A Bump in the Road

Yes, this missive is a wee bit late, but bear with me.

I am now back in the Manor in Toronto, after putting my daughter Isolde back on the straight and narrow. Or so one hopes. I had stopped off in Ottawa briefly, to give the good Stephen Harper a pat on the back for not attending that insane human rights conference in Switzerland, led by those paragons of personal liberty, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and a host of African countries where any notion of liberty was really licence -- in this case, licence to loot the country and give the proceeds to selected cronies and backers. I had a good word for Ignatieff as well, commending him for similar action. I think he used the phrase "an assemblage of clowns", although there really is nothing funny about the robbery, rape and murder sanctioned by these staunch defenders of human rights. It really is a fallen universe.

Now for something completely different. I had constructed a shooting range in the basement of the Manor, in order to keep my skill up to speed, given my occasional assignments where that skill is required.

An aside: Apparently word of this activity had somehow reached the Mayor, who was appalled, and he and select members of his Star Chamber began to proceed to enforce a gun ban. Now I hasten to mention that all my weapons are registered, and registered to a far greater authority than Canada's silly gun registry, aimed primarily at farmers and gun club members. The guns that should be banned, of course, are revolvers and assault rifles. These are the weapons of choice favoured by criminals, but amazingly these stalwarts do not exactly flock to the registration bureau. In any event, a colleague in CSIS, code name Barry, and last seen on a rooftop in Washington, had a word in the Mayor's tinted ear, and his desire to continue with the exercise came to a sudden and abrupt halt.

But back to the shooting range. I had aimed my Erma rifle at a target some distance away, the target being the profile of that illiterate leader of the Taliban, the awful Mullah Omar. (On some glorious day, In'shallah, I will have the bugger actually in my sights). I fired several times, then checked for accuracy. Uh oh. In each case my shot was a quarter inch from where it should have been, smack in Omar's forehead.

I rang for my ex-Mossad butler, Irving, and repeated the exercise, having with Irving carefully checked rifle bore, scope optics and calibration. Same result.

"Could be your eyes, Simone," said Irving.

"Nonsense. I can see you perfectly. And the target."

"Wouldn't hurt to check."

Now one of the perks of being in The Trade (God knows there are not many) is access to first rate health care. This is not done out of compassion or a keen sense of social obligation, but rather has to do with keeping your assets in fighting trim. So a medical appointment was made, and shortly after that, the results were in. Incipient cataracts.

Cataracts! Things that happen in your seventies, not your mid-forties. Still, could have been worse, and the road stretches a good distance yet, although the novelist Phillip Roth's words suddenly came to mind: "Old age isn't a battle, it's a massacre."

A day and an operation later both eyes were dealt with, and for the next little while, things were somewhat blurry. Hence is was simply not possible to write. Things are, however, back to normal now, and the bullets went exactly where I wanted them to. Now I must fly. The Compte de Rienville is in town, and coming for dinner. And it has been way, way too long since we -- well, never mind about that.