Hotel Celtic

To swear in a language not one's own is less incisive than swearing in your mother tongue. But tabernac! That nice quebecois juron referring to religious icons, tabernacles, just about captures my surprise at learning that one of the alleged perpetrators of the Rue Copernic terrorist bombing in Paris in 1980 is a professor at the University of Ottawa. And his wife is on staff too. At that time France was the target of numerous attentats. It was the age of the PLO, Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof and airplane hijacks. The bombing of the synagogue killed several people and was one of the incidents of the age that most stays with me, probably because a Swiss friend told me his parents were only a block away returning to their hotel when they heard the explosion. They narrowly missed being implicated. I would have read all about it in Paris Match. So now Canada has arrested this person. The hand writing on a motorcycle rental agreement, the bike which carried the explosives, has been matched to him. Wow, twenty nine years later. Bet you he swore (English, French or Arabic, who knows). A nice twist was he stayed at the Hotel Celtic in the centre of Paris. And the hotel at Motherwell cross would have been happy to put him up. Do you like the way I mix in religion and football to almost any platitudes I write?