Category Archives: Dear Friends

Dear Friends,

I should apologise for the long gap between letters; the summer has been busier than I expected, and finding time to sit down and write to you all has been a lot more difficult than I expected.  Over the last few weeks, we have crammed in a lot of fun activities, including a visit from my family, and a holiday of our own.

It was great to have everyone here for three weeks, and I think it was particularly interesting for us to play the part of natives, and watch other people adjusting to the differences which we now more or less take for granted.  I wonder when it was that I stopped peering at  the change in my pocket, trying to remember which coin is which, and wondering why on earth the 5-cent one is bigger than the 10-cent one – it wasn’t until I watched other people doing it that I realised I no longer think about it.

Several times my passengers had to be gently redirected to the passenger side of my car, and I realised that I no longer do that, either – having to pretend that there was something really important I needed to look at on the passenger seat before sheepishly scurrying round to my own side of the car to drive off.

I can go into a Tim Hortons (and remind me to tell you about them one day) and order complex arrangements of hot and cold drinks, doughnuts, cookies and muffins, and get exactly what I wanted at the end of it, and I can barely remember the times when I just stood there and stared blankly at the staff while they asked me what I wanted.  I can even order lunch in any number of sandwich outlets and get more or less what I feel like, although I still haven’t worked out how to get cheese and nothing else in one; I like a challenge, though.

However, I can still be caught out by the language differences.  For example, I was cooking (yes, I cook!) the other night, and when I reached the part when the recipe asked for green onions, I knew what they were, but the instruction to grill the result sent me to the piece of kitchen equipment I have always called the ‘grill’.  However, what I was supposed to do was turn the barbecue on; what I did was ‘broil’ the chicken, and the result, although perfectly edible, was not quite what had been intended.

We now – thanks in part to the boys, who took to the task with great enthusiasm – speak in a kind of almost-Canadian, where we hardly ever get chips and fries mixed up, and pronounce ‘yoghurt’ in the way which doesn’t get us stared at when we order it.  But we still get caught out by things.

My most painful early experience was buying a wireless router for my office.  Now I know perfectly well that the North American pronunciation of this piece of kit is different to the way I’ve always said it (and, having worked in IT, I’ve talked about routers more often than most people).  So I was quite confident asking for one that I had got it right.  Unfortunately, I hadn’t really taken into account the fact that my accent throws people off in the first place; when I wasn’t understood, I tried the British pronunciation (“a rooter”); that merely confused matters further; in the end, I had to go and point to it; everyone in the store (not the ‘shop’; I can do that one now) staring at the back of my rapidly reddening ears.

So we have tried to say things the Canadian way, and I’m sure it has helped the boys settle in better; they talk to their team-mates about soccer cleats instead of football boots and it is only me who cringes inwardly every time I hear it – imagine how I felt last week when we had to go and buy some.

And then, just when you think you have got it, life throws up a word you simply cannot get from context or anything else.  For example, on the lists of equipment we needed to supply for going back to school were ‘duotangs’ in various colours.

Now, from the context, I could tell that it was a piece of stationery, and that it came in more than one colour, but beyond that I was stumped.  I tried first principles; it must have (or be) two of something, and presumably ‘tang’ doesn’t refer to flavour or Chinese dynasties, so maybe it means a metal spike of some kind.  Two metal spikes?  Staples, perhaps?  But why would I need only 6 of them, and all in different colours?

In the end, I had to ask the boys, who – once they had stopped laughing at their father – pointed me to folders – the kind of folder which has internal spikes for gripping on to holed paper.  Now comes the strange part – I used these folders most days of my working life for filing and sorting papers, but I cannot now remember what we called them.  It wasn’t ‘duotangs’, though.

Oh, and so much for my deductive powers – these folders have three ‘tangs’.

Still, in the end, and despite the language difficulties, the boys are ready to go back to school; they have all their oddly-named stationery items in their backpacks; I have figured out what our old morning routine was, and I’m pretty sure I can get them to their new classrooms with faces washed and teeth brushed, and then I’ll come back home, sink into my chair and start doing again whatever it was I was doing 9 weeks ago when we left off.

And although I’ll be glad to be back in the saddle, as it were, I will miss the long days of boys together  – that was, after all, one of the main reasons for making this big change.

I’ll let you know how we all adjust.

Richard

August 2006

Dear Friends,

Reading back over these letters, I notice that while I keep referring to ‘us’ and ‘we’, this has been a bit of a one-person narrative.  So I think the time has come to redress the balance a bit, and bring you up to date on what all the other members of our travelling band have been up to since we arrived, and how they are all settling in.

It has been a strange kind of process for us all, this adventure, because while everything has changed, in some ways, nothing has – we get up, we have breakfast, we go off to work and school, we come home, we have dinner, we do homework or housework, we go to bed.  That much is constant.  But of course, the roles have changed, and all the details from big (we’re doing this in a different country!) to small (the school day starts and ends earlier than it used to) have changed.  And the biggest single change is that Zoë and I have effectively swapped roles.

Living in the stressed-out south of England, my day tended to start a lot earlier than everyone else’s.  This ensured that I missed the worst of the traffic, which now I look at it from here sounds a particularly wrong-headed way to prioritise my life.  Now, we eat breakfast together most days, and Zoë is the one setting off to drive across town to her new job.  She is still a Speech and Language Therapist (only now she is a Pathologist rather than a Therapist), working at the Child Development Centre.  This has meant that she has had to adjust back to working from an office rather than from home, at the same time trying to adjust to the different Canadian ways of doing things (even the hole punches are different – trouble with stationery items is really the last thing you need when learning a new job!)

The most fulfilling part of her role is her outreach days – regular trips to Vanderhoof (an hour’s drive west of here) and the Robson Valley (two or more hours’ drive east).  These are giving her the satisfaction of discovering much more about the country and the people in it, while giving me the experience of trying to figure out how badly delayed she is likely to be by construction (or shopping!), so that I can serve dinner in a relatively unburnt state.

Yes, I’ve been cooking.  That’s a whole other letter on its own.

It as been quite a change for both of us; I did wonder at first how I would fill my days (once I had done the school run, the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping, the helping-with-homework and the soccer coaching, of course), but I find that the 8 or 9 minutes I have left at the end of each day just speed by.

For Zoë there has been the strange sensation of letting me just get on with things; routines which she had carefully constructed over 8 years of bringing up our children destroyed in a few short days of ‘doing it daddy’s way’.  To her credit, she hasn’t shouted at me much.  Yet.  And I’d just like to point out that it is not true that I sent the boys to school with only candy bars for lunch.

As for the boys, I have to say that they have been just superb.  This has been a huge change for them, and they have handled it really well.  They have been uprooted from everything they knew , leaving friends and family behind and not only adjusting to a new country where they can say ‘pants’ without anyone giggling, but also a new home and a new school.  I would in particular like to point out that Hart Highlands School has been fantastic, welcoming them with open arms and making us all feel part of the community.

They have both enjoyed school (as much as any small child can enjoy school, of course), and they have both found their classmates fun and friendly.  In addition, they have both been very active in youth soccer, and that has given them a whole other social outlet, as well as keeping them (and me) fit and active.

And I must apologise to my British readers – the game they play here is called ‘soccer’ – there is already a sport here called ‘football’ (although there isn’t a lot of ‘foot’ involved in it), and even that is subtly different from the kind played south of the border – it’s easier for everyone if we just call it ‘soccer’.  Sorry.

So, soccer has been a wonderful way to meet new friends, and the first half of the season culminated in a World Cup Final party to which I (as coach) invited all Cameron’s team-mates, and a great time was had by all (especially those of us supporting Italy).  I looked around our family room that day, full of excitable boys (and some excitable parents, too) – none of whom we knew three months ago – and I thought that we weren’t doing at all badly.

As for the final members of the travelling crew: the two cats, they have handled the change very happily.  Once they recovered from the indignity of being squashed into a plastic crate and flown halfway round the world, they have enjoyed all the space they have here, and as soon as we felt able to let them explore outside, they have been rewarding us with a constant stream of dead rodents.  This is, of course, their way of showing us that they love us.  Alternatively, it’s a subtle comment on the Canadian cat food market – I’m not sure which.

So, we’re settled, and now we have our first visitors from the place we used to call ‘home’.  My parents and sister have just arrived, and the next three weeks will be taken up with showing off all that’s wonderful about the place we now call ‘home’.  It already feels like we’re on to the next stage of the journey.

I’ll let you know how they get on.

Richard

July 2006

Dear Friends,

My passing comment last time about the road surface has clearly intrigued some of you; I shall expand.

Here in northern BC we have, as I may have mentioned, proper winters.  Winters where the temperature gets down low enough for the school to have a rule about not sending pupils outside when it gets below -20.  And, therefore, winters with snow, ice, frost and snowploughs (or is that plows?  I’m still not sure about Canadian spellings).

As I type this, the sun is beating down, I have all the doors and windows open (albeit with mosquito screens in place), the fans are on, and it’s difficult to imagine that the temperature ever drops low enough for frost, but it does.  I know that it does because I have to drive on the roads.

What seems to happen is that a designated point in late autumn (or fall), everyone changes over to winter tyres (or tires, if you prefer.  I promise that is my last spelling lesson for now).  Now, if you live in Britain and are as old as me, you may remember winter tyres; we used to have them back when we had winters.  Winter tyres are essential in this climate, however, but they are not particularly kind to road surfaces.  Add to that the fact that the temperature will tend to cause cracking in the road, and that there are snowploughs regularly scraping the top couple of millimetres of hardtop off along with the white stuff, and you can see why Prince George has a certain reputation for the quality of its roads – indeed, I’m sure I heard it being referred to on the radio as ‘the pothole capital of the world’, which may be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.

So when we arrived, we quickly noticed that certain roads were basically a series of potholes loosely connected by random patches of tarmac, and that there appeared to be no road markings at all.  And then I understood something I had read when we were here last year; that Canada has two seasons, Winter (with a capital W) and Construction.

Before any Construction can take place, however, first the roads have to be rediscovered.  In some places, this is quite easy, because the roads are those wide, sand-covered areas between the buildings.  In more rural areas (or in neighbourhoods like ours, where there are no sidewalks), it can be quite difficult to understand where the roadway ends and the rest of the world begins.  So, around the end of April, a concerted campaign begins to wash down and sweep the roads.  At the same time, conscientious homeowners are using all manner of power tools to remove a winter’s road grit from their front lawns; I’m afraid I was too busy moving in to participate this year, but I’ve got to get me a power broom for next spring!

Once the roads have been revealed, it will probably snow again, but only a little bit, and it soon melts.  Then the full extent of the damage can be seen – in most places, the road surface will still look like a normal road, but will give a particularly brutal massage to the unwary; in others, there will appear to be a very real danger of losing your car down one of the holes; it’s one reason to be glad of the size of North American cars.

So please do not underestimate our achievements in passing our driving tests; we may not have done them in the depths of winter, when it is possible not to be able to see the road signs because of the depth of the snow, but we learned and passed in spite of the holes.

And we learned in spite of the lack of road markings.  Now in some places, the lack of markings appears to be deliberate – I’m not sure what the criteria are for an intersection to be unmarked, but it’s relatively common, and everyone just gets on with it – there’s not exactly a lot of traffic here at the best of times, and there are places where you genuinely feel you may be the only car to pass that way today, or even this week, so road markings which are going to be scraped away and worn off would just be a waste of time anyway.

But there were many places in town, at busy intersections or tricky-looking crossings where there had been markings, and there was just enough vestigial paint remaining to make you unsure what you were supposed to do; was that faint line white or yellow?  You can cross one of them but not the other, so it’s kind of important to know.

Also, pedestrians have an unnerving tendency to step out on front of you.  This is generally true in Canada in any case, but here it is exacerbated by the fact that they know there is a crossing here; it’s just invisible at the moment.  You, on the other hand, have no idea where the crossings were before the weather did its worst, so you end up driving around town at a crawl with the haunted look of the man who cannot take any more pedestrian abuse.

All of which sounds much more curmudgeonly than is intended; it’s not really anyone’s fault that the road crumbles (although I wonder what high-tech surfaces may be available these days, and what the long term cost-benefit analysis would be on using them; but only when I have trouble sleeping) – it’s just a fact of life in this part of the world.  The road keeps on crumbling, the authorities keep replacing and repainting it, and we the driving population keep swerving to avoid the worst of the damage, even after it has been repaired, so that we appear to be a city of cross-eyed drivers.  It probably makes everyone who has to pay for their own suspension repairs a little bit more cautious, and in the end that may not be a bad thing.

I promise to talk about something non-road related next time!

Richard

June 2006

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to report that I have at last been able to retire my passport.  I don’t mean that I don’t ever intend to travel abroad again, or that I no longer need a UK passport thanks to having become Canadian; it’s just that, since we arrived here, my passport has been my primary method of identifying myself, and I no longer need it to prove that I am who I say I am.

I imagine there is still lively and energetic debate going on in Britain about the ID card situation, and I’m not particularly sorry to be missing it.  Canada has an ID system, but one you would all recognise – it’s called the driver’s licence.  For most people, and in most situations, your driver’s licence is what you are required to produce when you have to identify yourself.

And that happens surprisingly often.  I have been asked for ID at the post office, the bank, the supermarket (when applying for a frequent-shopper card, not because you need ID to buy avocados), when collecting my new computer from the delivery company, any time I have been buying anything large or expensive, and every time I have had to fill in a piece of official documentation.  And Canada – or this part of it, at least – has a lot of documentation.  I have worked with Italians; I know all about bureaucracy and paperwork, but Canada runs Italy close for the amount of paper involved in doing anything – I even have had paperwork through the post for an entirely online transaction; I downloaded some software, paid for it electronically, installed it on my computer, used it happily for several days, then received a paper confirmation of the whole thing.

Given how often I have had to produce it, then, you can imagine how tired I was becoming of handing people my passport when they were expecting a driver’s licence, and how many times I have had to explain that, no, I don’t have a BC one yet, and yes I will have to sit a test before I get one, and yes, a passport is proof of identity, honest.

From all of which you may gather that I have now passed my dreaded driving test, and I am in possession of a credit card-sized piece of plastic which proves that I am who I claim to be (and even says I have brown hair, when I thought what I had was invisible hair!)

In the end, the test was as comfortable as such a thing could be; I have, after all, been driving perfectly competently for 25 years, and hardly ever hit anything, so I should be able to prove my ability without too much trouble.

And so it proved.  But before getting to the test, I had to adjust to the BC driving experience, which was much more of a challenge than the test itself.  First of all, and most obviously, Canada, unlike many Commonwealth countries, drives on the right.  Now, I have had plenty of experience of driving in Italy, which prepared me for this, and it was only a matter of a few hours before I was remembering where my mirror was, and what side the handbrake was on.  Unfortunately, driving in Italy is so completely different from driving here that, in all other respects, it was completely useless to me.  For example, in Canada, speed limits, while not universally respected, are at least acknowledged and paid heed to; lane markings serve to separate lanes of traffic, rather than decorate the road surface, and stop signs cause traffic to come (more or less) to a halt.  And there are a lot of stop signs.  Italy has become infested in recent years with the British invention, the roundabout – here they have 4-way stops.

I won’t pretend otherwise – the 4-way stop is a truly terrifying beast to the British driver.  Until quite recently, I was expecting everyone else on the road to drive in the British ‘me first’ style; it took a long time to realise that other drivers at 4-ways were actually waiting for me because it was my turn!  I carefully read all the rules for these intersections, but I’m afraid I still am not clear what happens if four vehicles arrive simultaneously – presumably, they all wait until one of them decides that progress is more important than being polite.

Other hazards awaiting the unwary Brit include the very sensible, but equally scary, ‘right on red’ rule, where you can legally go through a red light if you are turning right, there are no pedestrians in the way (pedestrians rule here), and you feel brave enough.  It is, I have been reliably told, perfectly legal to go left on a red if you are turning on to a one-way street; perhaps I’ll leave that until the day I no longer feel like I am breaking the law just by turning right.

Possibly the biggest difficulty I have faced (apart from the road surface, which I will return to when I’m feeling braver!) is the school zone.  Now this is a very sensible invention, whereby areas around schools are protected by a 30kph speed limit, which is to say, traffic is supposed to go at only very slightly above a light jog. Often in a school zone, I have been overtaken by elderly ladies walking arthritic dogs.

The school zone is announced by a luminous sign, which is difficult to miss; if ever anyone is pulled over for speeding in a school zone, there can be no excuse about not having seen the sign; it remains burned into the retinas for several minutes.  However, there is no sign announcing the end of the school zone – instead, one is supposed to look out for the back of the sign for opposing traffic.  Which is often behind a tree, lamp post or arthritic dog.  I am genuinely surprised not to see more people trundling along for miles at 30kph, searching in vain for the back of a sign on the other side of the road.

Despite all of the above, the test was passed with no real problems (apart from inexplicably clipping the curb before my 3-point turn); I even got an ‘Excellent Job!’ written on my form.  And now I have proof that I can drive as well as proof that I really do look like this.

RIchard

June 2006

Dear Friends,

We passed a test last weekend.  Not the driving test, that’s still to come – the whole subject of driving here is being left until that particular trial has passed – but a test of what you might call residence; an indication of how we are settling in to life here..

Last weekend was a holiday weekend; I imagine that most, if not all, countries have at least one long weekend in May, and Canada’s excuse is Queen Victoria’s birthday.  No, I don’t know why, but it seems to be a typically Canadian thing to do. People asked me if Britain celebrates it, and I had to confess that although we have two May holidays, they celebrate the beginning of May, and then, much later, the beginning of spring.  Now I read it, that doesn’t really make much sense to me either.  I have tried to explain the phenomenon of local holidays, but I’m getting tired of watching people’s eyes glaze over.

So, we had a long weekend, and we thought it was about time we got out and started to explore this country.  We have almost completed all the major furniture purchases (although I’d better get on and buy a barbecue before the summer is over!), and the soccer season took a break for the holiday, so we were free to do what we wanted.

If I’m honest, we really needed a break, too. I think I sometimes give the impression in these letters that this has all been relatively plain sailing, and that we are just swimming serenely on, but of course, there are stresses and strains, and even though our new routine is only a few weeks old, we really needed a change from it.

So we decided to go to Jasper.  Since we arrived, we have been tantalised by glimpses of the Rockies in the distance (or what we assumed were the Rockies; it’s remarkably difficult to get one’s bearings in a new geography), and Jasper is the place – we were told by many people – to get the authentic mountain experience.  It’s not that far, our friends would tell us – just a short hop, really – and full of interesting and exciting things to do.

Here we come to one of the key differences between our two countries.  A short hop in Canadian terms is equivalent to driving from our old house in the south of England to Carlisle – a journey which would take half a day, and use some of the busiest roads in Europe, passing several major cities on the way.  Here, we set off early on Saturday morning, and once we were out of the environs of Prince George, did not pass another major (or even minor) road, never mind city, town or settlement, for over 2 hours.

Eventually, the town of McBride loomed into view through the rain.  Yes, it was a long weekend; it rained, what did you expect?  McBride is where things got really Canadian.  For a start, all the sidewalks – and many other things – were painted blue, and to explain why would take longer than I have space for.  Enough to say that it’s about hockey, and I’m only beginning to understand how deeply hockey lives in the Canadian psyche.  We stopped at the railway station for a snack – the station has been converted into a kind of museum-cum-gift shop-cum-restaurant, although it still functions as a station as well – and wondered when we were going to see any mountains.

As we pressed on, we passed Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, although what we saw was cloud and rain.  Eventually, we made it over the Yellowhead Pass and down into Jasper.

This was our first experience of another province, and because all the license plates on the vehicles are different, and the town itself is kind of alpine-looking, and therefore quite different to Prince George, we felt for a while that we were in another country – it really was like being abroad.  We parked, and explored, and the rain began to ease, and then we came to our big test.

Naturally, when people hear our accents, we become objects of curiosity (although in a nice way), and there are a regular set of questions we expect; first of which is always “So, where are you folks from?”  Until now, this has led to lengthy discussions about the UK (no, not the Ukraine!) or Britain, or the difference between England and Scotland, and more often than not, the follow-up question “So, are you the guy who’s writing in the paper?”

However, we were in a shop in Jasper, we felt like we were on holiday, and when the question was asked this time, Zoë said “Prince George”.

And I realised it was true – we’ve been here since the beginning of April, when there was snow on the ground, and now the summer is almost here; the boys are about to finish their strange, disjointed, school year, and we do come from Prince George now  We’re a long way from being natives, we’re even a long way from being entirely comfortable with simple things like the language differences (and remind me to write about that sometime), but it feels like we’ve passed stage 1 of our adventure; we’re here, and it doesn’t feel odd to say that we live here now.

The rest of the weekend was wonderful; Jasper is a great place, and the sun came out.  We walked on a glacier (and fell into it); we got higher up a mountain than any of us has ever been before, and on the way home, we saw black bears grazing at the side of the road, which is kind of what we’d been hoping for.

We even saw Mount Robson without the cloud surrounding it: they have big mountains here.

Or should I say, we have big mountains here?

RIchard

May 2006

Dear Friends,

It’s hard to believe, but we have now been in our new house for a month.  We’re still buying things for it, and working on it – this weekend, I finally installed the cat flap, so now the cats can come and go as they please: we’re expecting to be woken by one of them trying to drag a moose in through the door, but at least we can reclaim some of our laundry room, which has been the cats’ own territory since they arrived.

I know that I am a homeowner again, because I have chores to do – laundry, vacuuming, dusting and so on.  It no longer feels like a holiday, it feels normal.  Well, mostly normal; there are some things about living in the Canadian style which still feel unfamiliar to us, and there are some which we may never get used to.

For example, we have no fences around our property, and no sidewalk outside.  Yet this is a normal, suburban street – we have neighbours at either side, there are all the normal utilities and so on, we don’t live in the wilderness.  It’s just that some things are different.  Having no sidewalk (I can’t call it pavement, because that refers to the road surface, and the road surface is a whole other topic I’ll get round to in another letter) means that we walk to and from school in the roadway, which in turn promotes more careful driving habits than we’re used to, and – I think – a greater appreciation for road safety than our children are used to.

Where we lived in England, we were used to sharing the narrow streets with fast-moving vehicles, and I was used to having to watch the boys every step as we walked to school, but here there seems to be a better balance.  The layout of the streets means that the pedestrian has more expectation of priority, and seems generally to get priority – it’s a wonder to me that more Canadians aren’t killed while on holiday in Europe; just try stepping in front of a turning car on an intersection in London!

So, externally, the house looks different, and internally we have much more space than we are accustomed to.  On our first visit to the house, the boys set off exploring while we chatted in the family room, and after a while, I thought I should go and look for them.  The result felt like going for a walk inside my own house – several flights of stairs, seemingly endless corridors and any number of rooms which they could have got lost in.  It’s not just that the rooms are generally bigger than we were used to; there are so many of them.  We still have two entire rooms – which will eventually become our living and dining rooms – which we simply do not use yet.  We don’t have furniture for them yet, and we don’t need to use them.

The chat in the family room was with the previous owner of our house.  We have been extremely lucky with this purchase; not only did we buy from people who had themselves gone through the process of emigrating from England, and orienting themselves in this place, but we bought from people who have been unfailingly friendly and helpful, and that has made the whole process much easier than it could have been.

As most of you will know, the process of buying and selling property in England (and I exclude Scotland from this deliberately) has become increasingly adversarial.  Our own sale, which should have been straightforward, turned into an agony of waiting, bargaining and threats sadly familiar to many people these days.  We consider ourselves lucky to have escaped from the process with more or less the amount of money we had asked for, and only a week later than planned.  The possibility that the sale could have fallen through less than a week before we flew out still gives me sleepless nights, and our situation was not unusual, or even particularly bad.

In contrast, from the first contact we had with them, Andrew and Janet, and their family, made us feel welcome, and that we were all on the same side.  Even as I grew more and more nervous about the late arrival of the funds, they kept telling us not to worry, that it would all be resolved.  And it was.

But I’m saving the best until last.  I almost didn’t tell this tale, because I don’t think it’s a typical Canadian situation, but it’s too good a story to miss.  Before we arrived, Andrew and Janet invited us to a party.  Said party to be held in the house we were about to buy, the weekend before we were due to move in.  We accepted somewhat bemusedly, and turned up on the Saturday night not entirely sure what to expect.  What we got, of course, was the most perfect introduction to a new house that it is possible to imagine.  We had the chance to see the house in use, as it were, not just as a kind of museum piece, which is how most houses for sale are presented, and we got the precious opportunity to meet all our new neighbours.  I’m not sure if we were sizing them up, or if they were sizing us up, but it was a fantastic experience, and the perfect way to get to know people.  I think I should start a campaign to have a ‘handover party’ included in every property sale.

Then I think of the English system – mixing a contentious sale, where either party could still pull out, with alcohol and loud music might not be the best idea I’ve ever had.  But it worked for us; after we’d seen the house full of people enjoying themselves, how could it not?

So, thank you to Andrew and Janet (and best wishes in your new home) and although our transaction was not exactly typical, it somehow seems right in keeping with everything else we’ve experienced so far – surprising, fun and welcoming.

Richard

May 2006

Dear Friends,

I’m writing this sitting at our new kitchen table.  The boys are settled in the family room behind me, watching a ‘Star Wars’ DVD, and I’m able to look out the window at rain falling gently on our back garden – a garden which very quickly becomes woodland as it slopes away behind the house.  It does feel good to be here now, although there is still some way to go before we will be able to call ourselves ‘settled’.

Our ‘new’ kitchen table is, in fact, one of the few things which we haven’t bought new.  It was actually bought at a garage sale a few doors down our new street, and in a transaction somehow typical of the first few weeks here, it was bought from a teacher at the boys’ new school; a woman from Dundee.  I had always assumed that there would be a British expat community here, and by extension, a Scottish one, but it has been truly remarkable how many Scots we’ve met in the first few days – our neighbour wasn’t even the first person from Dundee we’d met.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is a small town where everyone knows each other, but sometimes it’s hard to shake off that feeling – it took us about two days before we started bumping into people we knew.  Prince George is, in fact, a city of around 80,000 people, but it is also a community in a way that a similar sized British city would not be.  I think that this is partly because it is remote from other large towns, and partly because there seems to be a natural sense of  community here; as I have already mentioned, people are friendly and welcoming; this gives a clear sense of  being part of something, even as newcomers.

This has been brought home to me most clearly by my brushes with fame – as you know, these letters are being published in the local newspaper, and not a day has yet gone by without someone asking me if I’m ‘that guy from the paper’.  This is a curious sensation; for all the time I was in paid employment, however well I did my job, no-one ever stopped me to ask if it was really me.  It is obviously gratifying to be recognised and complimented, but there’s more to it than that – it gives me a feeling that there is a real continuity in this city – not only is there a daily local paper, but there is a clear impression that most people read it, or are at least aware of what is in it, and therefore knows what is happening in their city, and having come from an environment where people seemed to be becoming more disconnected by the day, that is a welcoming prospect.

I’d like to tell you that we have spent most of our time since we arrived getting to know people and settling in, but the truth is that having arrived with a grand total of 6 suitcases to our names, we have mostly been shopping.  I imagine that, taking the global economy into account, you’d expect me to say that shopping in one country is very much like shopping in any other, but there are certain observable differences, some of them very definitely Canadian.

I suppose the most obvious of them is that Canada is a bilingual country.  This is not readily apparent in the middle of British Columbia – we are almost as far away from Québec as you are – but while you don’t hear French spoken on the streets, you do encounter it in the shops.  Everything – and I do mean everything – is labelled in both languages, which does bring you up short if you are looking for baked beans, and all you can find is a row of ‘Fèves’.  It’s probably too early to tell what the average Prince George shopper thinks of having everything in two languages, but as an outsider, it seems to me that this situation has an unusual impact.

Without the French language on everything, it would be extremely easy for manufacturers simply to view Canada as part of the US; to run Canadian operations from the same office and in the same way as those for Houston, Texas or Boston, Mass.  Because there is a legal requirement to do things differently here, there is a subset of the global economic juggernaut which is uniquely Canadian, and it seems to me that it helps to foster a sense of Canadian identity.  It may not be a universal point of pride that there are two languages on the shelves at Save-On-Foods, but it is a unique selling point.

There is another obvious difference to the Canadian supermarket experience.  If your shopping list contains both cat food and beer, you will be visiting two retail outlets.  There is no alcohol whatsoever for sale in the grocery stores (and they’re ‘stores’, not ‘shops’: shops are something else entirely).  This takes a little getting used to for the Brit who is used to buying everything from malt whisky to car insurance at Tesco.  It feels ridiculously inconvenient to me, of course, but judging by the shocked faces when I explain the British way of doing things, I wonder if there isn’t something to be said for it.

If you do want to buy beer, then, you’ll have to visit a liquor store.  Now, I don’t know about you, but this expression conjures up all sorts of images for me.  Or it used to – I braved one of these exotic sounding places, only to discover that it’s just an off-licence.  A very big, government-operated off-licence, but that’s what it is.  There are privately run operations, but they have to buy their alcohol at the price the government outlets sell it at.  The fact that there are any profitable independent liquor stores gives me great faith in human nature.

I’m at the end of another letter home, and I haven’t even got to coupons, never mind the lack of online home shopping.  And there’s so much more to tell you, as well.  It’ll have to wait until next time.

Richard

April 2006

Dear Friends,

Well, we’re here.  I’m afraid the idea of doing one of these in transit was never likely to take off; there really was too much going on at any given moment.  Indeed, this is the first chance I have had to sit down and think about what we’ve done since we arrived in Canada, and it is – of course – early in the morning, and I’m unable to sleep.  That much, at least, hasn’t changed.

I think the first thing to say is that the weather is not at all what we expected, and not what we had packed for.  It has been uniformly sunny and warm since we reached Prince George, and there is really very little snow left on the ground, at least in the city.  What snow there is looks grimy and frozen, but at least we have proof that we will have some serious snow next winter.  Having said that, the locals have been complaining that winters have been ‘mild’: rarely getting below -20, and hardly worth the effort of getting the skis out.  I’m sure it will feel plenty cold enough for us, though.

So, what are the first impressions of Canada?  Having been here before, there are certain things we knew to expect, but even so, it can take you by surprise.  For example, I have been regularly coming back into Britain over the past 18 months from various European airports, and even as a native with a valid passport, I generally have felt myself to be under the suspicion of the surly immigration officials; they don’t acknowledge you, they try to stare you down, and the most you might get is a mumbled ‘thank you’ as they look for the next victim.  We arrived at Vancouver airport on Monday evening, it was around 2am by our body clocks and we had two tired children in tow.  In addition, we were not simply arriving, showing passports and moving on; we had forms to present and documents to collect.

The welcome we got was friendly, warm and interested.  We were looked after and helped, both at the passport desk, and at the immigration desk.  The process was somewhat long-winded, with four of us to process, but was completed in a way which made us feel welcome, and made us feel that we were in an entirely new country, one where they do things in a more civilised way.

The most obvious difference between Canada and the UK is that everyone you meet is pleased to see you, and interested in you.  It takes some time to understand that your waiter showing you to your table in the restaurant or the clerk at the car hire desk is initiating a conversation by asking how you are, not just reading the bit in the script where it says ‘be polite to your customer’.  I am finding it difficult to overcome that Brit reticence, and not just mumble ‘OK’ while staring into the middle distance.  I’ll get there, but it is a bit of a culture shock.

Our first few days here have felt uneasily like being on holiday – I think partly because the last time we were here, we were on holiday, and partly because any change in routine will have that effect.  To offset this, we have been making sure that we do some practical things each day – registering ourselves for Social Insurance, visiting the boys’ new school, buying some practical items we will need for when we move in.

Because we are not yet in our own new home, this activity is interspersed with more eating out than we would normally do, and more driving around looking at things.  This just adds to the holiday atmosphere, however, and we all feel that we need to be in a place we can call our own as soon as practical.  Like it or not, routine is what we really need right now.

At the moment, we are living in the basement of our friends’ house.  This will, I am sure, conjure up some odd pictures for those back home, but here comes another of those cultural differences.  Over here, basements tend to be part of the living space – indeed, the rooms we’re sleeping, playing and working in at the moment are easily as comfortable as the equivalent rooms in our old home.  And because Prince George is hilly (I’d go so far as to say steep in places), basements need not necessarily be underground, so you need not worry; we have not become a family of cave-dwellers!

The reference above to our former home is something I typed with some relief.  After what has seemed like months of struggle, we have at last shaken off the last of our UK encumbrances, namely the mortgage; sold our house to a very nice family, who will, we’re sure, be as happy in it as we were, and therefore freed up the required funds to buy all the things we need in Canada.  Like a house, and a car or two.

The house purchase should be completed in the next week, and all manner of things will become easier then, once I have an address to call my own – quite apart from anything else, I can never remember the address of the house we are lodging in, and this has made several transaction appear somewhat strange; I can feel people suppressing the desire to ask me why I don’t know where I live.

It has only been a few days, but already I have a number of stories to tell; of supermarkets and used car salesmen; of banks and solicitors; of schools and houses, and not least, of being stopped and asked if I’m the guy who is writing in the paper.  But the stories of my fame will have to wait for the next letter; it’s still a busy time for us all, and I’m sure there are things I should be doing instead of writing to you.

Thanks to all who have sent good wishes, I’d like to assure you that we’re doing well and enjoying this part of our new lives.  Still, it will be nice when it settles down a bit.

Richard

April 2006

Dear Friends,

There are all manner of clichés in my head about the passage of time at the moment.  These letters have not been quite as frequent as I imagined they would be, nor have they been as much on the carefully planned topics as I thought they would be.  Still, I’m writing them, so I’m getting something right.

As I type, the dawn chorus is chirping merrily outside the window behind me.   It’s around 5 in the morning, and no civilised hour for doing this kind of thing.  However, the truth is that with only a few days to go now, the realities have hit, and we’re both waking early, minds racing.  Is it the amount of detail still to be covered which is waking us, or is it the mixture of fear and excitement at the prospect of what we are about to do?  A little of both, I suspect, but however I look at it, this is not the ideal preparation for living in the Pacific time zone.  In two weeks time, if our sleep patterns remain the same, we will be crashing out in the early afternoon, and waking mid-evening.  Neither of us had planned on working night shifts, so this may turn out to be a little inconvenient.

With any luck, this will cause us to reach Vancouver still awake, and then sleep for 12 hours, starting the process of resetting our body clocks at the same time.  Certainly, the final leg of the journey, a one-hour hop to Prince George, which we will do the day after we arrive in Canada, will go better if we’re a little more rested.

Prince George, then, is but an hour’s flight from Vancouver.  This will, I hope, act as encouragement for those of you planning to visit us in the future.  Those of you not planning to visit us will have all kinds of psychological pressure applied to you over the coming weeks and months until you crack, and we turn into a one-family tourist drive for the Northern Interior.

I hope that the simple fact of the flight time will put the geography in context for you. As I have been explaining to people over the last few months where we are going, I have almost universally been met with the response “Oh, Vancouver is lovely!”  Well, yes, it is.  However, it’s analogous to moving to northern Scotland, and continually being told how lovely London is.  Although we will be an hour from one of the world’s great cities, we’ll be in a city of our own, a full day’s drive away.

I promised you an impression of Prince George in one of my previous letters, but never quite got round to it. I’ll do my best now, but be prepared for all my opinions to change once we’ve been there for some time.

If you research PG (as everyone seems to abbreviate it), the most common words you will encounter are ‘pulp’ and ‘mill’.  This has the effect of setting up some particular preconceptions, which I think need to be tempered a little.  If you research my home town, Aberdeen, you will keep turning up the expression ‘oil industry’, but there is a lot more to Aberdeen than oil, and there is a lot more to Prince George than wood.

Which is not to downplay the number of trees, because there are a lot of trees around the city.  And as you drive towards it, the number of logging trucks on the road increases until it comes as something of a surprise to see any other kind of commercial vehicle.  And yet, so much of the city’s needs must be served by road; I wonder if my impression is influenced by what I know of the place?  Certainly, there are yards full of timber (or is it lumber?  I will need to get the terminology straight), just as there are yards full of drilling equipment in Aberdeen.  And then there is the other 90% of the city, which is not preoccupied with trees.

My immediate impression of the place, driving into it from the south, was that this is a working town.  As with many places around the world, the outer edges of the main roads are filled with industry.  It’s logical and inevitable, but it can colour one’s first impressions.   However, as you descend into the centre (and you have no option but to descend; the city is often described as being in a ‘bowl’, and there really is no better word for it), things become more suburban, then more urban.

To the European eye, the surprise, I suppose, is the newness of everything.  Yes, we have our shopping malls and modern houses, but the only things here which were not built in the 20^th century were built in the 21^st.  And there’s an almost indefinable ‘North American’ feel to it – this is hard to explain, but given that by the arrangement of the roads, you couldn’t be in the UK, you equally couldn’t be anywhere in Europe, either.  It’s just different.

As you drive around, you see the unfamiliar – hotel names, schools, shops – alongside the familiar; global brands which exist in every town in Europe as well as here.  And you see things, like yellow school buses, which are iconic and familiar but only through film and television; there’s a strange sense of being at home somewhere although it’s all different.

The traffic is very North American, too.  Slow-moving to those of us who have spent time driving in Italy recently, and big.  Despite my preconceptions, there are plenty of what we would recognise as family saloons around, but there are also very many larger vehicles – SUVs, minivans, pickups, and other unfamiliar types – which are also family vehicles.  We know about winter in these parts, but there really isn’t the sense that everyone drives huge off-road vehicles with studded tyres.  Mind you, we were there in September; perhaps it’s all different in January.

The one thing I know for sure is that these impressions are all about to change.  However, it’s useful to have a benchmark to come back to in a few months, when all will be familiar, and photographs from ‘home’ will begin to seem exotic and strange.

That’s it for preamble, friends.  The next time you hear from me, we’ll be either in transit or in situ.  In spite of the stress, we’re really looking forward to it.

Richard

March 2006

Dear Friends,

Another day, another airport lounge, it seems at the moment.  I think it’s an effort by my current employer to squeeze the last few ounces out of their pound of flesh, but, in truth, I don’t mind – the daily routine is beginning to drag a little now, with so much else going on, and I’m happy to break it up and at the same time – allowing for the normal delays involved in these things – tie up some important things before I leave.  I’m trying not to think of it as my legacy, but there are certainly things which would be better resolved by me than left for whoever comes along behind me.

It has been cold these last few days, and it has got me thinking about the change we’re about to make.  Every time I look at the weather for Prince George (it’s early March at this writing), the temperature reading has a minus sign in front of it, and while it’s part of the thrill of this – experiencing new extremes – it’s also something of a worry; will we really cope if a temperature of 3 or 4 degrees allied to a stiff wind has us huddled round the fire?

Everyone we talk to about it tells us confidently that people dress for it there; they know what to expect, and how to deal with it, and I’m sure that’s true, but I was standing in the drive loading boxes into Zoë’s car on Saturday morning – another round of goods and chattels being sold off to the highest bidder – and I was cold.  Properly cold, and I’d have said I was dressed for it. Still, it’s also (by all accounts we’ve heard) a different kind of cold, not informed by the damp air inevitable, given that we live on an island.  Only time will tell.

We’ve also been talking to some British expats in Prince George, who make the same noises.  This is a particularly exciting development, because in the space of a week, we have gone from despairing that we’ll ever find a rental property to live in while we hunt for a home to having an offer accepted to buy a property which fits our requirements exactly; a house which we’ll be able to move into less than two weeks after we get to P.G.  If it sounds unlikely to you, imagine how it feels to us.

When we were over in September, we spent some time driving around the town looking at neighbourhoods (I think I’m supposed to call them subdivisions, but this distinction is on the list of things I need to learn), and we identified one in particular we liked.  It has a good school, which is key (and is recommended by our friends whose children went there), it has all the necessary conveniences and it’s exactly the kind of place we’d imagined when we first had this idea of heading for a new life.  As we drove round, Zoë took notes, and afterwards we identified one street out of all the ones we had been in which would be the ideal.

No houses ever came up for sale on this street, however, and we kept considering other options.  In the end, there are plenty of good places to live, and we would have been happy in any number of them.  We were also in no particular hurry; the proper thing to do is surely to get out there and then buy something – you can’t do this online.

Except, of course, you can.  Our friend alerted us to a house being sold privately on the very street we most liked; we investigated, pondered, tried to find the catch.  In spite of the fact that it has been one of the drivers behind this whole move, I still cannot accept that we will sell our house here, pay off our not insubstantial mortgage, buy a new house which is significantly bigger, furnish it, buy all the electronic devices a house full of boys could possibly want, buy two cars, and still be wondering how to invest the remainder.

There was no catch.  We offered, negotiated, and were accepted.  We’ve never set foot in the place (although I’m sure we’ve driven past it), but we’re about to become its owners.  Strange doesn’t begin to cover it.  Now, of course, the deal is not yet done – Canada appears to work in the civilised way which the Scots among you will recognise, where a handshake will seal the deal; we haven’t yet developed a method for shaking hands electronically.  But a lot of the pressure we were feeling has gone.  There will be a two week period where we will be effectively homeless, and we can’t sleep in friends basements for all that time, so this has to be addressed, but the biggest single issue has been resolved.

Now the real planning starts.  We’ve been amateurs so far, making general plans about things, doing the urgent ones, getting by on the reserves of time we still feel we have.  Now, it’s not so flexible.  We have only a couple more weekends in this country; we have a long list of things which have to be done, and we now have a calendar with detailed actions for each of us itemized by day.  We still have cars to sell, things to pack, cats to transport, friends to say goodbye to, utilities to wind up, and several dozen others, some of which have probably not even occurred to us yet.

It’s busy, and it’s going to get busier.  And one day it will be over, and we will be living a sedate suburban life in an entirely different country.

Except, how can sedate and suburban be enough any more?  I get the feeling our lives are about to expand.  I don’t know if all things are possible, but more things certainly are.

Richard

March 2006