I fell off the side of the big rusting bus and landed in a patch of green, slightly gloopy liquid. David, my recently deceased cactus, had warned me of the perils of visiting Quebec on a Thursday.

"You'll catch the lurgy, you fuckstain," he used to remind me endlessly, generally replied to with a middle-finger and a small bag of caster sugar. The problem though, as true as caster sugar makes cakes look great and Quebec is great place name, the problem is that Quebec is not a great place name. In fact, studies in the past have questioned if it's even a name at all - and more recent studies have questioned the existence of the region in its entirety.

Catholicism, having run rampage on the streets of Toronto and Sweet Carolina (sponsored by Dave's Caster Sugar Emporium) was now ready to launch an attack on the Canadian embassy in Canada. Having confused the shitting fuck out of everyone that commissioned and built the structure, the Canadian government's response to the threat of Canadian Catholicism being delivered to the Canadian Embassy in Canada that the building was ordered to be moved to a secret location. A location the government merely referred to as 'X'.

"It's not bad for a letter, X," I recalled a remark from a recently deceased Duracell Battery (AA Size), "it's got a bit of notoriety. It's bit of a maverick. A bad boy."

Having spent his life inside the arse of a remote control, seeing light only twice throughout his short years (once when initially thrust into the remote, the other seconds later when the polarity of another local battery required reversing for correct operation of the remote) I wasn't about to argue with his logic. In fact, Dury (as he became known) almost turned me onto a new way of approaching the whole situation.

If Canada's only Canadian-based Canadian Embassy could avoid Catholicism, then surely my issue of being stuck in a gloopy wad of liquid whoop-ass really isn't as much of a cuss and maybe Biffo had initially intended it to be.

Sure, I'm going to need to visit the dry cleaners again and as a result of the 'gloop', my Nokia N3423 with built in hairdrier is now suffering from a memory issue (gloop-related, y'see), but I'm still alive.

Like the embassy, I fled. Like Catholicism, the gloop stuck around. It was a lesson in nothing more than the fragility of cellular telephone technology, Canadian history and indeed life as a tangible mass of green.

The irony of the whole situation was something that occurred to me later though; I was only on that bus to buy some batteries for my new cactus.

Spooky.