This all took place in 2010, during Stampede. Kathy had found a man who'd sell us some bees and she wanted me to go with her. It wasn't far.

I felt lousy so I slept for a while. This is like rebooting a computer - it might fix things. Also when you get up sometimes people will have taken the hint and done whatever they were going to do without waking you.

This time they didn't, probably because ... I have no idea. If I was going to do something involving navigation, flaky vehicles, and the possibility of being stung by several thousand bees I wouldn't take someone like myself, but there was a strange feeling in the air that I was the man for the job.

I expressed these sentiments and they were brushed aside incredulously. 'You have to come! We waited!' It was like being sacrificed to the volcano god: 'But you have to jump in - we let you sleep!'

Samuel had wrapped the beehive in garbage bags and put it in the back of the Volvo. I would have taken the van but it burns its weight in gas every six miles and small towns have been known to form mobs and go after people driving things that look like that. 'It ain't normal like.'

I climbed into the back so that Kathy and Samuel could talk and I could sleep, and after about a minute I did so. I dozed uneasily for an unknown period of time, the car jolting over uneven surfaces and down strange winding roads. When I awoke up I was lost, the buildings and streets utterly strange.

'Where are we?'

'About three blocks from home.'

I decided not to sleep.

Having a conversation with someone in the front seat of a car when you are in the back is difficult because cars are noisy and filled with padded surfaces that absorb sound, and the people you are talking to have their backs to you. In this case it was worse because Samuel has an accent that is a mixture of English, Southern, and Canadian, because nobody in our house is ever allowed to correct a child's pronunciation.

I didn't realise when I was growing up in England that the street urchins who spoke in a slurred patois that forever showed their lowly origins were actually trying to develop an American accent from scratch. The first time one of my offspring spoke not proper English but a strange slurred drawl and I corrected him, Kathy interrupted with 'Suh, ah'll thank y'all to mahnd what y'all say to mah precious chald.'

As a result language is in our house a battleground in which I am often sitting bleeding in a shell crater (picture an incoming shell, marked with: 'This here one's for y'all, Adolf, suh.') and our children have their own distinctive way of speaking, a sort of soft drawl which partakes of both decent English and Mason-Dixon Yankee, and which is difficult to follow over engine noise.

After a while I was able to pick up the conversation and managed to make it veer off into an argument about the cultural differences between countries. We covered whether Buddhists believe in reincarnation and the viewpoints of various other religions, and I used Hindus to support my argument until Samuel pointed out that the Buddha - having started his own competing religion - wasn't technically a Hindu, which is a good point.

I theorized that while North Americans don't actually like suffering they think it's inevitable, hence dumb politicians, old mattresses, and brief vacations spent in a tent. Samuel disagreed violently and then did a remarkable about-face and agreed that people in Argentina and Europe have the relaxed attitude you would expect of people who have never had any part of their body frozen to a car doorhandle. This talk of suffering turned out to be strangely prophetic.

Two hours later we were still traveling, nearly an hour late and lost. Who could have foreseen this? In retrospect it seems pretty obvious that 120 miles is not an hour trip, despite the bee guy having assured us that he lived an hour from us. Also he left out half the directions, mostly trivial stuff like which town he lived in or the fact that it was located in a ravine buried in what appeared to be flat prairie.

We decided to take a chance on a road promising to lead to an inhabited place, and five minutes later we pulled into a town of about fifty people, probably a metropolis by local standards.

We found the house, where a note sent us to a nearby quonset hut. There were vast drifts of beehive parts all around it to a depth of about five feet, probably a couple of acres of weathered grey wood interspersed with dead cars.

There is something about living in small communities that makes people want to keep dead cars around, maybe as a sort of security blanket, or perhaps because in a town where everyone knows everyone else there is no way anyone is going to buy your crap vehicle. The inevitable corollary of this is that since any good vehicle is eventually driven to the city by someone with the sense to move away and then scrapped at the end of its allotted span, all the cars that people find rusting in small towns and lovingly restore were only available because they were lemons.

I said, 'If I owned this place I'd get rid of all this junk and replace it with interesting junk.' My family felt that this was not desirable. Still, the town seemed to have an abundant supply of crap. Apparently the locals weren't big on hauling away anything made of rusty metal or rotting wood.

The actual hives were comparatively few in number - maybe fifty of them in a neat area on wooden platforms. He seemed to have perhaps a hundred times as much scrap equipment as working hives. Also he had a nineteen-forties truck that had been torched in half, made into a forklift and then painted to look like a bee, which was a nice touch if you were on drugs.

The whole setup was a bit odd but beekeepers are by definition crazy. Cows may be a bit irritable when you milk them, but bees may suddenly decide to try to kill you or die trying. In return for this you get honey, which most people can only stand in small quantities.

Samuel said, 'You must like honey.'

'No, it's sticky.'

I considered asking why anyone who doesn't like the one thing bees are good for would keep them, but decided not to bother. Beekeeping is not the sport of kings, or - as above - the sane.

I found as we talked that he knew vastly more about beekeeping than we did, but so do many people who have never seen a bee. He pulled on a pair of very medical-looking rubber gloves and examined our hive. Apparently it was okay and our bees did not perish from foulbrood, Andalusian spotted mildew, lamprey worms, spelge, pitney, or the grumbles. There are about a million things that will kill a beehive and the treatment for any one of them makes the honey inedible except to bees.

We went and looked at his bees. He opened hives and banged them together, pried frames out with a metal bar and dropped them back in, inserted protective metal gratings and dropped cases with a frightening energy.

This of course crushed hundreds of bees, which amazingly made the survivors angry. I began to suspect that I wasn't a good beekeeper because I don't like to kill my livestock, but I'm unusual in this - it seems as though most farmers of any type take pleasure in offing a certain percentage of their animals. I suppose that this is understandable after a few years of the same routine, and it explains why there are so few grizzly bear farms.

We were shortly surrounded by huge clouds of flying bees, bees being shaken maniacally from one hive into another, open hives, and piles of frames. I kept walking away in fear, then going back to watch in amazement. Samuel stayed a cautious twenty feet away and Kathy was a worried looking speck in the distance.

He pointed out the queen to me. I pretended to see her. All bees look alike, and there must be five thousand of them on the frame, all wondering why they're suddenly in daylight. It's like 'Where's Waldo?' with angry venomous flying insects, except that if you can't find Waldo everyone else doesn't leave for another book or attack you en masse. Also Waldo books are notably lacking in larvae.

Bees bounced off my glasses. They kept coming, which was a bluff, except that they weren't bluffing, and if I walked away they followed me for about fifty yards. Presumably they were trying to get as much fear out of their own inevitable death as they could before stinging me, which seemed mean-spirited. The bee guy squashed them with gay abandon but they didn't bother him.

One of them got stuck in my hair and I frantically tried to brush it off. I knew better but my instinctive desire not to have an angry bee on me overrode my over-stressed rational mind. It stung me on the back of my head. At least it wasn't in my mustache this time. Samuel pulled the sting out, which is nice - he was actually useful for something.

The bee guy said that with luck we might get 70 to 80 pounds of honey this year. Actually we'd be happy with about three jars, but we nodded wisely and agreed.

He duct taped our three boxes, now full of bees, into a stack and made it bee tight. He was certain that this tall structure would go into the back of the Volvo, and my measurements agreed, but it wouldn't.

We redid it with a smaller base, losing a few hundred bees because removing the bottom opens it to the air. I was beginning to burn out a bit on having bees on me. We put the box back in the car. Amazingly it really seemed to be bee-tight, and there were only a few loose bees in the car.

He said: 'Open the windows and they'll leave.' I pointed out to Kathy that if you opened either of the back windows they wouldn't close again. Also it was starting to rain. We thanked him and left.

Sometimes you drive away back into reality, leaving the insanity behind you. At other times you drag a chunk of it along. We had a tall wooden box full of angry bees standing in the back of our car, held together with duct tape.

Two minutes later we realised that we were perilously low on gas, because we hadn't expected to come that far and it seemed likely to be the same distance back.

Samuel asked why there are so many little tiny towns in Alberta but not in BC. Probably this is because you can't drive fifty miles at random in BC unless you are prepared to winch your car up at least a few vertical cliffs. Also the only crops you can grow at a ninety degree angle on rock are lichens, and their growing season is about fifty thousand years so there isn't that much need for farmhands, elevators, ancient gas stations, etc.

We found Acme. The sign said that they sold gas, but there was no sign of the gas station.

I found that I had a perfect map of the town in my head even though I had never been here, because every single prairie town was built from the same plans which came free in Popular Mechanics in 1924.

'It's on the next block past the grain elevator.'

Kathy said, 'You've been here before?'

'No.'

We passed a closed gas station which had the pumps concreted neatly into the sidewalk in front of the store. Kathy giggled hysterically. They were closed. I made Samuel go and check, but they remained closed. He did a nice display of sarcastic body language standing on the sidewalk by the pumps. He'd probably have fit in there.

The real station was a block away, obviously, and it was open.

I filled the car, bought an Eat-More and a packet of chocolate eggs from last Easter, and used the bathroom. When I came out Samuel had a large ice cream cone. I was jealous. Kathy refused to buy me one because they had already rung up everything else. It wasn't like they had anything else to do.

The ice cream cooler had about fifty fluorescent pink signs, all saying 'Don't climb on here.'

'Is this an ongoing problem?'

'Yes.'

Samuel found a type of disposable lighter he hadn't seen, which is about as unusual as finding a pillow on a bed, but he was amazed.

We pressed on.

Kathy said, 'Where is the highway?'

'Turn left here.'

She did and we were back on the highway.

'Oh.'

Sadly my talent for navigation only extended to places I had never been.

Kathy asked, agitated, 'What was the point of that town?'

'It seemed very nice.'

'Yes, but it was just ... there! Why?!'

I said it was probably because you don't have to get permission to put up a town. Maybe there was a tree there. Perhaps the pioneers had a wagon break down and they needed a town to keep it in. It's probably still sitting there surrounded by dead cars.

We continued down the highway at high speed, anxious to get home. Several times I was tempted to use sarcasm: 'Why don't you see if you can get the car up on two wheels again - we only have twenty thousand enraged bees trying to get loose in the back.' I remained silent, being intermittently wise.

A fly was loose in the car. Every time it buzzed into the front we all flinched, thinking it was a bee, and the car swerved, the hive rocking from side to side. Fortunately the bee guy used a good brand of duct tape and it held. Kathy started to gesture as she explained some fine point of something to Samuel, and we proceeded down the highway in a long, gentle s-curve, the furious buzzing of the bees providing a pleasant counterpoint to the hum of the motor. I couldn't catch a word she was saying.

From time to time I put my hand up sleepily to steady the stack of boxes and then had to lick a mixture of duct tape adhesive and honey off my fingers. Nobody was sympathetic.

We crossed a train track. Samuel said, 'Why does that sign say 'rumble strip?'

I clutched frantically at the boxes as we bounced over a massive speed bump, flew for a few feet, and dropped back onto the road just before the rumble strip which was apparently there to tell us to nail the brakes before the stop sign. The train tracks weren't worth mentioning. The hive made a terrifying creaking noise but it somehow stayed together.

A while later we found Calgary. I had never seen that area, and we seemed to be entering the city from the opposite direction to the one we left in. It began to rain, turning the construction which occupied that entire side of the city into mud. Kathy plowed on bravely, showing the vehicles we left behind us that an old Volvo wagon is in fact a proper sports car and that she was not to be trifled with.

Soon the mud turned back to pavement, which was good except that water can seep through mud into the earth and escape, but it just sits on blacktop.

We continued to forge ahead at high speed. I looked out of the side window. Water came up level with the bumpers and dolphins playfully swam alongside us.

Kathy set the wipers on 'intermittent.' I was fascinated. You can tell a lot about people by the way they approach adversity. My side of the family like to be able to see, so we typically have about a thousand watts of light available and maybe some old searchlights. Kathy's people have found stubbornness to be a lot more practical than vision, so knowing how to turn on the wipers is more a way of showing off their intelligence than a practical skill related to keeping water off the windshield.

A large truck went by, throwing a tsunami-like wave over the car, and we were suddenly completely submerged. I saw creatures with rows of lights on their sides frolicking by a bathysphere. Kathy frantically slapped at the wiper controls and they sped up, leaving pretty trails of bubbles through the water.

Seconds later the road curved upwards and we broke through the surface into the air, skipping across the still-wet blacktop like an angular blue rock. The bees fell suddenly silent and clung madly to the inside of their hive, waiting for the impact.

The car swerved back and forth as Kathy tried to decide between the concrete barriers on the right side and the semi-trailer on the left. Even if we survived the crash we wouldn't dare to get out and drown because we'd be run over on the left and the right side of the car would be embedded in the wall of concrete, so we'd have to sit in the car and be stung to death.

I pictured my life summed up in a single picture plastered on every site on the internet: the crushed Volvo lying upside down in a foot of water, windows opaque with bees, and the caption, 'Epic Bee Fail! LOL.'

The time seemed right for a bit of wisdom, so I uttered a sort of strangled yell: 'Why don't you slow down?! We're hydroplaning!'

Kathy emerged onto a stretch of road with only about a foot of water on it. We slowed and the car dipped its wheels carefully into the water and found solid ground. She said, 'Everyone else was going faster than us.' it sounded like a matter of sensible caution to do the same speed as much larger vehicles carrying comparatively safe substances like dynamite and radioactive waste. Struck by a numbing mixture of fear and wisdom I fell silent.

Fifteen minutes later we pulled up in front of the house. Samuel and I carried the hive to the back yard, hoping as usual that the neighbors didn't notice, tore the duct tape off the entrance and ran. The bees flew out in a cloud and stung a nearby bus to death. We were home. I went inside and searched the internet for used amphibious vehicles capable of doing less than twenty miles an hour, with a separate cargo compartment.

We took five minutes to recover over tea, and then dressed to go out for the evening. I wore my cowboy hat, blue jeans and suit jacket. Samuel looked at me. 'Dad, it's nice to see you looking slightly less ridiculous than usual.'

After the events of the afternoon I decided that his definition of what was ridiculous had to be be fairly flexible.

I still felt crappy but the thought of doing something sane and normal was very appealing so I happily went out to surround myself with rowdy drunks.