I am feeling really cast down about Brexit, really genuinely sad. Not that I have much affection for the country, but the dream of integration, open borders, cooperation, is one that I can care for. The other country which I care far more for, Pakistan, stabs me in the heart so often that I can hardly bear to read the news at all, and the only self-defence seems to be to force myself to stop caring, to distance myself from it.
This morning we went for lunch at an izakaya which the GF really liked but I have to say I wasn’t very keen on. It was a nice little place, like all the Japanese places with too little space and menu items scribbled on scraps of paper on the wall, but I found the food unimpressive, dominated by sharp and sweet flavours and with little interest otherwise. Afterwards, though, I bought myself a new bag to replace the rather expensive one that I’d bought in London which had been rather more battered by travel than its price warranted, got mould in Costa Rica, and finally its zip fell off. So I was ashamed to carry it at all. The new bag is a canvas crossbody, a bit bigger than the last one, so it can hold my iPad in a pinch, and from quite a good brand so it’s quite expensve. But canvas bags seem to last better than other non-leather ones (not that I mind leather other than pigskin, but I want lightweight) and hopefully a good make will mean it’s reasonably long-lasting.
I have accepted, as I near 40, that I will never have a grown-up taste in handbags. My mother would be appalled at this bag, and generally in Pakistan the preferred handbags are by global designers: Chanel, Hermes, etc. But I’ve never really understood those bags, not at all and felt vaguely inadequate about it. Now, I think I’ve accepted it. Not chic, perhaps, but a cross-body canvas bag can be stylish at least.
After my bag we strolled past the house where I lived in Montreal over a decade ago. The area immediately around it was much the same, but a wider concentric circle was very much changed, with the old sex shops replaced by shops and restaurants catering to a more respectable clientele. A few places were the same, the old Indian restaurant where I was taken by one of the officers of the programme I was in and, over a very bad meal, told his expectations from me as a woman from the Islamic world (this was, of course, a bad way to start and guaranteed that I would actively try not meet those expectations — unsurprisingly, this lecture was not given to the Canadian or the Dane in the programme, only those from developing countries).
It was strange to see the house where I lived for nearly a year. Strange also to think back to what a terrible programme it was in those days, though I believe it’s much improved now, with years of experience and a change in governance. I peeped into the window to see the ornate wood panelled room that the fellows were not allowed to enter, looked up at the front door we were not allowed to use, and peered into the show kitchen which we all shared and which was extremely nice, but which was designed as a weird laboratory of international cooperation in which we were the lab rats. A very peculiar year, but an important one for me, a year of reinvention.
We walked over Mont Royal, through its golden trees and over to the Plateau side where we stopped for a macha latte at a newly-opened tea shop the GF had stumbled across, run by a tea expert. The tea was very good and the owner extremely nice, so I wish him very well indeed — it’s called the un-googleable @Matcha, doesn’t seem to have a website, and is on Rue Rachel, near the intersection with Avenue Laval.