by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Canada, a few acres of snow, says Voltaire. It's not a country, it's a winter.

And this city? It's a tale of two cities: orgasmic, overexuberant summers and winters as painful as an icy grave.

You spend the whole winter as bored as a dépanneur clerk. Winter's tiny days are duller than lunchtime food court conversations at the Complexe Guy-Favreau. When you close a winter's edition of this paper, the little picture of me above dashes around these pages desperately trying to rip a papery hole into another reality.

Then comes pains of rebirth, followed by unsustainable levels of expectation of stimulation. It's non-stop constant hop-a-thon - festivals, tam tams, outdoor volleyball, Greek soccer fans (note to Greeks, you can stop honking your car horns anytime now.)

So let me cool you down, regale and possibly educate you with a winter's cautionary tale of Montreal justice.

Last February 23, I was called to the Côte-St-Luc courthouse to contest a $140 bus lane parking ticket. My argument was that the adjacent signs didn't forbid it, and the one that did was bent back and not visible from my spot.

My chances looked good as Judge Pierre Bouchard was chatty and likeable, like a wrinkly albino gerbil whose head you want to stroke with your thumb. He was flanked by a natty prosecutor and a stenographer identically styled with peroxide and pinstripes, which led me to wonder about such brazen image theft in a court of law.

The fiasco began when the stenographer, whose job appears to be to operate the tape recorder, couldn't get the cassette to turn. Instead of banging it and jiggling wires, she peered terrified at the device as if it was a leaky car battery.

While we waited for the machine to get "réparée," the judge started offering deals - come on up immediately for undocumented judgement without right to appeal. An alleged Spanish miscreant went for the offer, mumbled incomprehensibly, and within seconds Judge Bouchard cancelled his fine. Then he cut a sweet deal for another contestant who agreed to an off-the-record trial.

Stupidly, I chose to wait for the tape machine to get fixed, partly because I was curiously transfixed by the stunning technical ineptitude.

The stenographer's boss returned from lunch, pressed a button and the machine worked. I was up and suddenly subject to unprecedented scrutiny. I was asked where I was from, why I didn't previously know the parking rituals of Park Avenue, was told not to put my hands in my pockets and eventually Judge Bouchard concluded that I should have walked up and down the street to see if any other signs contradicted the ones immediately in front of my Taurus. I half expected them to shoot me up with sodium pentothal. I was deemed guilty as charged.

It's what happens next that's the brain shocker.

I soon learned that to file an appeal for a municipal court judgement, you have to write a special letter to get it in front of a provincial court judge, because city court can't appeal itself. So who do you send the letter to and what do you write? No matter where and how often I enquired, nobody could tell me. They suggested I hire a lawyer to write it up. My freebie legal clinic lawyer just scratched her head. Also, an appeal requires a typewritten transcript done by city scribes at the cost of $200 to $300. As I tried to figure out how to do all this, my fine was bumped up another hundred bucks. The ticket had leaped to $240 and my licence was suspended.

I ended my suffering and ponied up. I report this painful chapter to let you know that, if you get in front of a city court judge, come prepared, hope for fairness and go for the no-tape deal if possible, because there's no rematch unless you're ready to dole out hundreds of dollars to do so.

The biggest regret is that the winter's cash isn't in my pocket for some summertime fun.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca