Montréal

Montréal, cold and decrepit, with highways laid out by a thirteen-year-old as he watched Mad Max: I am a fuel-injected suicide machine. Everything here is falling apart and we drive with corresponding disregard. “Arrêt,” so I’m told, translates to “slow down and roll on through.”

Montréal, home of the once-greatest franchise in professional sport, once the financial centre of Canada, once the seat of the powerful, once many things, is now a city in decay.

It is not a city I like to visit.

But today’s visit is in-and-out, a surgical strike, an episode from the upcoming Call of Duty 10: Modern Business Traveller. You get off the airplane and drive to the customer site and then drive back to the airport and hurry to the gate and have done with it, all in one continuous rush.

Another day wasted from my lifetime allotment.