Do you know how Christmas trees are grown?

It might be a bit early, but my wife and I did the Christmas tree today. Tomorrow might have been more appropriate technically, as it is the beginning of Advent, but today is the weekend and we had time to spend on it, so it was more practical. Some people are so obsessive that they put it on early November, so we are not so bad anyway. Sadly, we bought by mistake the one with the slim line and not the large one (mea culpa, I am the one who picked it up), but it is our first Christmas tree so I won't complain too much. She blogged about it herself. Anyway, it is nice to have a Christmas tree, even an artificial one, it puts us in a festive mood. I can't wait to smell the real Christmas tree in my parent's house though. I put some pictures here of the tree. You can see at the top right the very first Christmas decoration I bought for here, when I started my job in 2007. For some reason, I am particularly fond of it.

Now, people may wonder where I got the title of this post. It is not from me, and I understand that it is ironic to have it as a title about an artificial Christmas tree. Still, it has a good ring to it, so I decided to put it here. It is actually the title of a song in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The song is a bit silly, but really enjoyable. In the movie, its silliness actually works to make the scene works beautifully. Because it is set mostly during Christmas time, On Her majesty's Secret Service is one of my favourite seasonal movies. I found the song on youtube (with rather poor and irrelevant images, sadly) and I put it here to kick start Christmas season:

Dernier jour de novembre

Nous sommes le dernier jour de novembre déjà. Ce qui veut dire que demain c'est l'Avent. Comme à chaque mois ou presque, je place ici une image de Detective Tales sur le blogue, un numéro de novembre bien sûr. C'est une petite tradition qui ne semble intéresser que moi, mais ça changera des images de Noël qui risquent de saturer ce blogue pour un mois.

That darn wedding cake

I don't like fruit cakes anymore. I used to, there were some nice Christmas cakes that my dad used to make that tasted quite good, and some other he used to buy from some charity organisation that was absolutely lovely (and which I used to have for breakfast sometimes), but not since I got married. If you don't know it already, English people traditionally have fruit cakes for wedding cakes. For me, fruit cakes (this sort of fruit cakes anyway, not the raisin cake I bake sometimes) were one of those many Christmas desserts, not something to have all year round. My wife doesn't like them, she never did, not even the aforementioned raisin cake that is from her grandmother's recipe. And it seemed a bit heavy and not sugary enough for my taste. That said, I am a traditionalist at heart, so again my better advice, I decided with my wife to be to go with the traditional British wedding cake, bought at Marks & Spencer at a reasonable price. The wedding was a great success, we had a wonderful wedding reception at a beautiful venue, where they served us great food, I never had such a decadent chocolate marquise in my whole life (I still miss), I sang New york, New York in front of an actual audience (well, more people than a couple of drunken friends) and everything went really beautifully. Except for that darn cake, which almost nobody ate and probably nobody enjoyed. Many did not like fruit cakes, others were allergic to nuts so didn't have any (with all the marzipan covering it, this thing can be pure poison), some were simply too full to eat it after the very filling meal (and the lovely marquise) and in the end, I got stuck with the wedding cake almost intact, after struggling with my wife to cut through it for the pictures. (For my Facebook friends, I think there are some pics of me immortalising that moment. It was like cutting through thick wood). I ate the first layer almost every morning for breakfast in the first month of the wedding, then I kept the other two in the freezer. We still have them, so I started eating it again for breakfast not so long ago. I try, I really do, I hate to waste food, especially one that has that sort of symbolical significance. But I really get almost sick when I take a bite of that dry cake covered with sickeningly thick marzipan. Horrid. I posted two pictures of it here, when it was whole and nice to look at (at least it was somehow useful) and how the middle layer looks a year later. Oh, and I put a picture of the marquise, just to have a memory of it on this blog (it was that good) and to taunt my readership.

Mélancolie

"En verrai ge jamais la fin
De voz oeuvres, Melancolie?
Quant au soir de vous me deslie
Vous me ratachez au matin"
Rondeaux, Charles d'Orléans

Je n'admire pas Charles d'Orléans autant que François Villon, mais j'aime quand même beaucoup son oeuvre. Les poètes du Moyen Âge savaient exprimer mieux qu'aucun de leurs successeurs la mélancolie. Je ne suis pas tout à fait mélancolique, mais dans cette période avant les Fêtes, quand la neige n'apparaît pas, qu'il ne fait pas tout à fait assez froid pour me tenir alerte et que novembre ressemble toujours trop à novembre, je m'ennuie un peu. Cela dit, ma femme et moi allons faire du magasinage pour les Fêtes cet après-midi et il y a déjà des lumières de Noël, alors je crois que je vais me guérir de ce sentiment lancinant, qui, puisqu'il ne m'inspire pas autant que les poètes que j'admire, m'est un peu inutile.

Le petit ours gris

Je vous offre aujourd'hui une autre chanson de Félix Leclerc, pas sa plus connue puisque je préfère faire découvrir ses oeuvres plus obscures. Elle est parfaite pour les journées grises, bien que les matins secs et glacés se font rares par ici.

Discover Felix Leclerc!

A crow on the roof

This morning, I took a picture of this crow up on the roof. I couldn't get a closer shot, sadly. I barely had time to take the picture before it flew away. As a kid, I didn't like crows, I thought they were quite noisy. We had lots of them any time of year. Now I really like them, partially because we had so many of them in the neighbourhood when I was a child. They are intelligent and beautiful creatures and even their croak has a certain charm. They used to have a bad reputation in ancient times, probably because they were stealing harvest, were scavengers and had that sinister shiny black colour. Even not so long ago, a crow on the roof of a house like this would have meant that one of its inhabitant was going to die soon. I like crows, but I prefer ravens, which are much bigger and much scarier. Life is not very exciting around here, things might happen next week but right now things are not happening, so I end up taking pictures of birds.

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.