She died, she did; she died of a broken rib, she did...

I am not actually pushing up the daisies, I have not gone to meet my maker, and I have not run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. I am, in fact, very much alive. I have just been busy, that is all. I also did not have internet access, but that is not the point. BUSY, BUSY.

So as not to bore you all to death in one sitting, I am going to tell you about my summer in short and magical installments. Because if I were to show it to you all at once, the wonders of it might hurt your eyes. Like Neverland. But I haven't ever been there, so I don't really know.

HOWEVER, I have been to the land of the hamburger/onion fairies, a.k.a. French Canadia. In a car. It wasn't a very big car, but it was just big enough for two people to sleep in when the back seats were folded down and the front seats were pushed right forward. To which I must say, 'Hurrah!' AND we hung curtains in the windows so that the monsters and the creepy people couldn't see in.

And so I can honestly say that I am very well acquainted with Walmart, Montreal. Actually, the car park more than the actual shop. (If I were really Americany I would have said, 'parking lot,' and, 'store.' But I'm not.) It turns out that it is perfectly legal to park all night in a Walmart carpark. So why on earth would I want to pay for a hotel, when I could curl up in the back of a car in the middle of nowhere in the cold and wet?

Naively, I had imagined that a trip to Canada in the summer might possibly involve sunshine. This was not the case. At all. Instead it rained. And then it rained some more. And when we thought it couldn't rain anymore...it did.

We did not, in fact, do very much of note in Montreal, due to chronic dampness and the resulting trench foot. However, if you are ever there, and come across a shifty street/alleyway/quality restaurant, metro station or hotel/Montreal's red light district, you can be pretty sure that I was there first.