Erm ... Excuse Me ...

I seem to have been neglecting my blog this week ... that's because I have been in Canada.

Well, it feels as if I was in Canada. I have been hacking away at a translation of a book about Canada and I have to admit it's the first time in ages that I have had a long translation to do and not ended up hating everything to do with the subject ...

One bit tickled me in particular ...

The Quebec people have been talking about separatism for ages and in the 1990s there was a referendum about breaking away from the Canadian Federation ... so lots of discussions ... the French-Canadians saying, "we were here before the British, we explored the country, reclaimed the land, founded settlements ..." - je me souviens was the motto ...

But then all of a sudden, a voice piped up in the background ... one of the First Nations people, "...erm ... excuse me ..." I imagine him saying in a sort of Mr Bean voice, "... but we actually never surrendered our rights to the region ..." - it seems the First Nation natives still have the rights to 80% of the region, including all the natural resources, and they were now threatening to leave Quebec, if Quebec should leave the Canadian Federation ..!

Whoops ...