WE filed off the plane after 10 hours of food and movies - and it was still only the afternoon in western Canada. In the baggage hall, people were beginning to talk into their sleeves, hissing into mobile phones. One bystander was very scornful of them. "All those calls are monitored, you know, what with this being a big international airport ... It makes sense, you know. They're mainly doing drug deals. They'll be caught before nightfall."
He nodded, pleased with the great vigilance of society. I wasn't so sure he was right, mainly because I monitor most calls within easy radius myself.
A very elegant woman was telling someone that she was going to put in an hour at the gym before she came home, she said she looked like a crumpled paper bag and she needed a work out if she was to face that dinner later on. She had travelled half way across the earth and she wasn't going to collapse into bed - she was going to a gym and then on to a dinner? These people are out of sight. I suppose it could have been a code for drugs but she had a sickeningly healthy glow and I think I spotted her doing leg exercises on the plane.
A man was talking to a wife or partner on his mobile and the conversation was not going well. "What do you mean, How's Vancouver? I'm in Arrivals at the carousel," he said.
He listened with darkening brow.
"Oh come on, pul-ease. You ask me to call you the moment I arrive. I call you, and now you complain because I have no views about the place. It's an airport, goddammit, is that a view?"
At the taxi rank a woman called her mother. "Yes Mother, I have everything you asked for from London, Harrod's Tea, sausages, butter. Every single thing. See you soon, Mother."
She got out half a dozen Harrod's green plastic bags and asked the taxi to take her to the nearest convenience store on the way home. Her mother had emigrated to Canada 30 years ago and still hankered for Harrod's fare, she explained to me.
I'm not a woman of particularly strong views," she said before she got into her taxi. "But I do believe that the greatest happiness of the greater number comes before being strictly doctrinaire."
THERE isn't a great view from the Georgian Court, a lovely hotel in Vancouver, because its right beside the huge Sports Dome.
Every time I come to Canada I am filled with admiration for how they seem to have come to terms with their weather situation. They have all sorts of open air places which have chairs and tables for when the sun shines and become skating rinks when it freezes, and domes that close over an audience at a match or spectacle as soon as it snows or rains and open up when it doesn't. They can't even begin to understand all the fussbuttling that goes on when the dodos at Wimbledon pay the earth for tickets and then look up in amazed outrage when it has the nerve to rain on them.
The little trees they've planted along the footpaths, or sidewalks, are bright gold and orange now. The city becomes more and more Chinese by the hour as citizens from Hong Kong take up residence. Huge apartment blocks on the waterfront come complete with balconies overlooking the ocean. Many wealthy Hong Kong families are already installed, looking anxiously at that ocean, and hoping all will go smoothly next summer in their homeland - if not, they are at least sure of a comfortable foothold.
On a warm Sunday outing in Stanley Park and up in the Grouse mountains overlooking Horseshoe Bay, families were having late lunches.
"Did you order the killer whale, Mam?" a courteous young waiter asked.
I had in fact ordered crab cakes and chardonnay but feared I might have been indistinct.
"I don't think so," I said humbly.
His boss clicked his fingers. The Killer Whale, a type of beer, had been ordered by someone else, a man who looked at me suspiciously as if I had been about to claim it as my own and kept his, arm around the glass protectively.
The place was full of Canada geese, strolling around parks and lawns and sort of... well, grazing is the only word for it. Do all geese eat grass in great mouthfuls? As always, whenever I leave Dalkey and don't have access to all my encyclopaedias and books on How The World Works I need to know things like this.
HIS is not a holiday as such. It's a couple of days leading up to a writers' festival which, will have Margaret Atwood, Ruth Rendell, Carl Hiassen, Jane Gardam and Limerick born Michael Collins among the speakers. Every other time I was here I was absolutely exhausted from the journey and missed most of the fun by falling asleep suddenly at inappropriate times. So this year the great resolution was to have recovered before it all began and be a bit ahead of the game.
So far it's working fine, apart from misunderstanding giant car parks under shopping centres and leaving the car neatly in a loading bay with approving comments on how generous the spaces are. And I asked the taxi driver who was holding the back door of his cab open for me did he mind if I sat in the front, and then of course I got in the driving seat, to his enormous alarm.
There have been peaceful lunches in Thai restaurants, and much discussion in bars about the ludicrous licensing laws of British Columbia which make it illegal to play chess in a bar and which forbid the television to point so that people sitting, at, the bar can actually see it. The reason for this is that some places have sort of pretend bars called "holding areas" where you go in and ask for a menu as if you are going to eat dinner but then just have a couple of jars and leave.
Everybody knows this, technically everyone is breaking the law, but since there are only 15 liquor inspectors in the whole of British Columbia ... just look at the map and work out your chances of getting caught.
Two earnest young men were greatly exercised by this, they said it was degrading to live where people hadn't the guts to change the statute book but preferred to see people flout the laws instead. They asked me my views yes, they actually sought my opinion on the matter and I was about to hold forth, but I suddenly remembered where I came from. A land, which had survived very well for a very long time with not exactly similar but fairly parallel situations.
It will change, I said wisely. Believe me, it will take some time but it will change."
But they were young, of course, and eager and impatient and they didn't recognise mellowness and possibly didn't know that the law does catch up. Eventually. They were disappointed that I didn't have views on an autumn night in Vancouver.