#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

Andy Flower article/2014 Predictions

Here are the links to two articles I wrote for Warwick University student newspaper The Boar: one on England head coach Andy Flower, and my part in a collaborative piece predicting the sporting events of 2014.

Year Abroad Mix-Up Leaves Student with Grim Year Ahead

http://www.oxbridgereject.co.uk/year-abroad-mix-up-leaves-student-with-grim-year-ahead/

Here is a link to an article I wrote for satirical Warwick University magazine, The Oxbridge Reject.

Swann's Flight Leaves Gaping Hole in England Side

It’s becoming painfully clear that this most disastrous of Ashes tours will have ramifications far beyond the departures gate at Sydney Airport. If finding a replacement for Jonathan Trott didn’t appear difficult enough, then the shock retirement of Graeme Swann has instigated a task that must be somewhere close to impossible.

Since his test debut in 2008, gifted to him at the relatively late age of 29, the mournful strains of the Joy Division-inspired ode to Swann have echoed round cricket grounds all over the world. For the last few months, however, Swann’s off-breaks have ceased to ‘tear you apart’- instead, they have rather meekly pawed.

That said, Swann will be remembered as the best English spin bowler since Derek Underwood, the right-armer who played his last test in 1982. For years, Swann coming on and dismissing batsmen with his first ball of a spell was almost a matter of course. Just ask Gautam Gambhir, Shiv Chanderpaul and Marcus North, batsmen of the highest quality, and dismissed sixteen times by Swann between them. Left-handed players in particular will sleep a lot easier from now on.

Cricket fans my age have been blessed and cursed by our experiences of spin bowlers. We are blessed in the sense that we grew up on a diet of Muralitharan and Warne, the two best spinners to ever play the game; cursed in that every spinner’s record pales in comparison. In terms of English spinners, however, no-one can doubt the quality of Swann.

In an age of the doosra bowler, Swann was the traditional off-spinner, a regrettably dying breed. What made him so great? Put simply, it was a combination of the incredible spin that he imparted on the ball, and the nagging line that makes any bowler difficult to play. Good spinners tend to possess one of those qualities, and occasionally stumble upon the other. Swann, however, was better than good, and held both.

He will perhaps come to be seen as the epitome of the Andy Flower era. Undeniably gifted in one area of the game, Swann’s batting (an average of 22 is a healthy one for a tail-ender) and slip fielding made him a cricketer who was greater than the sum of his parts. Hard work and discipline have been the hallmarks of this team, and for so long, Swann was the flag-bearer.

Now, epitomising the shambolic nature of this Ashes tour, Swann may well become the pall-bearer. No-one can blame Swann, or even be surprised by this dip in form. It’s an argument for another time, but the ECB’s excessive schedule has caught up with some members of the squad.

Unsurprisingly, Swann does not want to carry the drinks for the remainder of his test match career. This decision to fly home should not taint his legacy, and indeed, it would seem that it will eventually be seen as just another painful facet of the tour rather than be a black mark upon Swann’s character. Perceived criticism of teammates and an unsavoury Facebook comment may prove to be viewed differently.

The brilliance of Swann, like so many legacies in sport, may only become apparent in the years to come. Nobody quite understood Andrew Flintoff’s importance as a test match number six until recently. To quote the old adage, ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’.

As if to emphasise that point, England hardly possess an embarrassment of riches in the spin department. Monty Panesar may well have two games, free of the pressure of a competitive Ashes series, to stake his claim. However, he is the anti-Swann. His laughable fielding and batting will not sit well with this particular England camp, so keen to have players of more than one discipline.

It seems now that it is a question of when, rather than if, Andy Flower leaves his post. In that event, the smart money appears to be on Ashley Giles, for so many years a steady hand on the tiller rather than a world class spinner. If he coaches in the same fashion, the conservative bent of English cricket may well look to Moeen Ali or Scott Borthwick, but Ali’s credentials in particular lie in his batting, not his bowling.

If not epitomising the Flower era, then Swann at the very least represents the cricketer we’d all like to play with on a Sunday. Fiercely competitive on the field, to the point of admonishing fielders for misfields, Swann’s jovial conduct off the field in Twitter and in interviews, until this cataclysmic tour, has softened the image of the team, with the steely Cook/Flower duo at the top.

England’s spinner, their best for thirty years, will be remembered fondly, despite the regrettable ‘swan song’.

The Bread Roll Awards 2013

Here we are again! The Bread Roll Awards, back by popular demand. If you read through last year's equivalent, it becomes clear just how brilliant a year 2012 was. I'm not sure how we fitted it all in, but we managed.

2013 was always going to have its work cut out to live up to those heady heights, where something exciting and newsworthy seemed to happen every day, not just in my life but in the actual, important news.

I anticipated this year to have a feeling of 'after the Lord Mayor's show', whereby everything would feel a little flat and post-climactic. This was, of course, to reckon without my Year Abroad, which has seen me move to Toronto, and encounter a whole raft of different friends and cultures. From August 28th, when I flew out here, to 4th December, when I finished my last exam, I don't think I had a day's rest, something which has driven me to doing, gleefully, almost nothing for the last 10 days.

This Year Abroad has been probably the greatest maturing episode of my life. It might not seem like it at times, but I feel like I've crossed the border from teenager to adult at some point in the last three and a half months.

With that personal 'voyage of discovery' (Eughh. Never use that phrase again, please- editor) I have to admit that 2013 might well be the year that popular culture passed me by. Lists like 'Best Albums of 2013' and 'Greatest Films of 2013' should really only be used for young people like myself to nod in a self-affirming fashion, safe in the knowledge that we've been right on trend throughout the year. For me, I'm using them as a whistle-stop tour through the last twelve months, a bit like having SkyPlussed something and then going forward on x2 speed.

I appreciate that the last paragraph is probably not the most comforting thing a reader can hear as they embark upon a list of great things to have happened in the last year, but if you're really using me as a cultural barometer, you're probably even further behind the times than I am. And nobody ever wants to be that person.

So here you are, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's the Bread Roll Awards 2013. Pick up your baguette at the door and wave it above your head like Ryan Giggs in the 1999 FA Cup final. What? You're surprised at a reference 14 years out of date? Have you not been reading a word of what I've just written?

Hero of the Year

Last year, Barack Obama took the crown, something I'm sure he'd be delighted to hear. His unsuccessful campaign against gun laws, although admittedly doomed to fail, means that he hands back his focaccia.

This year, I'm giving it to a dead person, more through my tardiness of blog-writing than any particularly heroic deed. I wanted to write an article on this when it happened, a real, heart-felt eulogy, but sadly, I ran out of time, and the moment passed. So, I'm doing it here.

I've never been one to work my way through great HBO box-sets. I don't have the willing to just plonk myself down on the sofa or in bed and watch hours and hours of television. This isn't me being snobbish or dismissive: I genuinely wish I could, and people who do are witnesses to the amazing work of talented script-writers, whom we would surely revere in the same manner that we do William Shakespeare, if only we knew their names and faces.

In fact, the only box-set of greater length than two seasons/series that I've ever completed was The Sopranos. My Dad was a huge fan, and he had a shorter attention span than I do. Like a lot of people my age, I was allowed to listen to the brilliant Alabama 3 theme tune before I was permitted to watch the show itself. The one occasion I was allowed to outstay my bedtime and watch an episode with my parents, the first scene took place in Bada-Bing, the New Jersey strip club, and I was immediately sent to bed. As if it was somehow my fault.

But that's by-the-by. I think the reason I stuck with The Sopranos is James Gandolfini. I've heard people aloofly claim that every male character is two-dimensional; it's apparently all 'Eyyy Bobby, get me a soda!' They couldn't be more wrong. James Gandolfini plays Tony the mobster, Tony the father, Tony the husband, Tony the cheater, Tony the psychiatrist's patient- the list goes on and on.

Without wishing to give too much away, the ending of The Sopranos left an air of mystery. To aficionados of the show, whose Gandolfini/Soprano lines have blurred, it felt like Gandolfini's tragic heart attack dove into our consciousness and made the decision for us.

RIP Tone'.

Hero of the Year 2013: James Gandolfini. 
Honourable mentions: The sign-language bloke at Nelson Mandela's memorial; Ian Bell for proving my faith in him; Andy Murray.

Villain of the Year

This is an easy one.

As much as I wanted to laugh off being in a city that has a crack-smoking mayor, I'm not sure I can. Granted the attitude to drugs in North America seems a lot more lax than the attitude in Britain, but a mayor?! That's going a bit far.

And you know what? That's not even the worst thing about this story. His sexist remarks- 'I've got more than enough to eat at home'- were inexplicably creepy and vile, and so bloody stupid that In the Loop or The Thick of It would have dismissed them as too far-fetched.

His misdemeanours are endless. There's some wonderful satire out there on YouTube about the whole sorry saga, which I won't bother to even try and emulate, but when your professor comes back from Haiti and says 'wow, the Haitians really have a low opinion of our political system', you know something is probably awry. His undignified clinging-on to his seat is not just poor form from Ford himself, it's embarrassing for this great city and its people.

Villain of the Year: Rob Ford

Film of the Year

I'm basing this on films that I've seen in 2013- they may have qualified for the 2013 Oscars, but it's my blog and it's my rules. 

Thankfully, I didn't see anything quite as bad as The Hobbit this year, so each film had to work for its acclaim, rather than going by last year's category of 'just being better than that Middle Earth shite'. (Just let it drop FFS- editor).

I treated most journeys to the cinema with some serious trepidation in 2013. Films were either, by my pessimistic reckoning, going to ruin books and memories (see Gatsby and Les Mis); going to show me up for my lack of knowledge about my own degree (see Django or Lincoln); or I'd have to admit once and for all that fantasy films and books, tainted by The-Film-Which-Must-No-Longer-Be-Named are just never going to be my thing (see The Hunger Games).

Thankfully, all of the above were, in my eyes, utterly brilliant. Les Mis was perhaps the least brilliant, but I'd always harboured doubts about its big-screen qualities, and it was still a thoroughly enjoyable watch/listen, even if it didn't involve me in quite the gripping, emotional manner that the stage musical always does.

I just really like films that make you think. Not films whose intricacies push your brain to the brink of explosion, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but ones that are a bit like a really, really entertaining university lecture. It's a toss-up between two films here, and both should probably be put on my degree course's syllabus. Whereas the subject matter and thought-provoking issues of the day in Django were perhaps a little bit more digestible, Lincoln was presented by critics and people alike with a stern warning face that said 'are you sure you're going to be able to understand this?' in a really, really slow tone of voice.

Thankfully, for me, Lincoln was the best advert for American history- the best type of history, by the way- that popular culture could ever throw up. Beautifully acted, unpretentiously presented, and if ever a subject deserved to take up three hours of somebody's time, it's the battle to end slavery. Not, as it turns out, a bunch of dwarf tossers ambling up a mountain. That's dwarf tosser, by the way, not dwarf-tosser.

Film of the Year: Lincoln
Honourable mentions: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire; Django Unchained; The Great Gatsby.

Single of the Year

Uh-oh. The one I'm dreading writing about most. Most of my music comes to me about thirty years after the rest of the country, so forgive me if I end up accidentally giving this award to The Beatles or Mozart.

I'm no music journalist, but I could listen to one song from 2013 all day, and probably not get bored. It's foot-stomping, seriously dark in some of its lyrics, and although completely unrecognisable from some of the band's early stuff, is still an example of why they should be viewed as probably the best, most consistent band of the 21st century.

It's One Direction with- JUST KIDDING!

Single of the Year: Do I Wanna Know?- Arctic Monkeys
Honourable mentions: Love Me Again- John Newman; The Wire- HAIM.

Sporting Event of the Year

As Blues sink ever deeper into the abyss, I've had to ramp up my patriotism and find sporting enjoyment in the more conventional channels. I've had to become a flag-waving, Keep Calm and Carry On ninny who takes enjoyment in Wimbledon and the British and Irish Lions. I only spent all those hours in front of the television begrudgingly, of course...

I've championed Andy Murray throughout his career. I don't do 'Oh, I've known this band/artist for ages before they were cool', so I have to find my kicks through doing similar in the realm of sport. I remember watching Sky when he won his first ATP title back in 2006. I can't claim to have 'seen something special', but I've always been a fan.

I even enjoyed his 'anyone but England' jibe. It was the sort of tongue-in-cheek comment I'd have made had I been a professional sportsman, and lots of people I know, despite their opprobrium of Murray, would have made. The difference is, we might have done it with a cheeky smile and a laugh, and gone on to talk cheerily and chirped on for a while and it would all have been forgotten.

It seems to come as a surprise to a lot of people that a kid who hails from a town synonymous with tragedy isn't always seen smiling and laughing. That's not to say he doesn't have a personality- and anyone who says that is guilty of trotting out the same boring hackneyed stereotype. Murray has a wonderfully dry sense of humour, and that documentary pre-Wimbledon showed his maturity and emotional depth.

When Murray stuck that championship point beyond Novak Djokovic, in a three-setter that for all the world seemed to contain all the emotions of a five-set epic, I let out a low, guttural, almost primal roar. It wasn't the same squeaky yelp that I emit when Blues get a famous victory, one born out of surprise that we've won a match. It was one that reflected vindication over my faith in Murray, and one that reflected my acute awareness of the lifting of British sport's great millstone- that of a men's Wimbledon title.

Sporting Event of the Year: The Wimbledon Men's Final
Honourable mentions: British and Irish Lions- about the only rugby union that I care about; Ian Bell's batting in the summer; Wolves getting relegated.

My Special Award for Team of the Year

I started this blog with a slightly lyrical ramble about a maturing process that has taken place on this Year Abroad. It hasn't been without its trials- journeys rarely are- and it hasn't been without a great deal of support.

On Twitter, there's a great account which rather brings together a Year Abroad community. In my email inbox, there's one email for every day that I've been out here from my Nan, and the odd pick-me-up from friends and other relatives. In my Facebook inbox, there's countless ongoing conversations spreading the Year Abroad joy. On my Twitter interactions bar, there's everything from #SweetsFootballers (Nikos Dib-Dabizas and Fabrice Mu-Wham-Bar) to people ribbing each other, and of course, the odd in-joke that just keeps you going through the bad days.

Make no mistake, Years Abroad are brilliant. I've seen incredible things, experienced the buzz of an amazing city, and met a whole batch of friends that have changed my outlook and, let's face it, life, for the better.

But these Years Abroad (Years Abroads? Year Abroads?) are also bloody hard. For people to perceive that being in a country where people speak the same language as you is a great deal easier is to be blind to the fact that three and a half months away from family and friends is bloody difficult whether you're in Canada or Kyrgyzstan. (It also belies the fact that you can't get proper gravy anywhere but England, which ain't a great deal of fun).

To everyone experiencing the culture shock of a Year Abroad, battling to find squash, coping with having your alcohol-buying rights snatched away, and struggling to explain or even, in my depressed England-supporting state, remember the virtues of cricket- I salute you.

And to anyone who's written letters, sent texts, tweets or Facebook messages, you'll probably never understand quite how much they've been appreciated. And neither, most probably, will I.

My Special Award for Team of the Year: The Year Abroaders.
Honourable mention: The #EdGoesToRonto Support Staff.

Have a very merry Christmas, and a fantastic 2014!

The Ashes- It Wasn't Supposed to be Like This.

Alone and no-one to rant to

It was supposed to be the winter that cricket finally came to Canada. I gleefully told and tweeted of the joys of my time-zone, with play starting at 7pm Toronto Time, setting me up perfectly for a winter of cricket. My enthusiasm for the game would prove infectious as England romped to yet another Ashes win. The ECB would welcome me off the plane at Gatwick airport with thanks and with job offers, as my PR campaign finally paid off. My friends and I would gather around the laptop and extol the virtues of this great game and this great England side, whilst I explained the intricacies of this wonderful sport.

Right now, seven days of play into the series, I don't even feel like watching it myself. Gutless batting and village green-standard fielding were supposedly a thing of the past. We'd done our time, crawled through mountains of shit, and ended up on the other side, all the while with Morgan Freeman narrating. This period of domination was, as some moronic blogger wrote during the summer, 'Catharsis Cricket'. 

The ramblings of a mad-man

It's still been entertaining, if you can be magnanimous enough to give Australia credit. I'm sure I will genuinely be able to in time, but for now, here's what I would say if I was actually magnanimous, and not writing through gritted teeth: seeing an angry fast bowler such as Mitchell Johnson run in and bowl at 94 miles per hour is undeniably a great spectacle. I'm just about too young to remember Ambrose, Walsh, Waqar and Wasim, and Brett Lee was fast, but never seemed scary. Johnson is undoubtedly scary.

However, to turn something from a great spectacle into great theatre, one needs dialogue, a response. Otherwise it just becomes a soliloquy, and these are rarely great without context. I've seen Hamlet. This is less like a gripping gladiator fight between two equals, and more like the scene in Reservoir Dogs when the bloke gets his ear cut off, absolutely powerless to resist. It's entertaining for all the wrong reasons. You're watching despite yourself. There's no fight. The best passage of play in this test match was Monty Panesar's brave resistance. If the rest of the team can follow Monty's lead, then this series might be something other than a procession.

I still believe that England, with every one (or at least a majority) of their players at the peak of their powers are a better side, man for man, than Australia. Other than Clarke and possibly Warner, there aren't any players that I'd have swapped before the start of the series. That is why explaining LBW and leg-side theory to Canadians is one thing, but comprehending this woeful England performance is rather a Sisyphean task. But, as an Englishman should, rather than backing away and showing that the task is not for this delicate stomach, I shall roll my sleeves up and try and explain away this dreadful nightmare.

1. The Rot. The questions came after New Zealand away, but we did not answer them, as we had Matt Prior. The questions came after Australia at home, but we did not answer them, as we had Ian Bell and James Anderson. The questions have come again in Brisbane and Adelaide, and the well of saviours has run dry.
   
   To not reach 400 in nineteen test match innings, since New Zealand back in March, is frankly abysmal. Matt Prior must be dropped, unless he gets runs in the second innings at Adelaide, and that frankly will not happen, based on recent evidence. I'm sick of questioning Kevin Pietersen's place in the team, as he's apparently undroppable, but slapping yet another 'flamingo' shot into the leg side was crass, irresponsible, and in the circumstances, unforgivable. Joe Root is apparently an old head on young shoulders, and yet his sweep across the line was the shot of someone nowhere near mature enough for test cricket. You can't have it both ways, and someone hopefully gave them a dressing down.
   
   Someone like Graham Gooch. Oh yes, our batting coach. Time to go, I'm afraid. The stats speak for themselves, and with several players regressing and several looking past it, it might be time for a complete shake-up of the set-up. Heavy Ashes defeats in the past have seen heads roll, and this one may well see Ashley Giles replace Andy Flower, and anybody, surely, replacing Gooch.
   
   Obviously, nobody wants to see a return to the revolving door selection policy of the 1990s and early 2000s, but right now, it seems that this England team, famous for its cliques, has gone too far the other way, and once that cosiness sets in, it's almost impossible to correct without an entire restructuring. I'm wary of using the phrase 'root-and-branch', but I doubt the ECB won't be so forthcoming.
   
2. Momentum. Here's a thought. Australia came away from the summer with greater momentum than England. Yes they hadn't won an Ashes test for seven matches. Yes they were thrashed at Lord's. Yes, they lost 3-0, but let's be honest: this result flattered England immensely. Many mocked Shane Warne in the commentary box and the Australians on the pitch for their belligerent optimism during the summer, in many instances claiming moral victories and improvements and criticising England for not being ruthless enough.
   
   England didn't dominate the summer series- they dominated at Lord's, and a few other days dotted about the calendar. In fairness to England, when they did have a good day, they were very, very good. In putting one heck of a positive spin on the series defeat and claiming some sort of victory at Manchester, Australia lessened any momentum that England had. Like I said above, I'm not even sure they had a great deal of momentum to begin with. Ian Bell may have done, but in hindsight, more questions (Cook, Prior, Trott, Joe Root- Lord's aside- opening) came out of the summer than answers. By Day 2 of Brisbane, any lingering memories of the summer had been well and truly wiped away.
   
3. The schedule: England's players and the PR team will tell us that they don't want to make excuses. The performances have been so abject that I'm not particularly inclined to take the blame off them. And yet an enormous part of me just wants to give the players a hug. Surely, surely Pietersen's and Root's shots were born out of mental fatigue. Cricket is not a game you can switch off from, and if Jonathan Trott's regrettable absence has proved one thing, it's that it's a game played largely in the mind. I'm desperately seeking mitigation, and that's the only thing I can think of.
   
   The ECB has flogged this team to the brink of breaking point, playing test match after test match, giving the people what they want- now it looks to have been at the expense of the team. It's akin to Simon Cowell parading One Direction around the world relentlessly. Sooner or later, Harry Styles will snap and the whole thing will collapse. Ideally, the England cricketers would have had a few months off, but this is the bed that the ECB and the cricketing calendar have made. The players, as ever, will bear the brunt, whilst the faceless suits in the corridors of power top up the ECB coffers. As it is, the decision to rest may be taken out of one or two players' hands, arriving in the form of the selection axe. 

I'm not claiming to be some great prophet. I predicted a 2-1 win for England. I certainly didn't see this defeat coming, and trust me, it will be a series defeat. There's been so much written about this failure that I doubt any of the above is particularly ground-breaking. Someone on Twitter remarked that Swann and Anderson looked tired even during the national anthem. You can almost see the weight of pressure on this side, and with Perth to come, for so many years the graveyard of English cricket, it shows no signs of abating. As far as this series goes, if someone offered me avoidance of a whitewash, I'd take it right now. All I can see from where I'm sitting is 5-0.