A Canadian In London

This blog has been a long time coming. I intended to start writing a weekly installment back in September when I first got here, but the usual adjustments and modifications of moving to a new city have hampered my dedication to the project. Finally, almost five months since my big move, I am getting down to it. I intend to write a weekly note – sometimes lengthy and sometimes brief – about my life here: my observations, missteps and progressions.

Let’s briefly go back to the beginning. As the year of the Great Re-pression, 2008, bled into a New Year, I was sitting at my desk in the enormous Rogers Publishing building at Bloor and Jarvis, on a rather ordinary Tuesday. I was called into my editor’s office and made redundant, along with more than 60 other publishing personnel. It was a huge shock but, as I packed up my few belongings and wandered the three blocks home with tears in my eyes, I came to a realization (and it is clichéd): This was the best thing that could have happened to me.

I was at an impasse of sorts in my position as assistant editor at HPAC Magazine. With a tiny editorial staff, the magazine just didn’t offer any mobility and I was feeling that my time there had given me everything I could get out of it. I adore Toronto and my life there, but I was feeling restless and dreaming of travel. The lay-off propelled me to action. I spent a couple of months applying for jobs in Toronto, going to interviews and migrating through a minor quarter-life crisis. I considered Manhattan and I considered London. And, finally, after some long talks with friends and some serious self-reflection, I decided to take the leap and move to the UK.

I consider regrets to be the most deplorable things to gather over a lifetime, and I already have enough of those for one person. So I renewed my passport, completed the application for the Tier 5 Youth Mobility Visa and gave my landlords notice for September 1. My cousin Pearl offered me the guest room (the West Wing) in her London home for as long as it would take me to settle in, find a flat and starting looking for a job.

A lot of people have asked me why London. It’s a broad question and I am not sure that I know exactly what it is that drew me in. It certainly doesn’t hurt that I have family here who are supportive and accommodating and completely amazing.

As someone self-assured enough to call herself a writer – a great lover of the written word, at the very least – it is absolutely thrilling to tread the same ground as Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It still amazes me that I am a mere bus ride or tube line away from the lights of Shaftesbury and the great theatre of the West End; from the Tower of London where Kings were born and Queens were beheaded; from the cobbled streets that came to life in Dickens’ novels and that served as the avenues where the suffragette movement took shape; from Big Ben and the House of Commons where Churchill delivered his War Time Speeches; from Westminster Abbey where monarchs were crowned and great poets were entombed.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been here for almost five months – 143 days, actually – and I haven’t spent one second of boredom, malaise or even homesickness. I certainly have not had a moment of regret. I have gradually discovered an unfolding city of great friends and family, quirky traditions, history and literature, music, pubs and cloudy skies. If I can keep it up, I will blog about these discoveries each week, and maybe then I will be able to explain exactly why I love London so much.