Scribbling #42: The Big Move (Part One)

This is not a blog post about being able to move abroad.  That you’re going to have to look up in a book that relates to the country that you’re going to.  Or some sort of website.  But not the phone, since people in immigration are usually very busy and there is a very high probability that a citizen of your favourite new country will be very rude to you, making you wonder why you’re bothering in the first place.  On this note, do not move to France, because everybody is rude, never mind the immigration authorities.

No, this is a post that details my experience of moving abroad – again – and this time from the UK to the literally great nation of Canada.  After all the boring stuff had happened, such as making sure that we had enough money, waiting for ages for the visa to come through, feeling that you were stuck in a waiting room marked ‘life’, thinking that it would be a good idea not to bother since our lives seemed to be working out all right, thank you – once that was all out of the way, I had to pack up the house.  My parents, who were kind enough to let our family stay at theirs while we slowly counted down to flight day, well, they lived *here*, while I lived *here*.  This turned out to be a daily routine that lasted from 7am to 2am because our house was a rental. 

Put kids and Crayola together, and you quickly find out that said stationary is never used on paper.  Put a young toddler in a carpeted room, and there will be excrement that has irrevocably stained the shag pile.  Stuff accumulates.  Stuff needs to be re-painted, cleaned, etc.  Otherwise you’re going to be mauled for fines because you’ve left a bit of fluff next to where the fridge was standing before you sold it.  At least, that’s what our big and scary rental agreement said, anyway.  From this, you’re wanting a clear out, so friends, family and Help the Wizened Wise Sages all get to reap the benefits of your so-called worldly goods which is really, at the end of the day,  nothing more than tat.

Nice tat, but still, nonetheless, tat.

You name your dog after eBay. 

At this point, if we actually owned a house, we would have gone stark raving bonkers in order to sell it and all the rubbish inside.  Now, imagine that you’ve done all this over a period of three days before you hand the keys over to the estate agent.  The estate agent walks around the house for 4 minutes and 32 seconds before declaring that your condensed 50-odd hours of work of getting the house so spotless you could drink straight from the toilet is "adequate for the area".  You say thank you, then drive back to the parents. 

The next day, you sell your car. 

You spend the next couple of days getting very comfy in the bathroom, discussing interesting items with the porcelain throne since your immune system is now completely shot.  Your children don’t know you anymore because you’ve been away for four days, and everything that you thought was not okay for your mum back in the day is now okay for your children to do in the very same house that you grew up in.  This confuses and bemuses you. 

You go back to talking to the toilet. 

It’s now D-Day and it’s time to go.  Your lovely wife has put all nine pieces (count them, nine) of luggage in an order that won’t have a hope in an icy Canadian wasteland that any of them would go through luggage control because they are all overweight.  You spend a literally feverish two hours sorting out the luggage just before the taxi arrives to find out that the taxi has already arrived.  You say goodbye to the parents, the children say goodbye, we all say goodbye.  We get everything into the taxi – just - strap the kids in, make sure that we all have our passports and paperwork for the umpteenth time and the friendly ex-police officer ex-ministerial bodyguard taxi driver drove us away.  And yes, you’re really doing this.

Scribbling #41: The Supermarket Cart

Not only do they call it by a different name - a "cart" instead of a "trolley" - but there are many things that are very strange and slightly unnerving about entering such places with names like 'Wal-Mart' and 'Canadian Superstore'.

There is the attitude of a lot of drivers around the *cough* parking lot *cough* whereby they are permanently and irrevocably scared of pedestrians crossing the road towards where they need to be.  This can either be the store or the car/van/whimsy of a truck, whichever is in the interest of the person in the direction that they're going.  It's like they see a person, stare for a second as the neuron fires, then the brakes slam down, causing the car to go into a skidding halt across Canadian Snow and Ice   It was as if they saw an amazing, incomparable thing and had to stop and make sure that it actually exists.  On the other hand, I am a pretty darn handsome specimen, something Canada may not have seen before.

I'm taking your silence as awe with a slice of reverence on the side.

Or, it could be that the Canadian Snow and Ice was covering the unseeable crossing, and the only thing that was really stopping them was the law.  Other than that, I'm sure I would be a smear across the parking lot that may not be good for me in the long run, but would be good for the landscaping.

Which brings me not-at-all neatly to the supermarket cart.  This is not, but any stretch, something like a Tesco trolley.  Oh, nosiree Bob, eh?  The generic Tesco trolley is a wonderful thing within an establishment such as ah... Tesco and not so much within a canal.  This lovely thing is more agile than a mosquito in a tornado, something that you can turn around at any given angle, spin around and make a 180-degree turn without any trouble at all.  And I would always, by default, get the one with the wobbly wheel.  It's like wanting to sponsor the amazingly ugly kid on World Vision or something.  Nobody else is going to do it, so you have to show them how it's done.

That was possibly the worst analogy in the world.  There is no such thing as a cute trolley.

Anyway, the thing is, is that, well... only the two front wheels spin around in most of the shopping carts in Canada.  I may be corrected and told that the full AWD spinning carts do exist, but I haven't come across them yet.  I thought that this was a horrible, horrible thing.  It was made even more repulsive by the fact that the trolley sits high enough for the elderly to rest their upper torso on while carrying out their shopping routine around the badly disorganised supermarket.  Yes, you, you in the back, your hands are on the same place on that shopping cart where once an elderly lady has rested her chest against it.  Ugh.

It doesn't become clear until you go outside.  Until then, you're grumbling about how the cart handles, that it doesn't know how to go around a corner properly, that it's too big and it's being driven by an idiot.  Pretty much sums up most North American driving, then.  Before you take the cart outside, you won't understand.  The huge truck thing you won't understand either, until you get your hands on a shopping cart.  These things with your groceries in, with their fixed rear wheels, will give you greater traction in the snow.  Edmonton has snow six months out of the year.  This is where it's at.  Trucks are huge, ungainly, won't go around corners and are driven by idiots, but they go through the white fluffy stuff pretty well indeed.  Same as the humble supermarket cart.  If its wheels weren't fixed, then they would be going all over the place, making the person who has just shopped a very angry person indeed.  You don't need an angry person behind the wheel of a two-ton truck with 400 horsepower.  That would end badly.  Make the carts have fixed wheels, said a smart person.  All will be well.

Goshdarnit, I'm a handsome beast.