The Observer has brought out a list of the 100 Greatest Novels of all time. Oh, how the Brits love their lists: the queue in written form.

Canadians, too, love lists and literary awards. They stage literary awards every week, like school plays. It’s what people who don’t care for hockey do for fun here. They also fret recreationally about their place in world literature, at least on the CBC, which was rocked by the discovery that not a single Canadian made the Observer list. (“But they did say that Robertson Davies was almost included…”) Michael Enright—a wonderful interviewer—devoted an hour-long panel discussion to the book that topped the charts, Don Quijote.

   “But would you say it’s the best novel of all time?” he asked a guest anxiously. Since she has just finished a newly-published translation, naturally she said yes.

The CBC, still tugging the forelock to the British Lit’ry establishment, apparently didn’t notice that the list was chronological. Even the Observer at its most Nick Hornbyish doesn’t presume to rank a hundred books by quality.

I’m dorky enough to count the number of books on the list that I’d read. 49 out a hundred. This is because it’s exactly the kind of list that English departments in Britain and Ireland taught as the canon in the last twenty years, topped up by the middlebrow Picador paperbacks we stack on our bedside tables when we escape with our BAs. The kind of books that the kind of people who read and write for the Observer would like to have read, and occasionally may actually have ploughed through. It doesn’t claim to be much more, and there’s no harm in that.

I wouldn’t stick to novels if I edited a list like this. I’m not a genre racist; I’d throw architecture in there, and memoir, and essays, and travel writing, and ecology and what have you. I’d use Christopher Alexander’s criterion for artistic beauty: does it make you feel more alive? It would be idiosyncratic and joyously unscientific. I’d proclaim solemn Dervala Awards, and vain idiots like me would vy for them.

My own novel-reading has fallen off a lot in the last two years. I used to be a publisher’s dream, regularly harvesting armfuls of paperbacks from the “What’s New” tables inside the bookshop doors. (Hardbacks always strike me as being for people who like the idea of reading.) I was almost entirely driven by cover design, an underrated art form. These days I’m too skint for new books, and I rely on borrowed or second-hand—which I still pick up by the armful, though I feel guilty about the poor unpaid authors. I’ve been trying new things this past while—travelling, digging wells—and I prepare the only way I know how, gobbling books whole. Novels now seem to me as frivolous a past-time as they did to Mr. Casubon in Middlemarch, though I lack his discipline in resisting the odd fictional treat. But I mostly stick to what time has edited. Life is too short to waste on the v. hot, darling.

Every day Tim calls the Home Depot to ask if his well-drilling order has come in. He dug an exploratory hole outside the washhouse ten days ago, but he needs a sandpoint to finish it off. In the meantime, he rescues the leopard frogs that fall in the hole, carries them lovingly into the cabin and places on the sofa to warm up. I sit beside them, distracted from my typing by the slow pulsing under their skin, which speeds up as they get warm. Yesterday a large fellow sat quietly for five minutes, then recovered himself suddenly and leaped right over my keyboard, over the arm of the couch, and down onto the floor with a splat. I chased him ineptly across the cabin, terrified he would leap onto the woodstove.
   “What do they think about?” I ask Tim, “Do you think they say, ‘What’s going on? This is really fucked-up grass’?”
   “I think it’s more a stimulus-response thing,” he says, “It’s warm. Bask. It’s moving. Chase and eat.” Tim is disappointingly immune to Disneyfication.

The well has not progressed, and the water supply is still a pump sucking water from the river through a length of black pipe. Or was, I should say. It dropped to minus ten celsius last night. Tim put a heater in the wash house and let the taps run, but all was solid as a popsicle this morning. Just this morning I’d been writing about a shambolic hike I did in Laos exactly this time last year. I remember noting the picturesque poverty as they taught me to wash myself and my clothes in the mighty Mekong. Now I think, lucky buggers didn’t have to do it in Canada in November.

But it’s no great tragedy. We “borrow” drinking water from an outdoor tap at the Fitzroy Harbour school anyway. We’ll bring up buckets to heat on the stove for dishes. As for personal dirt, it’ll freeze on my skin and chip off nicely. I only have to manage until Tuesday, when I hop the Greyhound to New York and temporarily resume my glamourpuss life, complete with glamorous indoor plumbing.

Note to self: no snogging lampposts.

A good friend of mine once worked as a music PR taking bands around Asia. She was really an all-purpose babysitter, as she describes it, guarding their passports and stocking their hotel rooms with whatever it took to for-God’s-sake keep them inside. Seoul wasn’t ready for New Kids on the Loose with no ID and no idea where they were.

We pumped her for Spinal Tap, but it was her Bryan Adams account that made us feel cheerful about our boring New York lives. The pockmarked (but compensatingly well-hung, according to the dreadful Popbitch newsletter) Canadian really was as antiseptic as his songs. In Hong Kong, Bryan called her up from his hotel room. He’d heard that fax machines were a really good deal here. He’d like to go and look at fax machines.
   “Fax machines,” we said, universally disappointed unless he was going to throw them out the window.
   “Well, they were pretty expensive back then,” she said loyally.

The PR’s rule no. 1: keep them in the hotel room, even the vegans. She begged him to stay put, then spent the afternoon rounding up salesmen to come to his room with a parade of the latest models. Fax machine models.

Then Bryan realised the buttons weren’t in English, and dropped the idea.

I feel much better now knowing that he shagged Diana, at least. Especially since his photo of the Queen is on the new Canadian stamps.

My friends Maurice and Hugh used to pretend to be the Queen on Mastermind whenever they got drunk. Mastermind was a high-brow BBC quiz show inspired by the by the creator’s experience of being interrogated by the Germans during the Second World War.

Hugh would do the ominous theme music, and we pictured the lights coming up on a small figure in that scary black chair. Maurice would play Magnus Magnusson, the stern interrogator host.

   “Last name?”
   “Kwheen,” Hugh would reply in a high-pitched, imperious voice.
   “First name?”
   “The.”

For some reason this was always hilarious.

Peed in the snow today. The thrills of log cabin life are piling up.

Adding Stadium Pal to my wishlist.

Chicness is my weakness, as the great Tori Spelling says. First thing I’m going to do when I get to New York is reclaim my bike. Then I’m going to pedal out to Brooklyn and beg Nina, my beloved Lithuanian hairdresser, to fix me.

I’ve had a year and a half of two-dollar Third World haircuts. I’ve hacked at it recreationally with a blunt nail-scissors. There were several dodgy dye-jobs (“You don’t have semi-permanente, señorita? Oh, yeah, permanente, whatever.”).

And now the final indignity: a Canadian haircut. An Ottawa haircut, like Jean Chrétien. It was a reckless economy measure before New York embezzles my pension, and though my sister swore that Pierre had Toni & Guy training, the bowlcut he perpetrated lacks the je ne sais rien of my Cambodian ‘do.

I look like the lovechild of Wayne Gretzky and Rosie O’Donnell. Fecking Canadians.

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is Caitríona’s subject line. She’s not given to spamlike capitals and exclamation points, but the article I sent her calls for it.

When we were bright young things of 22, I spent a summer with her in Boston. We each worked two jobs waiting tables, and at home we were baited by her roommate, Tom. Tom was 28, a hot-stuff local rock god, and he was sure his apartment was fast turning into Ellis Island. We would annoy him by blasting the Fine Young Cannibals on his stereo whenever we got home. He would bug us by shouting about damn Irish kids and our taste for The Smiths.

Enter…I’ll call him Eugene. Eugene showed up in the Black Crow Café one day when Caitríona was on the morning shift. He was tapping on a laptop and made some complicated request for something low-fat with no sugar and no salt. We were all out of egg-whites, but she found him some olive bread that was acceptable. Because Cait was the sweetest (and best-tipped) waitress in Boston, they got chatting. She told me all about the writer guy when she got home.

The next day he was there again. And the next day. He lived several hours drive away, but the martial arts studio where he took classes was nearby. He was taken by the double-act of Irish girls, and we played up, of course, like Shirley Temples.

He started to invite us out after our shift. We agreed. We didn’t know much about American men, and Eugene was strange enough to interest us. And since he was ancient, he was no threat. He told us about appearing on a daytime talkshow where his ex-wife berated him for being insensitive to her recovered memories of childhood abuse, which she couldn’t actually remember yet. He told us about his ex-girlfriend, the Eastern European refugee he dated for two years and escorted to her high-school prom. Shortly afterwards, she dumped him: graduation. Cait and I looked at each other uneasily. A very mature sixteen? We didn’t know the term “oversharing” then.

He went on and on about his age, how he didn’t feel 41, how he was fit and vibrant and had nothing in common with people his own age. How younger women were just so much more life-affirming. We laughed again. American men were bizarre, we concluded. We put up with him for in-joke material, making brattish cracks in Irish about the probability that he had red pubic hair to match his ginger thatch. Meanwhile, Eugene talked about “yoomer”, which he demonstrated by telling us jokebook jokes. Women love jokes, right?

American self-invention has always fascinated us both. Robert Redford makes movies about the American natural, but Eugene was his own Dr. Frankenstein. You could almost see the bolts in his neck. In a strange way we were fond of him, though we couldn’t work out why he kept tagging along. (That seems clearer in retrospect).

He would deliver long lectures on self-realization, on how he got up at six am every morning and visualized the ten things he most wanted to succeed at. We nodded intently. I’d never met anyone who got up at six o’clock before. He talked earnestly about his many unrelated book projects: on reengineering the corporation, on angel magic, on computer zen, on motivational speaking. His hero was Michael Crichton. He had firewalked at a Tony Robbins seminar, and now he was going to get rich writing books. We thought he was cracked, lu-la, but we also wanted to learn about this relentless, po-faced positivity.

Young Irish waitresses attract their own weirdo following in a place like Boston, and Tom made a Wall of Shame on the fridge for our victims and persecutors. My own favourite was Bobo the Clown, who was eventually banned for repeatedly rushing into our restaurant—in costume—and pressing pictures of his “pride and joy” into my hand. These were a bottle of Pride detergent and Joy dishsoap. Cait, for her part, was chased by various moody actor-boys, who gave her signed headshots and left flowers at her waitress station. Tom’s fridge shrine grew. Finally Eugene gave us a signed picture to share, and Tom scrawled rude comments on it and stuck it in the back of the fridge so he was lit up whenever we made a snack.

We needed Tom. He was the gatekeeper for girls unprepared for the directness of America. It’s hard to believe we were that clueless, but we were. I had never been asked out on a date in my life, and neither had Caitríona. Irish mating is not premeditated. We didn’t know how if saying no was terribly insulting, and we didn’t know what exactly they meant when they wanted to “grab a coffee” or “get some beers”. Dinner was a terrifying prospect. So Tom would growl “She’s not here, pal” while we made frantic gestures from the bedroom.

Eugene seemed mostly unthreatening, though it was clear he was getting ready to move. When he got me alone, he explained carefully that he was mirroring my body language, which was a powerful interview or seduction technique. I didn’t have the wit to point out that it might have been more effective if he hadn’t demonstrated it. My slouch didn’t look any better on a man twice my age. One week he sent a heartfelt love letter to Cait, the next week to me. The content was similar: “Caitríona/Dervala is a wonderful girl, but you, Dervala/Caitríona, really have special, unique qualities and a complexity that’s rare…” We giggled and noted his tiny, axe-murderer’s handwriting. The truth was we were getting tired of his attentions, especially the seven a.m. calls “to say hi to you guys” that made Tom yell at us.

One day Cait and I finally had an afternoon off. For a week she’d been having dreams where she tried to get out of bed in the middle of the night to bring five cappuccinos to table four. Waiting tables is the most stressful work I’ve ever done, especially because I wasn’t good at it. We were exhausted, and decided to celebrate our day off by making margaritas and renting It’s A Wonderful Life, to shut out the mugginess of Boston in July. Eugene phoned just as we sat down.
“What are you guys doing?” he said.
“Watching a video,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, “I’d love to join you.”

We really can’t say no. It’s a massive flaw in our training. The guest, uninvited or not, is sacred in Ireland: tasks are dropped, tea is boiled, resentful muttering saved for later. Phrases like ““You know, I just need a little me time right now, honey.” are as foreign as Greek.

“Of course,” I said. “We’d love to have you.” And I gave him the address.
Cait punched a cushion and gave me a filthy look.
“You just invited bloody Eugene over.”
“I had to! What could I say?”
With a thundering glare, she pressed Play. We watched Jimmy and Donna in silence.

Eugene arrived two hours later, with a six-pack of mini Coronas. (Mini Coronas. To visit Irish girls.) He was wearing, as usual, a trench coat, a white suit, a Panama hat, and a pair of braided-leather shoes. I saw a look of pure, evil glee on Tom’s face as this vision appeared, and Cait and I flinched.
“Hullo, I’m Eugene Edward,” said Eugene.
“Hullo, Eugene Edward. I’m Thomas Matthew,” said Tom with a solemn handshake.

Eugene opened the fridge to stick in his doll-sized beers. He turned around.
“Caitríona,” he said quietly, “What am I doing in your refrigerator?” We had completely forgotten it was there. His face looked out from behind the cream cheese, jaw jutting like a CEO. “Eugene Edward,” it said. “Author. Predator.”

We never heard from him again until I flicked through the pages of one of the men’s magazines on my sister’s coffee table last week. There he was, ten years later, bold as brass, with a how-to article on dating younger women. “For the past 10 years,” announces this triumph of American manhood, “I’ve declined to date any woman who isn’t significantly younger than me.” And then step by step, he listed all the tactics he tried and refined on me and Caitríona. He lectured on the importance of wearing clothes that younger women liked (the Tom Wolfe getup??). He stressed that much younger women were a better bet than mid-twenties up. “Nothing turns off a young woman more quickly than an old guy on the make. Low-key and friendly is the way; enjoy the process of getting to know somebody new.” He mentioned the Eastern European girlfriend, though he added a few judicious years to her (under)age and shaved a few off his own. I squealed when I read “I once discovered (under the dress of a 22-year-old Irish waitress) a massive, flaming tattoo that wrapped around her entire body.” Caitríona! Explain yourself!

All the hard work paid off eventually. Eugene just married the 21-year-old who used to clean his house. I’m taking Tom for dinner at Hooters next month, just to thank him for being a bodyguard when we needed him most.

“I feel like my nerves are exposed, on the surface,” says the woman on the radio, “and the least little thing will set them jangling.”

She is talking about menopause, but I know how she feels. I’m good-humoured, until I’m in a homicidal rage. I’m easy-going until I spend a day with tears and snot running down my face. I’m reasonable until I become convinced that the world is a cruel place and I’m going to die destitute and unloved and it’s all YOUR fault.

When I am PMSing I can’t stand being in my own skin. Literally. I have to get away from this place (wherever it is) and from these people (whoever they are). I would get away from myself if I could. Nothing can please me, and the attempt to please me, if undisguised, makes me feel murderous loathing towards the perpetrator. I am unbearably sad.

I’m not exaggerating, for once.

An alien takes the wheel. Cleverly, she makes me believe finally I see clearly, that the calm contentment I feel ordinarily is pathetically misguided. Cleverly, she throws in a few real-world setbacks for a hungry brain to gnaw on like a bone. Under her influence I bounce with pent-up aggression, then I’m too listless to move. I feel destructive. I can’t concentrate on anything but misery. It seems perfectly reasonable, now that the blinkers have been removed, to respond this way to such a horrible world.

I get by. Strangers are easier to deal with than close friends. Co-workers jangle me less than beloveds—though a small suggestion or the wrong kind of look can send me sniffling in the supply closet. I remember that I really probably should do a yoga class. I want chocolate.

Then I get my period. And feel stupid, every time, for not realizing my own body had declared war again. The outside world ticks on as it always had, and I try to get back into it. I apologize to the man I hurt, and we are both sad. I finish the work project I tossed aside in hopelessness or rage.

It doesn’t happen every month. Then it would be easy to track and fix, I suppose. My cycle is irregular anyway, and sometimes I just feel mild misery rather than raging sadness. But when I surface from a bad dose, I wonder how many marriages PMS wrecks, how many children are puzzled and upset when Mum turns into a crazy harpy. PMS has many sufferers, and not all of them are women. But what are you supposed to do?

Tim Bray was in Dublin for the weekend. He asked me for some non-touristy recommendations before he headed off, and putting together a short list was a mental pilgrimage to the city I loved in my college years. I’ve visited since then, of course, but always on a skinflint American vacation allowance that meant scuttling between friends’ houses before racing down to Limerick to see my parents. This December I’ll stroll around in the rain and get to know it again.

(On CBC radio this week, the two best talkers were Irish writers Nuala O’Faoileán and Dermot Healy. They reminded me I need a fix of good leg-pulling stories.)

Tim has a sharp eye, and there she is, unvarnished modern Dublin, in his account of abonfire confrontation at what I think must be the Kevin Street Flats. From there he walks to the hotel in chi-chi Ranelagh (where I once lived), where “the laundrette there has pale hardwood floors, red Eurostyled sofas, and a row of rent-the-net computers with, forsooth, big flat-panel screens.”

Like Canadians, we Irish are inordinately interested in what others think of our country. “Just a visitor’s impressions,” Tim says of his Dublin notes, but those are often the most truthful, the perceptions that are later dulled by familiarity.

Oh yes. Oh yes. Ireland has about three and a half million people; a third of them squeeze into Dublin like sardines. Half of us were born in the Seventies or later, and Dublin crawls with our sprogs. Inadequate, extortionate childcare is a huge worry for many of my friends; one is considering ditching her career in accountancy to set up decent childcare facilities for her poorly-served area.

Tim notes that Sinéad O’Connor should have credited Yeats for lines she stole from “No Second Troy” in her early song “Troy”. He is right, of course—but I picture 19-year-old Sinéad fresh from her Leaving Cert English exam, for which every student in the country was drilled with that poem. In Ireland you can count on certain experiences being shared. Maybe she never imagined the record reaching a world in which those lines were not as universally familiar as

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by”

When I was ten, I read Tiger, the boy’s adventure comic, after I’d outgrown Bunty’s serials on evil Victorian girls who pretended to be sugar-sweet and wheelchair-bound in order to torture the plain sister. In Tiger’s black-and-white panels, “Death Wish Man” rode a bike through a burning bush. Johnny Cougar, the “Indian” wrestler, half-nelsoned his opponents every week. Mighty Mouse, the Glaswegian footballer, kicked ass and headed butt whenever he needed to. It was a kinder, gentler world than the endless headfuckery of the girls’ comics, where every drawn-out plot depended on deception and mental cruelty.

I kept the taste for men’s magazines. I grew out of Cosmopolitan at fourteen, but Kathryn Flett’s sharply-edited Arena made me want to be a magazine writer when I was in college. Arena put Bowie and Johnny Depp on the cover, not some perky nobody in a pink sweater (or a pink bikini). Arena hired good writers and great photographers. So did GQ and Esquire, though I was less taken by their Master-of-the-Universe tone. I hoovered up the scant how-to stuff they printed. I already knew how to be a female, more or less, and it was much more interesting to learn how to be a male, from french cuffs to mixology to wrangling women.

I couldn’t understand why the women’s magazines were so dumb compared to say, Playboy. Real bimbos witter on about nothing other than Botox and Bridezillas, surely. I read Marie-Claire for a few years after it launched in the late 1980s, but the formula of sex tips, mid-range fashion, a health scare, and the single article on the plight of women in some third-world country grew thin. Women’s magazines limited themselves to women’s issues. Men’s ranged freely, and I wanted to, too.

But somewhere along the line men’s magazines lost me. That’s fine by them; I’m not their stuff-buying demographic anyway. Maxim and Loaded changed the game with unabashed babe spreads and birds-booze-and-toys editorial. A friend of a friend is a touch-up artist at American Maxim; we laughed at her two-day project of airbrushing flesh onto Lara Flynn Boyle’s bones. Her job is much more important than the writers’.

The lad rags are still funny, and I’ll always read them before a Vogue or Cosmo in a waiting room. What I do find creepy are the insecurity industry magazines—the ones with straplines about abs and trans-fatty acids and 25 ways to please a woman in bed. There’s something so…unmanly about fretting about your pecs and worrying about how to beat chocolate cravings. “Train your dog to guard the fridge”, says the latest Mens’ Health, and they appear to be serious. 176 glossy, ad-filled pages on aging, crunching, balding, pumping, dieting, impotence, Botox-shopping, and how to make women call you. Ugh. Who wants a bubble-armed narcissist?

I liked men better before they got neurotic about this stuff. Here’s my prescription to add to those 176 pages: Read books. Chop wood. Run. Self-deprecate. Spell well. Tip well. Cook like you mean it. Adore us. Forget the rest, and never, EVER mention fat grams or protein diets.