What I've been up to

Left work at lunchtime on the 23rd December, taxi and two trains to Cambridge, and saw Return of the King with parents and brothers. Wow.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day proceeded as family Christmases do; James got me The Light Ages by Ian Macleod, The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem and a nineteenth-century book by a noted French gourmand. Ben gave me the DVDs for the first season of Spooks, Mum and Dad the extended-edition Two Towers, some walking maps for when the weather improves, and a subscription to the Economist.

Up at 5am on Boxing Day, a lift by Dad to the bus stop, a three-hour bus ride to Heathrow. Four hours in a Heathrow waiting hall, in which I committed hopeless extravagence and bought a Palm Tungsten T3 handheld. It's a lovely toy, it'll be spectacular once I've figured out how to upload things to it. It has Bluetooth; next drain on my widget budget will be a phone that has Bluetooth too, and then at last I'll have Google in my pocket. Finished reading the first two volumes of Book of the New Sun.

Ten hours to Chicago; Glory Season by David Brin, which is a type specimen of the warning signs that surround a visit by the Brain Eater, Tomb Raider 2, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and half of Pirates of the Carribean on the seat-back screen. Five hours in Chicago, two hours to Montreal, collected by rysmiel and taxied to their home. I hope my future contains no Boxing Days with any more travel; it can't really, since in Montreal's time-zone I was travelling from one midnight until the next.

27th began with a trip to the local bakery, raisin brioche and chocolate brioche and French loaves, and realising that Montreal was a large city and spoke something quite a way from Parisian French - the baker had no English and great trouble with my French. I hadn't expected Montreal's signage to be so completely French, but I cope.

Afternoon trip to the Biosphere, a hundred-metre geodesic sphere built for Expo 67 containing an exhibition about water, including a "spiritual aspects of water" hall which sounded my nearly-atrophied 'rank Papacy' alarm nearly as strongly as Lourdes had. Rather fraught evening in a Russian restaurant - "let's split up and meet later" handles unforeseenly late trains gracefully only if all parties have cellphones, and that kind of worry spoils even really nice beef stroganoff for me. Nonetheless, redbird appeared only a couple of hours late.

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This is really a holiday consisting of interesting conversations, punctuated by the occasional museum, multi-player games in the evenings, visits to excellent food markets, and many magnificant meals.

Particularly to praise was bluejo's glorious roast goose on New Year's Eve, which turned into a superb goose pie on New Year's Day, and the selection of spectacular meats and cheeses each breakfast (the best Roquefort I've ever tasted, and rilettes de canard which taste like spreadable Peking Duck).

In sites visited, the Biodome, a walk-through zoo with an impressive pool containing six-foot sturgeons and a flock of eider duck (eider à duvet in French), and some porcupines that looked nothing like my preconceptions.

In games, Res Publica (basically two-phase Happy Families played with Huns/Germans/Persians/Greeks/Romans in phase one and Art/Trade/Technology/Religion/Literature in phase two) appealed, also Credo (a trading game whose score is in Flock size, whose action cards are miracles of the early Church, and whose end result is a Creed - ours began "I believe in many gods, amongst whom is Mithras, the Unconquered Sun ...").

A great Japanese restaurant meal, six courses including the previously-believed-impossible Almost Too Much Sushi, for £20, on Friday night merely added extra icing to the cake.

A fantastic museum

I've now been in Montreal for a bit over a week; today I went with zorinth and bluejo to take redbird to the station for her return to NYC, and then went with zorinth to the McCord Museum of Canadian History (very graphic-heavy website; don't bother on dial-up).

This is a medium-sized museum near McGill university; three floors, a couple of exhibitions per floor. One about Scottish settlement in Quebec and Nova Scotia, for an audience who hadn't been within three thousand miles of Scotland. One of heating and snow-clearing technology - gorgeous fur mittens warm even to look at. One of ways Montrealois had found to have fun, with lovely pictures of the full-size turreted ice palaces that were built biannually in the 1880s, and a cool table-ice-hockey machine where the players moved and spun as you pulled and rotated the control rods - would that the puck dispenser had not been removed, though the machine would doubtless no longer be intact in that case.

An intriguing collection pairing 1890s photos of Montreal with ones taking in as-close-to-possible the same position and lighting in 1999 - the churches and the fancier municipal buildings stay the same, all else changes, the river narrows substantially thanks to landfill, the great multi-masted sailing ships are gone.

And an utterly superb exhibition of Canadian paintings from the two World Wars.

The art I'd associate with the first world war is poetry; I may have seen British paintings as asides in the Imperial War Museum, this is the first time I recall seeing masses of such things gathered together. There's a great mixture of styles, from van-Gogh-like seascapes in thickly-applied oils to art of a kind I'd call "inter-war German" with smooth airbrushed gradients; chiaroscuros trying to show the effect of the star-shells illuminating an artillery battle at sea; nearly-Socialist-Realist massively-muscled artillerists; portraits; pale lifeboats of pale men on a pale sea; and an incredibly effective painting of D-day (it looked like Saving Private Ryan because Saving Private Ryan looked like it ...) whose artist had made little sketches in glycerine-enhanced watercolours as his squadron stormed the beach.

Absolutely marvellous.