Montreal, a postcard.

Mile End, Montreal, Quebec.

Hello from Montreal!

It’s garage sale season. Hand-written posters tacked to trees and taped to lampposts, everyone trying to flog off their unwanted goods on their neighbours, cleanse their soul with a spring clean, start the school year as they mean to continue. I love it. One man’s junk is another girl’s treasure. I remember the revelation from my clothes swap days, how the skins I was so happy to shed were born anew on my friends and vice versa. Not to mention eco-friendly anti-consumerist cost of living crisis eat your heart out. Remind me to organise a clothes swap when I get home. Where the hell was I? Oh yeah, in Montreal. I once found a stack of postcards for $3 in a garage sale here. Canadian dollars that is, even better. Maybe 100 postcards, unused, from all over the globe. The world’s largest pecan - a dolphin wearing sunglasses - someone’s peculiar collection. I had grand plans for this fine find: I would send one to everyone I knew; use them as invites to an album launch; leave them around the city, postcards to strangers. Grand plans, I tell you. They ended up as the front cover of our fridge. All of them, wall to wall. Recently our baby started pulling them off so I taped them down, full commitment, no going back. The fridge itself had a hard time in the recent heatwave. You could say it is now something between a fridge and an oven. “Please treat it gently”, said the note to our subletters when we left town last week. If it survives until we’re back it will be a minor miracle. If not, at least we can admire the postcards…

All this to say, consider this a virtual postcard from Montreal. Not in word count perhaps, but in sentiment. Wish you were here! Hope this finds you well! Thinking of you! I miss you! My Sunday Morning Substack proper will recommence Sept 18th with a musical commission of sorts. If you haven’t yet, now is the time to sign up to this weekly column, this multi-media pot-luck, this silver lining in the iCloud of your life. And if you each recruited one friend that would double my readership in one fell swoop (A-level maths!)

It’s nice to be almost back,

Lail

Our postcard-plastered fridge-oven.