It's been a long and enjoyable seven days for me. Last Saturday we played at the pumpkin festival which was essentially outdoor fun with orange blobs here and there. Then an overnight flight to UK and two days walking around well tended gardens and battling thorns and stings in my own back yard. UK house is sold and we now have a paperwork mountain prior to completion. Great karma that we have sold it to a friend who asked us 5 years ago to let her buy it. Happy for us and for her. Many weeks of reading about tax and money transfers are in my future I reckon. Maybe we will be home owners again in 2016. Dunno, all too complicated with jet lag.
I spent 2 days at work in London, catching up with friends and not catching up with family. Travelling with work is full on, and meeting up with people who are 2 to 4 hours away is impossible. I imagine folks believe it's all nights out and plush hotels when infact its in bed by 8pm, laptop on, back to work. Not complaining, but increasing surprised by how little time I have away from work.
I enjoyed walking around in the drizzley rain, the silence, the beautiful manners and friendliness of people in shops and hotels. Love those Europeans with doctorates who sell coffee in Pret as that is better than being unemployed in Portugal. Everyone I spoke to had an aunt in Toronto but know one asked if I'd met them :-)
I didn't enjoy watching the news, with the party conferences. Hours about the rights and wrongs of having to pay 5p for a carrier bag. What the hell? Children are drowning in the Med. Winters coming and 800k people are living in tents in Germany. It's gonna get bloody cold for them very soon. I wonder what their views are on 5p carrier bags?
The news was so negative, so "problem to solve", so "defending our borders from job stealing foreigners". Maybe as a job stealing foreigner myself I am biased, but what I love about Canada is the " expand, evolve, grow" attitude that sits beneath the news stories. There are problems here too, no one is perfect, but it feels like people solve problems to create opportunities, not to lock things down and preserve the now.
On the C4 news they had a writer who took issue with a women in a hijab winning the Great British Bake Off. He felt that Britishness had been and was being diluted. Less than 5% of Europeans are Muslim, and many of those in the UK are 3rd and 4th generation.
What is "Britishness" anyway? A friend at work shared a Ted Talk video with us last week, about who you are. The speaker proposed that you are not "from" a country. You are from a set of experiences. You are local to those experiences. So whilst on paper I am a temporary British foreign worker in Ontario, Canada, I do not relate to the British people I saw on the news in UK. I am local to my community today and my community I had in England, local to artist friends across the world and to a Britain in the 1970s when my Grandparents told me stories of ww1 and ww2 and I wore flares and played outside and drank from hose pipes in the garden. I am local to the islands off Scotland where I felt a spiritual connection to the past; and to a small town in Spain where I can order my breakfast in perfect Spanish.
With a blog your supposed to end on a note that shows a purpose in the writing...not too sure what that is on this one other than I feel at home with people and not places. A friend remarked that I had posted on Facebook that I was flying home to Canada...I explained that I was in fact flying home to my husband and small person as they are my home.
Off to the apple orchard...
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