#EdGoesToRonto- The Quarterly Update

As of Saturday, I'll be pretty much bang-on three quarters of the way through my time in Toronto. Six months completed, with only two months to go. That's quite hard to comprehend for a number of reasons, not least the thought that I won't see a lot of my newly-found friends for a good number of years. I say newly-found, as it really does feel like yesterday that I was flying out here in August, full of excitement that has barely dipped beyond peak level the entire time I've been in this fantastic city.

To this end, I've made a vow to myself that could be difficult to keep, but we'll see how it goes anyway: I'm determined to come back to this city, by fair means or foul, within the decade. So, if I haven't been back to Toronto by 2024 (let's say December 31st 2024, give myself six months extra leeway), then you can all get in your hovercrafts and yell at me. Deal?

This blog is something of an in-betweeny issue, not quite near enough to the end of my Year Abroad to start getting misty-eyed, nostalgic, and sycophantic, but enough has happened in the last few weeks that this will hopefully prove an entertaining read.

In addition, I'd like to place on record my thanks for everyone who sent me kind comments about the blog I wrote about my Dad. I've saved every comment in a Word Document, and I'm sure that if I'm ever feeling low, the reminder that I have such wonderful friends will assist with the healing process!

***

Last week was Reading Week, and, in the realisation that the furthest I'd been outside of Toronto was, er, Greater Toronto, I desperately wanted to visit somewhere else before I left Canada. Montreal was the ideal candidate- reportedly great night-life, a distinctly different, and indeed European feel to the city, and just far enough away that you could get a Megabus for about $40 return.

So, it was time for #EdVaAuMontreal, the sister-hash-tag of the now famous #EdGoesToRonto. I travelled on my own to Quebec, which was met in some quarters with raised eyebrows. I was pretty unperturbed by this; I'm content with my own company, and, what's more, you tend to make more friends if you travel on your own- this hypothesis, thankfully, proved true.

I've spoken to a few people before about this, but last semester I took a course/module in 'The History of Quebec and French Canada', and it was honestly the most interesting module I've ever taken at university. It was also probably the most demanding, down partly to the fact that I was starting from a position of literally zero knowledge, so I either had the choice of total immersion, or total failure. Thankfully, a somewhat inspirational professor prompted me to choose the former path.

The history of Quebec and French Canada, I wrote in an exam, was characterised by several moments of great rupture, instigated by ferocious language debates, race, and a vehement desire in certain vociferous quarters to be independent from the rest of Canada. Despite these moments of headline-grabbing rupture, I continued in this exam, Quebec was a place of peaceful coexistence.

Now, I'm not sure how correct this was, as I haven't had the breakdown from the exam, but I'm pretty sure this assumption was on the right lines. I'd also gleaned the impression, from friends and from my own cautious xenophobia, that the people of Quebec were somewhat aloof and unfriendly towards English speakers- as, I suppose, they had every right to be. Someone told me that my Englishness would even see me get beaten up. I should have stayed at home and gone to Millwall away instead, clearly.

Thankfully, these fears were utterly unfounded. The people of Montreal were even more friendly than those in Toronto, who, in turn, are friendlier than English people, so my three-night trip was essentially a waltz around the cobbled streets, practising my French to patient Canadians after three rusty years, and eating lovely food and drinking beer at a cheaper price than Toronto. Much as I love you, Ontario, this needs to be rectified.

It felt brilliant to be able to wander round a city, fully appreciating its history, and even casting a wry smile at the street names and subway stations. Its history seemed to be everywhere, but that may be because I was actively looking for it. They've even got a piece of the Berlin Wall inside the shopping centre, given as a gift to the city of Montreal, and acting as a nod to Montreal's fortified past. I probably know more about the history of Quebec than I do any other time period or place, owing to the rigorous exam and essay schedule of my afore-mentioned course, so it would have been a great shame had I not visited the subway stations named after Lionel Groulx and Henri Bourassa, a pair of, to put it mildly, French-Canadian arseholes.

Inside Montreal's underground city

I didn't witness a city with visible ruptures. Of course, there are two communities that predominantly mingle- those who see French as their first language, and those who see it as being English. But it was far from a ghettoised, fragmented population. If anything, I came over all jealous, as I often do when it comes to languages, that these people have essentially grown up in a place that has encouraged bilingualism.

For some reason, I expected the people of Montreal to 's'en fous' (not give a ****) when it came to the Winter Olympics. I now realise that this was perfectly idiotic, but seeing the collective celebrations in the face of the Istanbul-esque comeback of the women's ice hockey team wiped that away.

Something that did depress me, as a fervent sport-lover, was the state of the Olympic Park, built for the 1976 Summer Olympics. It's thought of by many as the first really expensive modern games, but the park's legacy seems to be completely bizarre. It's been turned into a zoo, a crap Insectarium, and some fairly ordinary botanical gardens. I'm no fan of West Ham United, but at least our Olympic stadium in Stratford is being used for sport. Whoever's idea it was should probably be hanged for crimes against legacies, if there is such a thing- as should whichever quango or committee decided to build the most hideous office tower right in amongst Vieux Montreal, with its bakeries, cobbled streets, and of course, opposite the beautiful Notre-Dame Basilica.

Every city has its croissant to bear, I suppose.

***

Speaking of ice hockey, I've fallen in love with the sport since I've been here, and yet, ironically, it's one of the few North American sports I haven't yet attended. I was speaking to my British housemate during the Winter Olympics about its appeal, and, admittedly under the influence, we couldn't understand how anyone who liked football and rugby didn't like ice hockey. It's like a 6-a-side game played between Leeds United of the 1970s, and Wimbledon's Crazy Gang of the 1980s. It's got pace, violence, and perhaps most importantly, a goal carries much the same weight as a goal in football. It seems like a sport made for Britain, with the obvious exception of one thing: ice.

Canada IS ice hockey. It pervades their culture like nothing else. When I was travelling downtown one evening, I ended up on the same subway as Toronto Maple Leafs fans, and it was the closest I've felt to being back in Small Heath or Bordesley Green, on the way to St. Andrew's.

Obviously, with its popularity, tickets come at a serious price, and are also hard to come by. Hockey is said to have the most affluent, middle-class fan base of any of the sports over here, attracting scores of bankers and young professionals, despite the Leafs not having won anything of note since the 1950s. Hold on... affluent fanbase... used to be big and are now crap... haven't won anything this millennium... do I support the hockey equivalent of Aston Villa?!

***

About three weeks ago, my British mate Matt texted me asking if I wanted to go and see the World Cup. For a brief split-second, I was planning on buying a ra-ra skirt and dancing on the Copacabana, but then a second text came through saying that we weren't going to Brazil, but the trophy was on display in downtown Toronto.

I assumed that we'd have had to book to go and see it, like some sort of audience with the Pope, so I tweeted CBC, the broadcasting company where the trophy was being housed, asking if there was any chance that two English people could go and see the trophy. Lest we forget, England have lost the World Cup more times than Canada have won it.

It was the first time I've ever been star-struck by an inanimate object. I've seen the Sistine Chapel, the Eiffel Tower, and the Berlin Wall, but the World Cup?! That's something else. For the brief seconds that we were allowed near it, various thoughts went through my head, ranging from 'this must be like being at the Earth's core' to 'how the feck do I try and get this out of its display case without anyone seeing?'

We were also shown a hologram promotional film which was so very FIFA and depressingly corporate. They showed the  1986 Maradona wonder goal but not his handball; they showed the 2006 final but not the only memorable thing that happened in that game; and they left out the event which should be shown in every single World Cup montage- Mwepu Ilunga of Zaire rushing forward out of the wall in 1974 and booting a Brazilian free-kick halfway up the pitch. If you haven't seen it, please watch it.

Fuleco. He's the one in the middle.

Sanitised and clichéd it may have been, but it did obviously contain some iconic clips, so even my cynicism briefly dissipated, and I had Three Lions stuck in my head for days afterwards. And if a picture of me with the World Cup doesn't get you hot under the collar, I'm not sure anything will.

Oh, and we met Fuleco, the World Cup armadillo.

***

So yeah, like I said, this blog was a bit inbetweeny, and dare I say pointless ('now he tells us!') but I get a bit of non-blogger's angst if I leave it too long without penning an entry. Two months to go, and I'm determined to make the most of the rest of my Year Abroad, so much so, that I've begun to resent having to do any actual work...

KRO.

Three years on, and it has got easier

Last year, on the second anniversary of my Dad's death, I wrote a fairly lyrical, highly emotional piece on what he meant to me. It was a strange evening- it sounds completely facile and twenty-first-century-naff, but I make a point of marking both my Dad's birthday, and the anniversary in either a tweet or a Facebook status, and yet all this stuff came pouring out of me in quite a poetic way, so I stuck it in here instead. I still get lovely comments from people saying how nice it was, which is really touching to hear. It was the right thing to do last year, and as perfect a tribute as I could muster, but this year, writing in the cold light of day, something different and more analytical seems right.

Something that, through my experiences, will hopefully shed some light on how hard it is to be a teenager coping with grief.

I've had books, 'memory boxes', diaries, and 'So You've Lost Your Loved One' pamphlets all thrust into my hands with varying degrees of sensitivity (and some startling instances of insensitivity), but I don't think any of them came close to doing anything other than create the illusion of helping. I read the oft-lauded On Grief and Grieving by Kubler-Ross and Kessler, which came close to articulating how it feels to lose someone close to you (that's the '5 stages of grief' one, by the way), but even that one could probably have been written by someone who's never been through it. Imagine 'anger' being a stage of grief- who'd have thought it, eh?

In Bruges. Looking more like hitmen than the two in, er, In Bruges.

Marking the anniversary is something that is really important to me, for a number of reasons. I don't always get the time to just sit, think, and write about how much he meant to me, and in addition, I think it's important that people who are friends with me know that this important moment in my life occurred. It's ironic, therefore, that since February 2011, there have been very few truly constant people in my life, due to moving to Warwick, and then Toronto, and none of these people know. There's nothing more awkward than a date with someone or a few drinks with some new friends, and the topic comes onto parents, and you're forced to weigh in with your conversational equivalent of a sledge-hammer to prevent things getting even more awkward for all concerned. It's bad enough when you're witness to people talking in awed, hushed tones about that fucking 'Heart Attack Grill' like it's a witty name for a restaurant and not an incredibly insensitive shock marketing tactic.

The thing is- I love hearing people's tales of their fathers, as they so often remind me of my dad, and, as I will reiterate, reminiscing is a brilliant thing. The last thing I'd want is for people to start watching their step around me in conversational terms. If anything, when the conversation turns to fathers, the chances are I'll prevent you from getting a word in edgeways! The only difference being, my descriptions of my dad will be exclusively in the past tense, and may occasionally raise a tear as well as a smile.

***

My Dad and my incredibly smiley sister

If you're a 17 year-old boy (and trust me, I was a boy back then), it's 3 o'clock in the morning, and you've had to perform CPR on your own 48 year-old dad whilst a woman from the NHS urges you and your mum to stay calm over the phone, it's fair to say that you're going to be a bit different from then on. I don't think many people at all know just how directly and totally involved in the death I was, and for the first few days, I think it became more about getting over that horrific hurdle than anything else. I described it over the phone to the emergency services as 'my dad's had a funny turn', which seems a frankly ridiculous statement with which to signal the end of one part of your life and the start of another. It probably came out of the bit of my body which screamed 'denial'- (alright Kubler-Ross, you did have that one in your 'model'). No way was I going to admit that my dad was having a 'heart attack'.

My ringtone at the time was a voice recording of the meerkat from the 'Compare the Market' adverts saying 'This is Alexandr Orlov. You have a message. Simples!' And, in probably the most ridiculous moment of my life so far, sure enough, just as the surgeon was telling me and my Mum the bad news, my Nan phoned to say she was outside the hospital. A Soviet meerkat advertising insurance was the first noise to break the awful silence. Don't feel bad smiling or laughing; my dad would have found it the funniest thing ever, and slowly I'm beginning to see the comic timing. That in itself might sound strange, but I'm a young person with a natural aversion to finding things funny, and it's just one of the reasons that this blog will be consigned to the scrapheap of useless information concerning grief- you can't apply a 'model' to dealing with these things. You just have to find a way, and the strangest things help you deal with it.

Despite numerous offers and suggestions, I never sought counselling or a support group or anything like that. Pride? Possibly. Fear of crying in front of someone I didn't know? Probably more likely. I did carry on writing a diary that I began when I was 15 and wrote almost all of the way through Sixth Form, every single day, but I stopped when Blues got relegated three months later, as I wondered if some utter **** up there was just doing all this shit to spite me, and I couldn't bring myself to write it any more. I haven't looked at it since, so there's no knowing how useful that was. I very occasionally write letters to my dad now, but even that's not particularly useful. I've found I don't tend to get a reply.

I think I became a bit bipolar in the weeks that followed the death. At school I was blessed to have brilliant people around me, and it was a relief just to go to classes. (I don't always feel my gratefulness has been adequately transmitted to the friends and family that did so much for me, but I hope they understand). Putting a brave face on is always going to be a double-edged sword however, as people will naturally assume you're coping, and I suppose I was, from 9-4 at least. What it would also mean is that within five minutes of getting home, I was sobbing my eyes out alongside the rest of my family, and would proceed to do so for a good two or three hours. No danger of a hosepipe ban at Higgs Towers.

The weeks that followed were a succession of 'good days and bad days', something which became a bit of a mantra. It was a bit like weaning yourself onto the feast/fast diet fad. You start off having 6 bad days to 1 good day, then it becomes 5:2, 4:3, 3:4, and so on, until it becomes a case of within months, maybe 25 good days to 5 bad days, then you get it down to not even bad days, just bad hours, and you know you're just about cracking it.

And there are still bad hours, of course. I wouldn't want to be completely over it, and I never will be. Certain songs are completely off-limits to me. I won't go near them unless I feel completely self-indulgent and need to cry, and even then I try to set a time limit whereby I, for want of a better phrase, 'man the fuck up'. I daren't say what songs, in case I end up in some sort of psychological battle-of-wits with a Batman villain who follows me around with a boom-box and a list of records, but there are some.

It's a physical pain. I remember writing that in my diary. It really hurt, the days after the death, not psychologically, but a pain in the gut. YouTube videos can be hard to watch, just like songs are hard to hear. Clips of famous Blues matches we attended. Future ones we'd have liked to attend, most notably the Carling Cup final, agonizingly, crushingly, three weeks and one day after his death. Typically, some might say. Typically, Neil Higgs would probably say. Out of everything, that arguably hurts the most. Certain bits of commentary. Tom Ross. The 'This is Our Time' Carling Cup video with the line 'we may not have the history... but we have each other'. All stay in a guarded corner of the Internet for most of the time.

***

So what helps me cope? Considering the sheer amount of time we spent together watching any old rubbish football match on the television, discussing fixture lists in unbelievably minute detail, there's no reason why I shouldn't be sitting and moping during those hours, surely? I've got to fill that time somehow, so why not sit crying? Obviously I'm being a little obtuse, but it hopefully gives people some insight into just how much these things affect you.

1. Being busy helps me cope. I live in fear of not being busy in this respect. I was in the midst of my A-Levels in February 2011, and they, along with a few people, probably saved my sanity. I thought the Year Abroad would be a nightmare in this respect, being so far away from home, but mercifully, I've been so busy that I've probably only had two or three 'bad hours' since I've moved to Canada.
2. Filling that football void helps. My Great-Uncle Mick is brilliant, but he finds it hard to go to as many games now he's 82, and so I turn to Twitter, this wonderful online Blues community, which has helped immensely. I chew the ear off any Blues fan I meet, just to recreate that connection which only fanatical football fans can ever have.
3. Nice comments help, about my blog, about my dad, hearing people and family members reminisce, and reiterating that he would be proud of me, Sarah and my mum for the way we've carried on in his memory. It's probably why, if you're reading this on the anniversary itself, I'll be fine, as people will (hopefully) be looking out for me. The days you expect to be impossible are usually the simplest. It's the really shit little moments, like standing in the away end being 3-0 down at half-time, or the ones that blind-side you, like losing a train ticket or dropping a catch, or not being passed to in a kickabout and wondering why the fucking hell you're even there when your dad died 4 days earlier and you've never even been any good at football anyway.
4. Crying and throwing stuff about helps, as long as you set a deadline for yourself to stop crying and get on with the rest of your day, because moping never did anyone much good.
5. Hearing Keep Right On (see above) helps. It occasionally hurts, but mostly helps.
6. Remembering little comments or texts help, which is why my blog from last year is so important to me. Evidently, a heart attack is a sudden process, so there was no suffering on my dad's part- he'd have died dreaming of Wembley or a holiday, most likely. The downside to that is that there's no time to say goodbye, and to thank him for being just the most brilliant and truly irreplaceable father and friend. 

So, I suppose, you have to look on the bright side of life, and remember. You can't closet these memories away, you have to embrace them and tell people how much he meant, to make life easier for everybody, not least yourself. I want my future partner, kids, in-laws, whoever, to know how much he meant to me. I say this to everyone who asks how I cope, but a lot of people don't even have as many as seventeen years with a parent. Furthermore, I doubt that many people will have had such a special relationship with a parent as I did with my Dad. 

I'm told that I resemble him more and more each day, in mannerisms and in appearance, and I take that to be the ultimate compliment, whilst simultaneously frantically looking for grey hairs. 

Here's to more reminiscing. Keep Right On, and thanks Dad.

Xxx