Good Morning Sunshine

New Year's Day in Hamilton, Ontario shook me gently awake this morning with a glimmer and sparkle of a beautiful winter sun peeking through the roman blinds of my mother-in-law's guest bedroom. Even the latent hangover couldn't dull the freshness of a bright ball of fire in an ice blue sky. It made up for the hour's walk home in minus 20 the night before. I had been expecting this - if you think the Brits can talk weather - a Canadian's knowledge and understanding of weather systems makes a Englishman's polite musings sound like the ramblings of a mad old aunt. Everyone is a weatherman here and they need to be. If you leave your house without checking what the weather might be doing today, well put it this way, it's not like leaving your umbrella in a pub and getting a bit wet on the way home. Here that kind of oversight could kill you. I repeat MINUS 20 degrees below freezing.

Anyway, taxis being as easy to find in the early hours of New Year's Day as Bin Laden, I had come prepared with balaclava, woolly hat, ski gloves, Uggs and a second pair of trousers. After a night of mixing spirits, wine, beer and champagne whilst cutting a vigorous rug to live trance electronica in heels, walking home was literally the last thing I wanted to do but call me Yukon Cornelius, at least I wasn't cold. The exercise didn't go amiss either.

Old enough to care less about aesthetics than surviving the trek home, I was utterly astonished at the youthful nihilism encountered last night. Did I say it was minus 20 degrees below freezing? Well it was minus 20 degrees below freezing and all about me young guns stood around in bare legs and thin fashions seemingly unaffected - though the angry red rawness of their skins told another story. I did worry that a couple of them were simply frozen solid in mid stride rather than unaffected by the brutal temperatures. I didn't know whether to praise or pity them. Thank god for the numbing effects of alcohol. I believe it may have been the only thing keeping them alive last night.

I saw in the New Year with the husband, the old friend, the sister-in-law and her lover at a kooky bar in Downtown Hamilton. Three live drum and bass bands later, a bunch of textbook lesbians and creative fashions on the dancefloor made for a truly entertaining evening; a people watcher's paradise. Fun and frivolous.

After a year of loss and upheaval and looking at the year of economic depression that lies ahead it's more important than ever to appreciate the fact that the best things in life really really really are free. Vaya con dios amigos.