I hate coming home after holidays. It makes you see just how depressing, repetitive, boring and just plain un-fun real life is, and exacerbates (“what does that mean?”) this odd feeling of dissatisfaction and impermanence that seems to be pervading my life of late.

So, yes. Anyway. Following on from the previous entry, I feel I need to clarify one or two things.

Skiing good, Snowboarding bad – Goddamnit, at the very least have separate pistes for them so that us real snow users can enjoy nice, groomed pistes which haven’t been smoothed off to ice (except where the snow has been pushed up into big mounds specifically designed to catapult you halfway across the mountain when you hit them) and without the danger of a boarder suddenly drifting nonchalantly across your path (it seems that, whilst skiers go down the hill, snowboarders seem quite content to spend their lives going across the way, which is quite annoying). And all of them have that stupid, surly, oh-so-cooler-than-thou attitude and hang out in annoying little cliques, speaking in some foreign language (what the hell does “gnarly” mean, anyway?) and basking in the mistaken belief that they are somehow better than skiers. Well, hey guys – you’re not. Get off the goddamn slopes; we were there first.

Canadian beer – there’s an advert on in Canada which goes something like the following:

“Why don’t I drink American beer? Well, why don’t I buy a Moroccan bobsleigh, or a pair of Jamaican snow-shoes?”

And they have a good point. A point which would be better if Canadian beer were anything worth writing home about as well, but a point nonetheless. Canadian beer is, at least, drinkable and moderately enjoyable with it (even if their dark beer is served at slightly below freezing so any flavour it has is masked by the cold anyway). I’d rather have a nice pint of Marston’s Pedigree, thanks.

Long journeys – Getting to Banff involved a flight (7 hours, 6 hours behind England) to Toronto (which I mistyped at least three times as Totoro), a flight from there to Calgary (4 hours, 2 hours behind Toronto), and a bus from there to Banff (1.5 horus, no hours behind Calgary, but the clocks went forwards an hour anyway, specifically to confuse foreigners who thought they’d got the hang of this timezones thing). The result was that, after leaving the UK at 3pm, we arrived at 1am local time, after travelling for about 20 hours. And they then gave us the wrong apartment, so we had to go and explain to reception that it wasn’t possible for four people to sleep in an apartment with one bedroom. That was fun, then.

Country music – Ok. This is the one I’m going to get most stick for. Let me first start by stating my position on a couple of things: Firstly, there is no such thing as an inherently bad style of music; country music is not, in itself, an inherently bad thing. Secondly, despite this, country music seems to consistently produce the worst artists and songs of practically any genre of music around today. Thirdly, it follows, therefore, that someone, somewhere out there must be capable of producing enjoyable country music.

It turns out that there are, and they’re two guys who do the entertainment for the Sundowner at Sunshine Village near Banff. Maybe it was the fact we’d been drinking (quite a bit of) beer at high altitude, maybe it was the sledging, maybe it was the food, maybe it was just the atmosphere, or maybe it was just the fact that they were actually really damned good musicians and didn’t take themselves so ridiculously seriously as most country singers, but it was a damned good evening.

(And for my next trick, I shall argue that Pete Waterman is one of the greatest* songwriters of our generation)

We found Kat! – Well, that’s not quite true. She (that is, Custard’s fiancee’s sister, who happened to be working in Banff at the time we were there) finally sent me a text message. Ten minutes before we were due to catch the bus back to Calgary for the flight home. This website might have been a useful thing to find before I went away, too. Bah.

Anyway, I’ve got to get a train back to Manchester today, and that’s another four and a half hours from here, so I’d best get myself off to the station.

Work tomorrow. Bah.

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