tonics and then dare her to a game of competitive spinning, resulting in lying face down on ye cobbled streets in the rain. This was Lucy’s first experience of a well-used Montrealian mating ritual. As we can tell from today’s happy event, it wasn’t to be her last.)

JM’s animal magnetism first sent the Monkey synapses sparking, leading her to emit her infamous high frequency ‘man growl’ – inaudible to most, but a siren’s call to her victim, also works in the animal kingdom. Photo evidence abounds of his mesmeric talents to stun a squirrel into a ‘paws up’ pose, his ability to render a caterpillar immobile for up to six minutes and to make almost any form of canine growl ‘sausages’ to order. Of course all this is done with a glint of his gunmetal grey eyes, for it is well known that he is yoda-like in his verbal delivery. (Once, after a 10 minute presentation on porcine dendentrics he was rendered incapable of speech for 2 weeks. Tru fax my friends, tru fax.)

But this ability to communicate as a latter day Dr Doolittle also extends to the plant world and his gardening prowess. The size of his marrow is legendary, as are his plums. Lucy has never been happier than whilst foraging with abandon in his well stocked garden.

But Lucy too has a great affinity with outdoor life. Many a time Lucy has watched American Idol with a rabid fox who has crept in from her former London garden and spent a merry half hour with her in her lounge whilst she peruses Simon Cowell’s nasal hair. She’s generous with animals too - lending her Fendi handbags to foxes to savage in her garden, talking to small dogs she meets on the street like Mary Poppins on crystal meth with a ‘come along poppit, keep up keep up’, and she always takes great pleasure in spotting animals who closely resemble their owners. She was the first to muse that Pamela Anderson does have a cute pair of puppies.

Lucy and JM are the meeting of two great forces, the Western seaboard squeezing at a few juicy Rockies. Without JM, Lucy would have no idea of the concept that you can’t leave your shopping in the car not in case it thaws, but because it will all freeze. He has taught her the joy of spaghetti suppers, and that it is not compulsory that risottos need to be served to guests after 11pm having been plied with several large turbo shandies beforehand. He has patiently month by month, year by year taken away all the grown-up stuff that a real lady should not be bothered with – MOT-ing the car, filing the cds into alphabetical order, cleaning the gutters – real daddy bear man stuff. In short, he is her knight in shining armour, or given his DIY boiler suit look, her shite in nylon armour, the Becks to her Posh.

In return, she has introduced JM to a whole new world of Englishness – a fondness for poorly insulated housing, having an ‘urgh, lovely cup of tea’ on 20 minute cycles, looking at a slight snow flurry and shouting ‘shitting hell we’re in a fucking white out we’re all going to die’. She has saved him from continuing to commit the fashion crime of wearing brown penny loafers with black shiney trousers, of keeping on his ear mufflers indoors and of sporting his vintage 1996 Alanis Morrisette ‘Jagged Little Pill’ blouson tour jacket when meeting friends for dinner. Sadly, she will never be able to rid him of his strange fascination with cutting his own hair. Lucy has, in short, turned him into the French Canadian stud muffin that we see before us today. A moment of quiet reflecion whilst we, as one, rest our gaze upon Jean-Martin. A chorus of "For he’s a jolly good fellow…"

As for the blushing bride well, the now dirtily titled Mrs Lucy Monkey, she is a phenomenon. Part boho flapper girl, part deep thinker, part house mistress, part cockney second hand car dealer. Imagine Martha Wainwright, soused with Steven Pinker mixed with Naomi Klein with a side order of Conrad Black. She can present an astounding array of burps, trumps and underarm fart noises. She can bump and grind like a bad bad Jamaican girl. You knows it sister. Step it girl. She can knock out a triumphant array of cakes and savoury snacks. Knows the method to produce a killer gin. Can make us laugh more than it was previously thought humanly possible. She has the prettiest eyes and the softest skin of a lady what I have ever known. Just thinking of her makes me feel happy. She has an exquisite taste in clothes, jewels, music, poetry and all the fighting arts. She knows more rude words than the progeny of a Fleet Street papparazi and a filthy minded aristocrat. Exceptionally modest, pure of heart, a caring and loving godmother to our children, and a huzzah to JM for becoming a godfather to our nippers.

A friend for life, indeed friends for life. For this happy union today cements the two tribes into one unique unstoppable force. Ability to cook and take the piss out of each other, check. Joint ability to discern a snow shoe from a tennis racket, check. Stamina to fly to England from Canada and race around to see all the millions of people who want you all to themselves, check. A love of hideous museums, bizarre spectacles and odd encounters with the uniquely blessed of this world. Double check.

Ladies and gentlemen, madams et messieurs, please raise your glasses and whoop yourselves senseless as I present to you Mr and Mrs Monkey."

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.