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Thursday

Today, I was very proud to be the guest of honour at Durham’s Soil Improvement Festival, an event for which I was able to secure $45-million in federal gas tax funding. For a centrepiece honouring mulch, I had a planeload of white sand flown in from Australia.

I also commissioned, as a permanent legacy of the festival, a collection of three gazebos, each constructed with wood sourced from a different Canadian coastline — and hand painted by a team that included Robert Bateman and Ted Harrison. The paint, all 300 litres of it, was rendered from salmon eggs, borrowing a traditional recipe from the Coast Salish peoples.

More than ever, these kinds of festivals are imperative in spurring Durham’s economic development. Although, what with all this overspending jibber-jabber, I decided to cut costs by putting the sand on the same flight as the 30 gallons of Kopi Luwak coffee I arranged to bring in for our next Cabinet meeting. They say it’s extracted from the droppings of a wild cat or something, but all I know is that just one sip of it makes Fouquet’s espresso taste like Styrofoam by comparison.

Friday

My accountant has informed me that even after writing off my Tibetan mastiff’s five-day spa visit as a parliamentary fact-finding mission, I still have $3,300 owing on my tax return. Rather than getting angry, though, I changed the amount owing line by adding the word “not”. That should probably take care of it.

Anyway, off to Germany for a summit meeting on extreme poverty — and just in time! It’s been ages that I’ve been wanting to get back to that resort near the Black Forest where you can immerse yourself in a pool of wine. It’s exactly what I need after a week of merciless political harassment. Of course, whenever I visit, I always insist they fill the tub exclusively with wine sourced from Niagara or the Okanagan Valley. We may be Canadian, but when abroad, we shouldn’t be ashamed to show off our national pride.

National Post

thopper@nationalpost.com