two hours later I and google have suddenly hit it off - password lost in some virtual sewer somewhere swirling about like an abandoned stick. No matter. What be time but the way we measure lives by, the way we measure patience by. I did not swear, careering around in cyberspace getting hopelessly lost. Now wham - we are re-united - my password and myself. Enuf. The present is rescued. I am alive on a Saturday night. I and the dog. I did not want to go to fireworks, bonfires, rage cages and waltzers, candy floss and fifteen year olds clutching onto their bottles of Wicked and their spangly belts, hair all straightened. I didn't want all that. Truth is I wanted to fill the house with the expanse of my self - after three weeks in Canada as one of a party of five - being the writer who did not write, now I realise much of this craft, this agony, this passion, has to do with being alone. And these summer nights are long. The words well up - the novel a pregnancy erupting, but of course so much else nudges in for seeing to first. The one thing - you know, the one bloody thing, is last in the queue, saying nothing, head bowed, don't notice me, I might rip the world open. As I remember reading on a toilet wall in them days when left wing-ed folks wrote on toilet walls - if women told the truth about their lives the world would split apart. Perhaps I was twenty or some such wide eyed scared one - those scrawled words impressed themselves upon me. Not many years later a drama teacher said of ancient Greece - and they would take your finger and press it upon a wall and everything you ever thought or did was there for ever. Impressed. Pressed. Words in print. Impression.

the saddest image of Canada - though it's hot, though there are cool breezes, there is some kind of cranky law to dry your washing inside (in a dryer) because it doesn't look good outside. Oh ma gawd - where did we take a huge wrong turn to think sheets billowing in the wind looked awful? But let's not end on a moan. Here world is Niagara Falls - that close, that mighty, cleaving two nations and knowing nothing of either.