Christmas Day

I went to the cinema to see Sweeney Todd tonight. Ooo, it was dark. I think the version we put on when I was in Primary 7 (I was Mrs Lovett) must have been Sweeney Todd Lite. Of course, we didn't have Tim Burton directing us. The film is beautifully done, but with quite a lot of throat-slitting, spurting blood, and nasty spasmodic death throes.

Earlier I went out on a very very long walk - somewhat longer than intended. First I went through McGill and up to the Mount Royal chateau again to look out at the view. It was sunny today, and there were lots of people out for Christmas Day walks. Not that walking was easy - with all that snow, then the pouring rain two days ago, and then the bitter cold since, all of the paths in the park are now paved with thick, hard ice.

I've often wondered since getting to America about the haste to clear snow from the sidewalks. In Colorado, at least, you're legally obliged to do it if you're a home or business owner. But with the kind of weather we have, if we have a heavy snowfall we can have days on end of the piled-up snow thawing in the daytime, leaking across the pavement, and freezing again at night, so that the apparently clear pavements become perilously slippy in unexpected places, and if you can find a place to walk where the snow was never cleared it's a relief. You know where you are when you're walking on snow, whereas on ice you often find that your legs aren't where you thought you'd left them.


I went on up past the Lac aux Castors (which turns out to be Beaver Lake, and nothing to do with it being on wheels), and into the Cimetiere de Notre-Dame-Des-Neiges. This is very large, and stretches out over a great expanse of the hill, with lots of little roads going here and there. I wandered lost in a forest of dead people for quite some time, before coming out on the other side of the hill somewhere near the Oratoire, in other words at the furthest possible corner from my B&B. So, I walked round the top side to see what was there, and then back down the edge. It was interesting to go from the very ugly Université de Montréal (the ugliness made more remarkable because of the prettiness of McGill on the other side of the park) and the ugly terraced blocks facing it, to the very upmarked neighbourhood of Outremont, and then to huge ugly apartment blocks again, all on one long road.