Il a neigé au Québec...

...mais pas ici. Je regarde les prévisions météo de l'autre côté de l'Atlantique et je suis envieux. Ici, j'attends la neige, mais je crois qu'elle ne viendra pas. Il fait sombre de plus en plus tôt, à quatre heures les lumières commencent à baisser, mais il ne neige pas. Je ne suis pas impatient, mais ça mettrait un peu de couleur au paysage. Enfin, il reste un peu moins d'un mois avant Noël. Patience, patience...

I'm dreaming of home

"I hear the mountain birds
The sound of rivers singing
A song I've often heard
It flows through me now
So clear and so loud
I stand where I am
And forever I'm dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I'm dreaming of home

It's carried in the air
The breeze of early morning
I see the land so fair
My heart opens wide
There's sadness inside
I stand where I am
And forever I'm dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I'm dreaming of home

This is no foreign sky
I see no foreign light
But far away am I
From some peaceful land
I'm longing to stand
A hand in my hand
...forever I'm dreaming of home
I feel so alone, I'm dreaming of home"

Let's start by a bit of triviality before I get down to serious business. Tonight I will teach for the first time in a bit more than a year. It is on behalf of a language school, for one student. I feel a bit rusty, but I think I will be all right. I should be happy, but it's not exactly the kind of teaching I wanted to do, I thought when I started working in Liverpool that language schools were below my skills and that I would finally be a real, full-time lteacher. How the mighty have fallen (not that I ever was that mighty to begin with, but still).

Since inspiration hasn't quite arrived yet, since I am feeling homesick, with Christmas coming and everything, and since I forgot to put it on Remembrance Day or Remembrance Sunday, I have decided to put here I'm dreaming of home, which I discovered in the movie Merry Christmas/Joyeux Noël (a nice movie, by the way). And I just found out that Natalie Dessay sings in the movie version of the song, so that's another reason to like it. This song illustrates perfectly the longing of the expatriate like myself.

Sainte-Catherine

C'est la Sainte-Catherine aujourd'hui. Essayez de manger de la tire,des restes que vous avez gardés de l'Halloween. Ou alors, lisez ce conte, dont j'ai déjà parlé ici et qui est un petit bijou d'atmosphère. Je l'ai lu en quatrième année et je m'en rappelle encore, c'est dire. Si vous trouvez la tire trop collante, c'est une excellente façon de souligner la fête que de le lire. C'est d'ailleurs tout ce que je vais faire pour souligner ce 25 novembre.

Saint Catherine's Day tomorrow

Well, I am a bit early for this, but I thought I would remind my Anglophone readership that it is St-Catherine's Day tomorrow. I will write a post about it in French tomorrow with the usual nostalgia, children souvenirs nobody wants to hear about but my brothers and I, so I won't bother you too much with childhood memories. That said, Saint Catherine's Day is a fascinating little holiday that is sadly forgotten these days. It is one month before Christmas and for Quebeckers it used to be the last big day until Christmas. It didn't start the Advent, but it was still a way to pass time until then. It was, in effect, our Thanksgiving. It was also the day of unmarried women and spinsters, as Saint Catherine is the holy patron of virgins. As a child, I didn't know much about the saint, but I knew that "coiffer Sainte Catherine" meant, for unmarried women of 25, becoming "vieille fille", i.e. a spinster. As a child, 25 seemed very old to me, and I wouldn't understand why any man in his right mind would want to marry a woman so ancient anyway, so the tradition made sense. Obviously, I didn't know I was going to marry at 30 a woman aged 26 going on 27. In France, they had Saint-Catherine's hats or wigs to celebrate the event. In Québec, we used to make tire, which is taffy,"like Marguerite Bourgeoys" now a saint herself), who introduced taffy in America and evangelised natives by bribing them with the candy (the way we were told her story, that's how I understood it). So that's what I loved about Saint-Catherine's Day: the taffies, which we used to cool on snow, when there was some. Funny that a day so austere was also for us another day of sugar indulgence. But the holiday served also as a warning for the girls who were too eager to get a husband. We were told the cautionary tale of Colette, a maid approaching 25 who did not want to become a spinster, and who tried too hard to get married before Saint Catherine's Day. If you can understand French, you can read her story here. It's a beautiful conte québécois the way I love them: simple, dark, with no happy ending.

I didn't know how to commemorate the day, and then I found recently at total random this song by the McGarrigle sisters, which is called Complainte pour Sainte-Catherine. Granted, it is more about the rue Sainte-Catherine in Montreal, not the day or the saint herself, but the "pour" in the title means that the song is addressed to the saint, so I took it as a sign. Anyway, I don't know if it is the thick Quebec anglophone accent, the use of joual, the way the lyrics picture perfectly a cold winter day in Montreal, but I found the song irresistible.

Orange sanguine

Il fait froid, mais il n'y a toujours pas de neige. Que ce pays est gris ces jours-ci. Il a plu abondamment hier, de cette pluie froide qui pénètre tout. Aujourd'hui il fait soleil (pour le moment), mais on gèle même à l'intérieur. J'ai passé tout l'avant-midi à envoyer une traduction parce qu'hotmail avait des problèmes. Alors voilà, j'ai un peu hâte aux Fêtes. J'ai quand même de bonnes raisons de garder le moral. Le métier de traducteur, bien que terriblement irrégulier parce que contractuel, paie extrêmement bien quand on considère le temps passé à travailler. Et ça me tient occupé, mais pas trop, alors j'ai le temps de chercher du vrai travail (et tant mieux, parce que c'est également d'un ennui mortel). Je consomme aussi assez régulièrement de la comfort food. Comme nous allons au Québec pour les Fêtes, il serait absurde de commander ce qui me manque du pays, mais j'ai trouvé un substitut pour le jus de canneberges qui complétait mon jus d'orange à Montréal. Je prends donc du jus d'orange sanguine Tropicana. Ca n'a pas le goût acide si distinctif de la canneberge, je doute également que ça ait ses valeurs nutritives, mais ça donne de la couleur au déjeuner et ça change de la fadeur du jus d'orange. Je sais que c'est d'une trivialité frisant le manque d'inspiration, mais j'ai décidé de prendre en photo le verre de Sanguinello en question en photo et de la publier ici, histoire de mettre un peu de couleur au blogue (couleur qui, de par sa rougeur, rappelle Noël qui s'en vient). Cela dit, je suis conscient que je vous fais lire un billet qui, après avoir divagué sur pleins de trucs et sauté du coq à l'âne, porte surtout sur un verre de jus d'orange.

Une citation...

Dernier billet de la journée, très court. J'ai déjà entendu cette réplique alors que j'étais plongeur dans un restaurant de fine cuisine:

"-Tu sais, l'alcool est un poison qui tue lentement.
-Tant mieux je ne suis pas pressé."

À se tordre à terre.

An anniversary to remember

Today is the day I met my wife, six years ago. It was a Saturday evening, I was eating a mince pie in the residence's kitchen and she showed up because she was looking for a friend (my neighbour, a Greek girl from Cyprus I will always feel guilty not to thank in public in my wedding speech). I might blog more about that evening one day, something that hopefully will be an outstanding post. For now, suffice to say that since that day, I try to have a mince pie on the 23rd. I am not the biggest mince pies fan, in fact I quickly get bored of them, but it is one of those little traditions I have and I am quite fond of it. It is important to commemorate such events, and it makes the end of November more exciting, or at least exciting for something else than Christmas lights and decorations they already put everywhere. This is a personal, little celebration of mine that needs nothing but a mince pie.

À propos du grenier

Je ne pensais pas bloguer encore une fois ce soir, mais j'ai trouvé un article sur cyberpresse qui m'amène à revisiter un de mes billets préférés. J'y avais parlé de mon amour des mansardes comme lieu de résidence Ir, il semblerait que je ne sois pas le seul à apprécier les vertus du grenier. Le style est plus journalistique, l'approche est plus pratique qu'évocatrice, mais la lecture de l'article n'en est pas moins intéressante.

JFK

Holly's blog entry reminded me that today is the day of Kennedy's assassination (and I have a good excuse for forgetting, as you will see tomorrow). For people of my age, itt was the 9/11 of our parents's generation. A lot of people of my age have known the story through Oliver Stone's movie, which I never liked. I much prefer the James Ellroy version of the murder, that he related in American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. Just as fictitious as Oliver Stone's paranoid fantasy, but to my taste much more believable.

On a side note, you can find here a fascinating website about Kennedy and his murder, which I visit from time to time around the 22nd of November.

Is this a nest?

I wonder... I saw it in one of the front yard's tree yesterday, and while there is no sign of a bird around there and the branch doesn't strike me as the ideal place to build a nest, as it is exposed to the weather and potential predators, it sure looks like a nest. Maybe it is just a bunch of twigs that got there by the wind, but I think it is more likely an empty nest. So sadly, I will not see birds any time soon in it, but the nest in itself still looks quite nice. Interesting how the natural world can be so aesthetic, even it its smallest incarnations, like this nest or a spider web.

Réflexions décousues d'un samedi matin

Sommes-nous enfin en hiver? La température baisse lentement mais sûrement. Ils disent que c'est très froid à la télé et je dois admettre que, même si c'est encore doux comparé à ce qu'on peut avoir au Québec, le froid pince de manière étonnante lorsqu'on sort. On annonce de la neige certains endroits. Et d'ici là (si jamais elle vient à tomber ici) il y a le vent qui souffle. J'apprécie la baisse de température, donc, parce qu'enfin il y a unv rai changement saisonnier.

Étrange, j'ai ces temps-ci envie de manger de la grosse pizza cheap et abondante qu'on retrouve dans les pizzerias au Québec. Je me rappelle à quel point on aimait Pizza Royale quand mes frères et moi étaient jeunes. Le restaurant avait beaucoup de succès vers la fin des années 80 à Chicoutimi, je me demande encore pourquoi, parce que ce n'était qu'une pizzeria quelconque. Mais c'était notre pizza préférée. Maintenant, Pizza Royale est retombé dans l'obscurité. Les pizzerias se sont multipliées et nos goûts ont évolué aussi. Cela dit, parfois j'aime retourner aux joies gastronomiques simples ou, dans ce cas ci, simplistes. Où sont les neiges d'antan, et ainsi de suite.

The wind in the windows

It is quite windy today, you can sometimes hear the wind shaking the windows slightly. I love the kind of day we are having right now: it is sunny, cold and windy. I remember when I was working in Liverpool, a few days after I got back from the Christmas holidays, we had a few days/weeks where the weather was terrible, with lots of rain and lots of wind. I had my head down marking grammar exams and the windows of my office were shaking as if the end of the world was on its way. It felt great. So was sleeping in my bedroom in the old Victorian house I was living in. When the weather outside is unfriendly, you appreciate more the comfort of your home.

I can feel the wind more in this attic flat. Whatever the weather is, we are in much closer proximity with it. It is something else I love about attic rooms: it makes you more in touch with the outside word, in direct contact with nature's temper. I don't know if it is because we are higher up, or because of the angles of an attic, but attics have that property. Or maybe I just have a wild imagination.

Londres aller-retour

On dirait que je n'échappe pas à cette ville. Je suis donc allé à Londres brièvement aujourd'hui, pour m'inscrire à une autre agence de placement, celle-ci spécialisée dans le domaine de l'éducation, alors je crois que j'ai plus de chances de progresser avec eux et de trouver du travail qui au moins m'intéresse. Cela dit, je suis resté à Londres le moins longtemps possible. Par paresse, j'avais décidé de m'y rendre le plus tard possible. Par manque d'enthousiasme, je l'ai quittée tout de suite après mon rendez-vous. J'aurais pu faire un peu de magasinage du temps des Fêtes une fois rendu, mais l'esprit n'y était pas. Je trouve la ville toujours aussi barbante et la réconciliation espérée est encore loin.

Au retour des Fêtes, j'essaie de me réconcilier avec la ville, promis. Pas avant, parce que je crois l'avoir assez vue pour le moment. Mais en janvier (ou en février?) je vais essayer d'y aller une fin de semaine avec ma femme et on visitera les musées. D'ici là, je l'évite comme la peste.

Looking for inspiration, hoping for snow

Since November, I feel like I have no worthy topic to blog about. Well, I do, but I feel either uninspired to blog about them, or I am waiting for a more appropriate moment. There is just something about this month I guess. Not that it is in my case completely uneventful: my wife's birthday is in November and there are some unknown yet interesting holidays, which I am going to talk about in due time, or already did. But on the whole, November is stuck between Halloween and Christmas, so it is a month of waiting time and expectations. Autumn is no more in full force, but it's not quite winter yet. I don't like the monotonous, in between nature of November. If only there was snow...

Ah! There's another thing: I miss the snow. Snow makes everything look more serene and warm (ironically enough). I have been longing for the snows of yesteryear since we got snow here as early as October. They had snow in Québec a few days before, so I was hoping for some real drops In November, then I remembered that I was living in England. You might think that I am digressing, talking about snow in a blog that started being about inspiration, but you see, this is actually structured (okay, not necessarily well structured, but the connection makes sense). If you understand a bit of French, you will know that I mentioned in some of my previous posts the great poet François Villon. Villon made one of his most famous poems (which I often quote from) longing for snow and for past glories. He was inspired by this absence. It told me that one does not have to have an exciting life to create. Creation can also come from monotony, from longing. I am no François Villon, but I am looking up to my favourite poet by longing for a time that will come and that I have seen before, hoping for it as I have known it in my childhood in Northern Québec and I have been giving an foretaste of it this year. Through melancholy, I hope to get a stroke of genius, or at least some kind of interesting writing. Not an epiphany, as I got all of them in teenage, but something good. I don't know which one will come first, the snow or inspiration, but I am expecting them. In the meantime, I'll put some pictures here that my dad took in Chicoutimi in...April 2008. It looked like December, as you can see.

Le fossoyeur

C'est un mardi gris (même s'il fait soleil, novembre est désespérément gris quand il ne neige pas) et je suis un peu désoeuvré, tellement que je ne sais pas trop sur quoi bloguer. Alors autant mettre un peu de Brassens, pour tenir mon modeste lectorat occupé.

Ca commence à ressembler à l'hiver...

...enfin, l'hiver anglais, ce qui veut dire un automne plus froid que l'automne normal, sans les couleurs. Il ne neige pas encore, mais la température a baissé un peu. Selon les prévisions météo (pour ce qu'elles valent), elle doit continuer à baisser. S'il pouvait neiger, je serais le plus heureux des hommes.

Sugar fix

Since I haven't written a food entry for a while and since it's November and therefore utterly uneventful, I might as well do it now, with pictures if you please. My mother-in-law often says that I have a sweet tooth, which I never completely agreed with. I am not too keen on sugary snacks between meals and I always prefer to eat something savoury before something sweet. That said, I sometimes get sugar craving. I usually try to satisfy it with some sort of chocolate dessert or other. My favourite is the chocolate mousse, which is for me the quintessential dessert: simple, rich, delicious and utterly satisfying. This is what I had yesterday, a little cup of chocolate mousse from Waitrose. Tonight I had again a sugar craving (must be the gray weather), but I fixed with a trifle from Waitrose. It is not as satisfying, trifles in England seem to be of the lighter kind (this is at least the feeling I had eating the Waitrose one). I had my first experience of trifle in the Binerie Mont-Royal, a "restaurant" (more a snack bar really) of traditional Québec cuisine, very famous in Montreal. (Just a little note, if you go to Montreal, have at least one meal at the Binerie, it is simple, honest food, quite cheap and the staff is so friendly you'll feel like you are family, which you probably are in their eyes. The owner always called me "jeune homme" when I was going there.) A trifle is called bagatelle in Québec and is made of leftovers from other desserts. The one from the Binerie was primitive in its look, filling, a pure declaration of war on waistline, nothing like the somewhat aseptised, fancy version that Waitrose's trifle. I think it is the kind of dessert one really needs: uncompromisingly sugary. Anyway, that's the kind of sugar fix I usually need.

Attendre l'hiver en citant Villon

"Sur le Noël, morte saison
Que les loups se vivent de vent..."

Lais II, François Villon

"Tant crie l'on Noël qu'il vient."
Ballade des proverbes, François Villon

Je ne veux pas faire pédant, mais je tenais à citer François Villon pour commencer ce bref billet. Il fait un brin trop doux aujourd'hui. Les temps hivernaux sont peut-être plus difficiles et associés au froid et à la privation, mais je les trouve plus comfortables. Alors voilà, j'attends les manifestations de l'hiver et les joies qui viennent avec, ce qui va changer de la grisaille quotidienne. À force de l'espérer, je crois que l'hiver, comme Noël, va bien finir par venir. J'ai confiance en la sagesse de François Villon.

Feuilles mortes

La semaine dernière, quelqu'un a ramassé en tas les feuilles mortes qui jonchaient le terrain, lesquelles me plaisaient beaucoup. Franchement, ça me désole un peu. On a eu un tas de feuilles mortes (comme sur la photo de droite) pendant un certain temps, un amas humide et un peu dégoûtant. Maintenant, le terrain est propre et aseptisé. Si seulement il y avait de la neige, ça lui redonnerait du cachet. Enfin, il me reste La Chanson de Prévert, que je préfère à l'originale (même si je ne suis pas le plus grand admirateur de Serge Gainsbourg). L'automne prêtant à la mélancolie, il n'est pas étonnant que les feuilles mortes aient inspiré les poètes.

You Know My Name

I thought I'd put another Bond song here. As you know, I love Casino Royale. I was not the biggest fan of Chris Cornell's You Know My Name when it got released, but I grew to love it. You can find the original videoclip here. That said, I find the song particularly efficient in the movie itself. The title sequence of Casino Royale is brilliant as the animation is an narrative in itself. Here it is for you to enjoy: