Entries about migration experiences

Stealing, as I do, posts from my facebook page...

Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. So in the spirit - along with turkey sausages for dinner this evening - stuff I am thankful for...

• my iPod;
• people who don't point out my grammatical errors;
• Ninkasi;
• life's constant reminders that I am human so I don't develop hubris;
• the opportunity to live abroad;
• family and friends back home who love and accept me, even though I am far away;
• friends here in the UK who accept me, even though they have to live close to me;
• Teressa Bellissimo for inventing the Buffalo wing;
• my general good health;
• the fact that those of my family who have suffered ill health this year have gotten better;
• and a good gin Martini.

As the day wore one - and I had consumed my Turkey sausages, I called my family back in Toronto. I spoke to the family back in Toronto as the clock turned over to 11 PM here in the UK. They were sitting down for Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and all the trimmings. I hung up the phone, knowing they would soon be on to pumpkin pie.

So to you all reading this, regardless of the day or your nationality, I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving. Early October may be the Thanksgiving day for Canada, but we should be aware of what we need to give thanks for every day.

Look up, this is the world you live in. It may be harsh and hard at times, but it can also be beautiful. It gives so many gifts, even when at the time they seem like blows to your chest. Hard lives are hard won.

Thankful for everything that has happened - the good, the bad and the ugly. If it hadn't of happened, I'd be a different man, in a different place, in a different set of circumstances. Maybe it would have been better, maybe it would have been worse. But it wouldn't have been me.

Night fall covers me, but you know the plans I'm making. Still overseas, could it be the whole world opening wide?
- View to a Kill, Duran Duran

It has been a busy few weekends past. First was my trip to the Paralympics, and then, with a friend from Canada in town, two weekends of day trips to Hampton Court Palace, Brighton, Canterbury and... um, this is a little embarrassing... The Harry Potter Studio tour. Actually, Harry Potter was surprisingly good, even though I haven’t read any of the books and only seen the first of the films.

Award winning beach, Brighton

Rose Garden, Hampton Court Palace

Canterbury Cathedral at Night

Dumbledore's office on the Harry Potter Studio Tour

Given all this activity, I decided to take it easy this weekend. I slept in, did some laundry and as a final activity got my haircut. I planned to grab some take-out chicken from Nando’s and head home for a Saturday night in.

My haircut finished up about 16:30, so a little early for dinner. Instead, I popped into a local pub to catch the end of the Saturday Premier League football. I had a couple of pints, watched the football scores come in and surfed the internet on my phone.

18:00 rolled around, so I decided to head home. Wandering out of the pub, a thought flashed into my mind. “I am enjoying visiting this country,” I thought, “I will miss it when I go home.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. “Wait a second,” I thought. “I am not a visitor here. I live here, just around the corner.”

It’s not the first time I have caught myself thinking like that. Thinking that this is just a temporary situation - a holiday away or a longer-term business trip. I still, after four years living here, sometimes find myself surprised at the fact that I really am living abroad.

The truth is, I don’t really feel like I am British. Certainly, legally I am not - not at least for another couple of years.

However, at some point I would have thought I would start to feel like I belong here.

This isn’t an externally driven feeling. The people of London who I know have never made me feel like I wasn’t welcome. I feel accepted here. I feel like I have a life here. I feel like people are happy to have me here.

But I don’t feel natural here. I don’t feel far outside, but I do feel like an outsider, just always outside of the circle of those who have lived in the UK all their lives.

I wonder if that ever goes away?

Without a way to connect my iPod to the rental car’s radio, I was forced to listen to the local radio. I tuned the radio to a classic 80s station. Wave Babies by Honeymoon Suite came on the radio as I made the turn off from the Queen Elizabeth Way (Niagara bound) to North Shore Boulevard.

If I hadn’t caught a glimpse of my receding hairline and grey-haired temples in the rear-view mirror, I could have sworn it was 1988 again, my teenaged years spent in this same town, driving these same streets and listening to this same music.

But, as Honeymoon Suite sung, just like summer, it is over too fast...

= = =

I flew back to Canada to visit with my family, and take care of some personal business. I stayed in the town where I grew up, Burlington, which is about one hour outside of central Toronto.

Despite only having left Canada 4 years ago and having been back a few times since, I hadn’t spent much time in Burlington since I moved away 15 years ago (originally to Toronto, and then to London). I had spent a few days, and the occasional overnight, but mostly had focused my Canada life on Toronto.

On this trip I spent 7 days and nights in Burlington, the longest I had been there in a very long time.

It was all so familiar, but at the same time, very different.

I ended up feeling like a tourist in the town I grew up in. A stranger in a familiar land.

It was partially the physical changes to the town - new buildings erected, old buildings torn down, new roads build. The constant turning of a corner and being surprised by what was there.

That was only a small part, though. When I lived in Burlington, I knew a lot of people. This was, of course, because when you are a teenager you know so many people in your local area. Everyone in your school and the place you work are likely from the area, so you have a wide social circle.

Now, though, I knew no one. In seven days, I didn’t see a single person I knew by chance. Even though I walked through the malls and the parks and ate in the restaurants of the town, I didn’t happen upon a single person who I knew without pre-arranging a meeting.

Mostly, though, the feeling was driven by the changes in the life of myself and my family. When I last lived here, my parents were both alive and lived in a house on a leafy street. I returned to a place where I have just a single parent, and he is going through the process of moving from his modern, waterfront condominium to a care home. My family is in the process of moving from having parents as caregivers to giving care to our parent.

When I say I was a stranger in a familiar land, there is a double meaning.

Not just familiar because I knew Burlington from my past, but also familiar in the sense "of my family." I am in the place where my family lives, but much changed since I lived here.

New places, new configurations, new structures. Physical, emotional and mental.

All change. Same place, but different.

I am local, and I am the foreigner.

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” - Heraclitus of Ephesus, c. 535 – c. 475 BCE.

When I first arrived in London, I got lost.

London's street layout has not changed much since the medieval era. They twist and turn, and there are many narrow little walkways and alleys to go down. I'd start out walking down a street, thinking I am heading east, and wind up heading off to the north, coming out somewhere completely unexpected.

Narrow London

Traffic in Islington on the Cally Road

Now getting lost in a new city is good fun, but if you are trying to make a life there, and get to appointments like job interviews or medical appointments, trying to find your way through the new streets in the quickest and fastest way possible without getting lost becomes important.

"I need a map," I said to myself.

I went into a local shop and said I wanted a map of London.

"Do you want a map, or an A to Z?" the clerk asked.

I had no idea what he was taking about. "A map," I replied.

"We only have A to Zs," he said.

I shrugged and walked out. It was only later the same day when I was in another book store, looking up at the London section, that I realized what an A to Z was.

Little and Big A to Zs

The A to Z (or in its written form, AZ) is a street atlas, in a booklet form. Back home in Toronto, we would have just called it a map, but here it goes by the name AZ.

AZ (that's A to Zed, my American friends) was a creation of the AZ map company, designed by Phyllis Pearsall. Back in the 1930s, Phyllis walked London street by street to create the first AZ, and named the map after the index at the back, an alphabetic list of every street in the capital. It, of course, seems completely and totally logical that something like this should exist, but back then it was a revolution.

The AZ took off, so much so that the description "A to Z" has come to mean any booklet form map. I own two AZs, though they are actually Philip's Street Atlases. I have a pocket sized one that I could carry around with me when I was out on the streets, and a larger one that sits at home on a shelf to be consulted in the comfort of my abode.

I used to carry the mini one around with me constantly, and would often consult it. Unlike in Toronto (whose streets are an understandable and easily navigated grid), where someone with a map out would be pegged as a tourist immediately, here in London the long time Londoner would take no shame in pulling out their AZ. All those windy streets, changing names every mile, with lots of little streets off them that run for only a few hundred yards. No one could really know it all (except the cab drivers, who must obtain "The Knowledge" (an understanding of where every street in London is) before being allowed behind the wheel of a black cab).

London's Twisty Streets

The AZ is such an institution, it inspires its fans. James May is a fan, as is Ham over at the London Daily Photo. The iconic east London blogger, The Diamond Geezer, has a whole series of A to Z posts, looking at the museums in the capital.

But the AZ is slowly disappearing. I stopped carrying my mini one around, and very rarely pull out the big one at home. It's been replaced, at home by the endlessly fascinating Google Maps, and out on the streets...

The New Maps

..the smart phone with GPS enabled. No longer do I pull out my AZ and then go through the process of staring at the street signs trying to place myself in the map. Instead, I pull out my phone, click on the "map" app, and wait while it "locates satellites." (Has it ever thought of looking up? The sky is full of them.)

The physical AZ still does have a soft spot in my heart, even if it doesn't have a place in my pocket when I head out into the streets of London. Getting my first one, and pouring over it trying to learn my new city will always be a key part of my becoming a Londoner.

While this weekend in London is focused on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, another celebration is also being observed, though perhaps by fewer people. In fact, as far as I know, I am the only one marking the occasion.

Four years ago, on the early morning of the June 4th, 2008, I landed at Heathrow airport, and soon thereafter was admitted as a resident of the United Kingdom. Thus, today, June 4th 2012, is my Linen Jubilee. I am thinking of going out to the local Debenham’s and buying myself some new sheets to celebrate.

Recently I was talking to someone at work who is also an emigre from another land. “How long have you been here?” she asked.

“Almost four years,” I replied.

“Oh, so that means you are here for good,” she said.

How had she determined that, I wondered. “Why would you say that?” I queried.

“Most people say if you have stayed in a place for four years, you’re bound to stay and not go back,” she replied.

I will admit that I have no plans to go back to Canada. When I first moved here to the United Kingdom, I always planned on staying for six years. Six years would give me enough time to run through my visa, one year of Indefinite Leave to Remain and then allow me to apply for citizenship.

Beyond that, though, I really had thought I would take advantage of my new status in the EU and probably pull up stakes and resettle somewhere in Europe. Perhaps Paris, which originally called me to move to Europe in the first place, or somewhere in Spain to brush up on my Spanish. Maybe I would move to Eastern Europe, settling into one of the fast growing Eastern European economies in their beautiful capital cities.

At the time I was filled with a wanderlust, and I really saw the move to Europe as a chance to fulfil that lust for travel in a different way.

Over the last four years, though, my thoughts have changed. Certainly the ongoing drama in the Eurozone is partially responsible for questioning if I really want to travel into the EU (if there is even one left in another two years). However, there is more than that. Settling abroad as an immigrant has quenched my thirst for travel. I no longer get the itchy feet I used to if I am at home for an extended period. In fact, now when I travel, though I still enjoy it, I am also looking forward to getting home.

Now I feel that getting a British passport is not just a gateway to further adventure somewhere else, but instead I see it as cementing my position here in the UK. It is about giving me the paperwork to match with my feelings - that London is now my home.

Sometimes I am surprised how settled and comfortable I feel in London, because it certainly hasn’t been an easy four years.

I’ve struggled with work, at first to find any job, and since finding employment, to find the right job. I’ve suffered from a lack of UK experience, both real and imagined on the part of my employers, and am only now getting back to a level I feel is similar to what I left behind in Toronto. I am certainly not financially better off since leaving Canada, with my salary basically staying flat over the past four years in a city which is more expensive than my previous home town of Toronto.

I left behind a set of friends in Canada, and came to the UK with no friends to call on. Trying to make friends in your late-30s and early-40s hasn’t been quick or easy, and there was more than a few times early on when I suffered from loneliness. Luckily now I have a growing group of friends to call on, and have something that could be called a social life now. But I still don’t have the number or diversity of friends here in the UK that I had back in Canada.

Hardest recently has been the fact that you are far away from family and friends. I must admit when I left Canada, I think I subconsciously thought that life would just stay still in Canada. That things wouldn’t change. But they do change. People get married, people get divorced. Children are born, and then grow into adults. People grow old, people get sick, and people die.

Being in London is being far away from it all. I am not there to give the level of support I’d want to give to those who need it, nor can I get that level of support from those back in Canada. Email and international calling provides some value, and my family has been excellent about keeping in touch, but electronic communications can’t replace seeing someone, feeling their touch or having a good hug.

Recently my father had surgery. Luckily I was able to take a week off work and fly back to Canada to be there for the surgery, but in the run up to the decision to have the surgery, and now I am back in London and he is recovering, I feel the distance strongly. Often, I wish I could be there in Canada with him - both to offer support to him and the rest of my family, but also so I was closer to what was happening, and to draw some comfort with being involved and fully informed of what is occurring. I find myself suffering from the stress of feeling impotent - of not being a part of what is happening back home.

Despite these struggles - excluding a few times when I thought that perhaps I would be better off packing up and heading back to Canada - I find myself bonding more and more with London. In the past when I lived in Toronto, when I suffered from hardships, I found myself turning to travel as the escape. Getting on a plane and heading somewhere new, I would find my worries floating away as soon as the cabin crew shut the main cabin door.

Now, though, when something in London is getting me down, I feel myself retreating not to another place, but to something different within London, be it a nice walk along the Thames, or a wander through the historic streets of Westminster, or a night out in the vibrant night life of this city.

Whether it is London itself, or just the experience of living abroad that is providing this comfort, I don’t know. Either way, it makes me feel good to be here.

So tonight I will raise a glass to my Linen Jubilee, and to London. To the last four years, and to many more ahead of me.

Long live the immigrant in me, and long live London.