Black robe

Heading North across New Hampshire and Vermont in a Greyhound bus turned out to be one of those unstuck plans which prove to be exactly the right outcome. As we drove deeper into the New England forest and the rain picked up, I saw occasional deer standing in the distance, and until the Canadian border the perfect realization of Fall Colours.


And the truck-stops were almost as good. Pausing in a tiny Twin Peaks village, overhead traffic lights swinging in the wind and wooded hills looming all around I succumbed to the ersatz allure of vending machine Apple cake and 'vanilla' cappucino. Once I might have added an insouciant Peter Stuyvesant.




Solzhenitsyn spent his twenty year exile living in Vermont, no doubt fully prepared for the New England Winter by his apprenticeship in Siberia. I recall a picture of him wearing a hunting cap. The ear flaps lent a certain symmetry to his down-turned mouth. Apparently he showed up at the occasional Vermont town meeting, in practice for his return to Russia where he lambasted Gorbachev and perestroika. Wonder if he's still alive, and if yes, whether he has anything to say to Putin. Speaking of writers whose fire remains undiminished by age, how fabulous to see Doris Lessing as an 88 year old Bohemian perched on her front stoop and not looking quite like anyone's grandma.


Unlike the beautiful old port city of Quebec, Montreal is rather charmless. In fact to me it resembles some rundown Scottish city, with its grimy blockish architecture and badly laid out streets.







Weirdly the street names echo every corner of Paris. Such familiarity of cadence, but set in a colonial aesthetic, has been disconcerting. Montreal apparently prides itself on its souterrain, the vast network of underground shopping strips joylessly connected by empty, and therefore mildly sinister, corridors.

Above ground, the streetscape is ugly, dishevilled and rather dirty; below ground it's like an unending airport corridor, all artificial gloss and gleam. I looked around for a flock of hosties, trailing their wheelie bags behind a handsome pilot or two, but .. there was no-one. Upstairs, damp and cold; downstairs, cosy and warm. What would Dante have to say?

But I'm staying somewhere so charming that the awful streetscape hardly matters.

It's a house in which the owner continues to live on the ground floor (first floor in American parlance) while progressively restoring each of the rooms on the floors above for a B & B. My room has all the things I like. It's made of old fashioned building materials i.e. real stuff like timber, brick and stone. The window frames are pine and my room has a window seat, wifi, cable, and a huge plasma TV screen fixed to the wall. Geraldine Grainger looked the size of a small piano in her Vicar's robes (and there's a bit of a Pride and Prejudice plot coming up for Dibley's vicar, not that I want to give too much away).

On some good advice given in Brisbane I spent a day visiting Quebec City, built on the immense St Lawrence River, and still partly within the huge city wall which failed to repel the British during the so-called seven year's war (how useful Wiki can be).

Along the river's edge, and built beneath a long escarpment which borders the city, little harbour-side houses sat in flat rows.

The trip from Montreal to Quebec took 3 hours each way by bus, and was completely full both aller and retour. The journey was on the longest, straightest road I've ever travelled upon, rather like going from Oakey to Dalby but over and over again. Alongside ran a railway line and at one point we passed a container train miles long, on its way to the port with cargo bound for China or empty containers returning, it was hard to tell. On each side of the road vast fenceless grain fields flowed, and in the distance I could see a little French eglise here or there. Listening to and reading French everywhere seems to be a necessary ingredient of any vacance I decide upon; however this time I wasn't prepared by bringing with me my trusty miniature Harraps, so there were many words I grasped for without success.

It's been extremely cold. I loved Bruce Beresford's film Black Robe when I saw it, for a variety of reasons. Even in October it's been possible to get a sense of the ferocious winters that so defeated the early Quebecan missionaries portrayed in that film.

I couldn't find any real bears for you darl, but I did find some inside my giant TV - bears playing in the snow. If the bears can ski so can you. Actually they were rather good, but they do have four paws. Canada awaits you!