This ain't a song for the broken-hearted.

We were on the highway from Quebec City to Ottawa. We'd been driving for hours and for much of the way we'd been in the middle of a blizzard which had whited out everything except the power poles. Black ice had made the Cherokee rental car slide badly but Alastair with his Indiana Jones hat on had wrestled it back each time, and Caroline had kept things calm with that gentle Canadian way she talks about things, and every now and then handed out homemade cookies. Gaby and Issy screamed at the top of their lungs when the car aquaplaned and slept through the rest of it, Nicky snapped away with Caroline's camera (odd shots of dilated nostrils and the whites of eyes), and I just did a lot of talking, I guess, and filming snow-ploughs and glimpses of men fishing through the ice.

After four hours or so, we were nearly on the home stretch - tired, cramped, bored. I slid an unknown CD into the slot and pressed play.... and up it came: the rough-edged listen-to-me sound of Bon Jovi, and a song that is more than a song it's an anthem about being well and truly alive despite life's vicissitudes. And we all sang along, or rather shouted, despite the ice and the under-pressurised wheels of the car, despite the bitter cold, despite the distance travelled. And we played it over and over and over until our voices were hoarse, too, and - adapting a line from Elizabeth Bishop - victory filled up that rented car.

So often we look back and see things differently given what has happened in the meantime. But how can that be? Each one of us experienced the drive from Quebec City differently, there's no doubt, but we all felt - I think - that we were on a mission, brought together because some of us were family and the rest of us cared enough. When Bon Jovi played in the car that day, the last vestiges of whatever it was that separated us were forced out of the window and we became something overlapping and noisy: that open highway, Bon Jovi talks about. We can't ever go back to the trip in mid January 2009 with the blizzard and It's my Life blaring, but each time I play the song, I am inside the car again, feeling the marvellous thing we became; and it seems to me that the experience is independent of us all, and of all we've done since and will continue to do. Complete and unassailable. Alastair, Caroline, Gaby, Issy, Nicky, me and Bon Jovi.

I dedicate the song to Alastair and Caroline for all those reasons.

The Wonder of Alice

I am still in Canada - until tomorrow. And I am still reading the inimitable Canadian author Alice Munro who recently hung up her skates because she'd apparently said all she had to say. Here's a slice from her short story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage which I bought the other day in an Ottawa bookstore:

'I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida - not of that in particular - but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories, The cries of the crowd came to me like heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.

This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.' Family Furnishings

In the story Family Furnishings, Munro has a character who comes to the point where she knows she wants to write. The description above is what she feels writing is, and being a writer is. It could be my thoughts on the matter.

This is the first time I've read Munro's work in Canada. Suddenly, stories which mention Ottawa or Quebec or the thawing of the snow or a field of corn resonate differently, feel different. Even the voices I'm reading sound different here.

One day they were out in the fields of stubble playing with my father's dog whose name was Mack. That day the sun shone, but did not melt the ice in the furrows. They stomped on the ice and enjoyed the crackle underfoot. Family Furnishings

There was no fence. The cornfield just petered out into the yard. She walked straight ahead into it, onto the narrow path her arms like streamers of oilcloth. She had to remove her hat so they would not knock it off. Each stalk had its cob, like a baby in a shroud. There was a strong, almost sickening smell of vegetable growth, of green starch and hot sap. Floating Bridge

What hasn't changed is the way Munro is able to write the fine filigrees of feeling, and the equally fine shifts in those feelings. The way she makes a feeling an event, an event a place, a place a person, a person a feeling, and on it goes.

It seemed to her this was the first time ever that she had participated in a kiss that was an event in itself. The whole story, all by itself. A tender prologue, an efficient pressure, a wholehearted probing and receiving , a lingering thanks, and a drawing away satisfied. Floating Bridge

Munro's good on kisses. She had a great kiss in her collection Runaway that helped me write a kiss in The Blue. She also knows just when to open something out, to let it breathe and gain weight, and be suddenly bigger than, weightier than the sum of its parts.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given. Floating Bridge

And all this because Munro must listen to those distant sounds of 'inhuman assent and lamentation', really listen, and then suddenly - like a insect-eating bird - grab them from the air. Swallow that humming. Make it into words.

One guesses that for the character of the writer in Family Furnishings she listened to a sound already swallowed.

And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself...

To finish with, here are some photographs from the Rideau Canal today in Ottawa. Minus 34 degrees C with the wind chill and yet there were so many people skating on the ice, all ages and backgrounds (it's free), wrapped up tight, together.

There isn't much noise except the scratch of the skates, the odd snatch of conversation in English and French. But there is that wave of sound Munro talks about - the sound humanity makes at its best one cold Saturday out on a canal.

Holding its own in Canada

I mentioned in my last post that I saw Rachael King's novel The Sound of Butterflies on the shelves at the huge Chapters Bookshop in Ottawa, Ontario. And that I felt proud. Well here it is, holding its own. A lovely sheen to this cover.

Land of the Giants

It's the middle of the night in Ottawa and we're too far from Washington to hear the inauguration celebrations. Canadians I know seem to have watched the historic ceremony at work and school and home. They're all asleep now (the ones I know.)

There's not much to see outside but I can still make out the dips in the snow on the balcony railing where a squirrel shimmied along it two days ago. That's the thing about snow, all sorts of things are frozen for weeks: dog pee, squirrel prints, rubbish. You leave water and cameras in the car, they freeze too.
The snow blankets and muffles as you'd expect. It wraps up sound and tucks it down for winter.

We are in a giant fairy tale. Really. Giant. Eggs come in one and a half dozens. I saw a blue jay today, it's so much bigger than I thought a blue jay would be. There was what looked like a child's fort in the trees and my nephew said it was an abandoned crows nest.

Squirrels are darker and more menacing when hopping through snow. When you run into a baby bear, look for the mother, you might need to start running again.

Snowflakes on your eyelids are enchanting. In your eye they hurt.

Cafe au lait and brioche for breakfast in a patisserie. If we'd only come for that it would have been enough.

Today's winter sports and their aftermath: my niece was on a ski-trip but a suspected broken leg from a fall saw her stretchered off the mountain (luckily it's just a double sprain), my brother-in-law was on an annual ski trip up Mont Tremblant and lost his car keys, my nephew skated on the school rink without mishap ( we have pools, they have rinks.)

We go ice skating on the canal on Thursday. I can't ice skate.

I am reading Alice Munro's stories after buying a lovely new Penguin (Canada) copy of Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage at Chapters Bookstore in Ottawa.

I found Rachael King's The Sound of Butterflies there too and felt very proud.

After Munro, I need to finish Auster's The Brooklyn Follies. Then I think I'll start Obama's Audacity of Hope. The book is in my suitcase. It begins: 'On most days, I enter the Capitol through the basement...'

Hallelujah.

O Canada

Bienvenue a Quebec City. On the way there by car from Ottawa, the traffic signs said: 'froid intense' and the road was 'glissant'. It was in the minus 30s and a blizzard hit us on the way home, but our first day shone brilliantly in this 400-year-old fortified city on the narrowest part of the St Laurence River.

Ah yes, books. A whole bookstore full of French books including Quebecois Literature. I was looking for a novel by a former sister-in-law and another by a nephew. Neither were there. Meanwhile, I've started on Carol Shields' novel Unless. Good to read a Canadian.

Back to Ottawa.We've been very domestic and 'family' here since arriving with the only outing a spot of shopping at the local mall. We hit the city centre tomorrow. Maybe try some ice skating on the canal or a snowball fight?
A demain.