… can you get?
There I was with an appointment to go out for an evening meal with Josée and we arranged that she would telephone me when she finished work and came outside.
And so she did. She telephoned me at 16:30 and 16:30, sent me a couple of texts, a message or two on my social media page, and then became fed up and went home.
And where was I when all of this was going on?
In case you haven’t guessed, I was flat out on my bed, well away with the fairies and totally inconscient of anything that was going on. And I must have been too, to have slept through the cacophony that was going on.
I blame the bus myself.
I can’t sleep on buses (except whrnI’m driving them). At best, I just fitfully doze and let every bump shake me awake.
But that doesn’t apply to everyone. As we pulled into Montreal a girl suddenly stood bolt upright.
“Is this Montreal?” she asked, in a panic
“Yes it is” replied the driver.
“What happened to Sainte-Foy?”
“We stopped there and everyone there got off”
“But I should have got off” she wailed.
“Not much I can do about that” said the driver. “I can’t go around waking everyone up to see if it’s their stop”.
The bus was quite busy too. Everyone going back after Thanksgiving with the family.
We were 10 minutes late getting into the Bus Station. 06:10. Far too early to go to my hotel and so I sat around with a coffee and did some work.
And if you think that our family tree is complicated, you ain’t heard nuffink yet.
Apparently my mother any my aunt were daughters of their mother (my grandmother Ivy)’s SECOND marriage. That’s a new one on me. Ivy had apparently been married before to someone called Cyril Ralphrul Hogg who had been her singing tutor.
He was apparently quite famous and had studied at the Conservatory in Vienna.
They married in July 1918 but he was swept away in the Spanish Influenza outbreak of December 1918.
Now that took me by surprise.
At 09:00 I took my stuff round the corner to the hotel and left it there. Of course my room wasn’t ready so I went round the corner to Tim Hortons for breakfast.
From there I decided to go down to the docks to see what was happening.
My route took me close to the Gare Viger, which, asregular readers of this rubbish will recall, is my favourite building in the whole of the city.
We haven’t seen it from this angle before though. It looks quite eerie with the morning sun reflecting off the autumn leaves of the trees.
Our walk continues round to the docks to see who is there.
The Winnipeg is still there of course, but we also have the Barnacle. She’s a bulk carrier of 30,000 tonnes and is on her way to Ghent in Belgium from Hamilton in Ontario.
her cargo is “Agricultural Products” – by which, presumably, they may well mean “wheat”. Montreal is one of the world’s biggest ports for the handling of wheat.
. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of activity around the rest of the commercial part do I wander off down to the old port.
Not too much going on around here either but at least there’s a good view of the city from here. It’s looking quite splendid in the early morning autumn sunlight.
And you can see the twin towers of the cathedral right in the centre of the image.
However, at the cruise terminal we have the Artania of 44,000 tonnes. Operatedby a German cruise company, she set out from Hamburg on 22nd September.
But don’t let appearances fool you.
Despite having just crossed the Atlantic with a load of passengers, had she been simply going back and forth across the English Channel she would have been scrapped long ago because she is actually 33 years old
She was built in 1984 and sailed for many years as the P&O liner Royal Princess.
I’d caught a glimpse of a container ship down in the Oceanex container terminal so, with nothing better to do, I headed that way.
However, my perambulations were interrupted by this most bizarre spectacle of a woman taking several dogs for a job.
You might think that it’s hilarious but the poor little dog being dragged behind, clearly unable to keep up wasn’t enjoying it one little bit every time their leader broke into a run.
So here in the Oceanex terminal s the Oceanex Avalon.
She’s a small container ship of 14500 tonnes and seems to work a shuttle between St Johns in Newfoundland, Saint John in New Brunswick and here.
I imagine that rather than half-unload a huge container ship at Saint John and have her shuttling around, they will completely unload her for a faster turnaround and have the Oceanex Avalon doing the distribution.
I had a wander around the port to see if there was a better view, but not today.
On the way back I walked down alongside the Lachine Canal and today for some reason you could clearly see where the former dry docks used to be.
I can’t think why it was never so noticeable as this before.
But like most canal-side enterprises they have long-gone. Montreal has lost a lot of its importance since it started on this monolingual anti-English crusade.
But this was interesting to stand and watch.
We’ve seen … “on several occasions” – ed … the shambolic nature of much of the city’s concrete infrastructure as it weathers and disintegrates.
These men were up on a sky jack tapping the concrete supports of the flyover with a hammer to see whether the concrete was still sound, or whether it was being eroded away from within.
One thing that I haven’t yet done – and I can’t think why- is to go to visit the site of “Ville-Marie”.
That was the original name of Montreal, but it’s more properly applied to the site where the first European colonists installed their settlement
As far as it’s possible to tell these things, that column just there marks the centre of the original settlement. We can’t go to visit it for a closer look unfortunately.
That’s because the Place d’Youville, site of St Anne’s Market, is currently undergoing archaeological excavation and everywhere is fenced off.
This is a historically important site because St Anne’s Market became home of the Canadian Parliament in 1844, moving here from Kingston in Ontario.
That was a controversial move and in 1849 during a debate to consider the losses that had been incurred by the population during the rebellion of 1837-38, a mob stormed the building and burnt it to the ground.
From here I went for a butty and then back to the hotel to sign in for my room, followed by all the nonsense that I mentioned earlier.
Later, I went for a walk and something to eat at the little Lebanese restaurant at Sherbrooke. And here, I watched a television debate that rather amused me. Should the captain of the “Montreal Impact” football team be a French-speaker?
You can tell what kind of society you are dealing with in Quebec when a person’s language ability is considered to be more important than his professional qualifications.
