The December Travel Book
Part One: Into The Unknown
‘When have I not been weary in winter time, or indeed anywhere when settled?’
Edward Lear
Chapter One: Putting on Drinking Boots and Spreading my Wings
There had to be something wrong.In the ratings of best places to live in the world, Toronto kept coming out top. Then why did I fi nd myself crying when I flew back there after Christmas? Landing at Pearson Airport, I stood outside and saw only bland colours and concrete. As I took the bus downtown, a woman yelled into a mobile phone, enormous trucks barrelled past on the highway and the huge maple‐leaf fl ag billowed in an icy January wind outside the Molson brewery, and I didn’t want to be there. Even my favourite view of the skyscrapers from the lakeshore didn’t make me happy.
I was renting an apartment on Fairview Boulevard, the top floor of a big old house in the east of the city. I’d just turned thirty and noticed my friends were beginning to buy houses. Perhaps living abroad kept me feeling like I didn’t need to grow up. Now I wondered glumly whether deep down I didn’t want to live in Toronto forever, and whether seven years was long enough to spend in a place you didn’t want to stay in. It wasn’t that I was particularly homesick for England, but ‐ I sighed, putting my bags down and the kettle on ‐ I was no longer sure if this road was leading where I wanted to go.
Stuck to the fridge door was a photo of the pretty village in green hills where I grew up and which we left when I was eighteen. I thought about how my mother was already bringing up two kids there by the time she was my age. I just had a mixed‐up accent, a continual reminder that I was at home nowhere, and still didn’t know what I wanted to make of my life.
I’d recently had such a run of rotten liaisons I was beginning to despair on that front. Not that I had any trouble meeting people, oh no. The previous summer there’d been someone utterly devoted, practical enough to build me bookshelves, rough around the edges but with quirky habits like playing the accordion, and his kids were delightful. But his surprise drug habit ‐ well, I’d spent an exhausting few months trying to get the guy into rehab and out of my life.
Meeting Mr Kim by Jennifer Barclay is published by Summersdale (paperback; £7.99). It is also available through amazon.co.uk and all good booksellers.
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