Hello everyone! Yes, many thanks to Debra for all her hard work, and I really hope your health is better! Hello, sparqui! and hello again to everyone else. It is bitterly, horribly cold here in Montréal right now.
It wasn't as cold yesterday, and a friend took me out for supper in Mile-End south of here. On the way, I dropped in at "PA Nature", the natural-foods grocery just opened by the venerable Greek supermarket, PA. Am enjoying a very good quality chicken leg with some German wine sauerkraut and green salad. A modicum of cheap white wine as well. Renzo, of course, got part of the chicken leg. I'd just roasted a few with no seasoning so he could share it. Yes, I'm spoiling him in his dotage, but he's always been a very polite cat, who doesn't bother me at the table.
Chatting with friends, especially progressive Jewish friends, about how to counter the band of thugs known as the Jewish Defence League, who are actually holding their local founding meeting at Ruby Foo's, of all places. (Antonia will get the rather quétaine cultural reference).
When I was a little girl, a very sophisticated aunt who was a nurse in the Canadian Armed Forces and who had travelled round the world - even to the Soviet Union, when most people simply couldn't do that - took me to either Ruby Foo's or Bill Wong's, don't remember which. One dressed up way back then for such an outing, and I'm sure I had a fancy dress (probably made by my mother) and my thick, curly hair up in plaits. The food, which would be considered "Western Chinese" nowadays, seemed the height of elegance in the postwar years.
We are also up against an extremely reactionary, hardcore austerity government here in Québec. They won a majority in part because many people wanted nothing to do (and rightly so) with the Parti Québécois' "Charter of Québec values". Québec solidaire won 1 more seat, the great feminist, lesbian and advocate for the downtrodden Manon Massé, but far from enough.
Along with the other people who had provided support to the Canadian boat to Gaza, writing press releases, translating, researching... I did the same this past summer in opposition to the assault against Gaza. The new security bill could make that into some kind of (peaceful, over-the-hill) "terrorism". All the while saying nothing about the JDL, who are a bunch of violent thugs who've made death threats against progressive Jewish friends of mine here and in France.
I'm huddling against the cold. I simply can't stand it anymore.
