The Life of a Nomad

A nomad is defined, in its modern-day context, as an itinerant, a member of a community of people who moves from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. At the very basic level of who I am, which traces back to before I was born, the label nomad is a bit of an anomaly. Anyone who knew me as a baby, as a teenager and even as a freshman at university, would find it hard to put me into this category. But, I have been living the life of a nomad for the past 13 months.

Before I recount the past year of homelessness, essentially, I want to instill, first of all, how truly lucky I feel to have the family and friends who have allowed me to live this nomadic life. I hope it doesn’t sound like I have taken them, or the opportunities I’ve had, for granted. But, at the risk of sounding insincere, I can’t wait to shake off the shackles of this nomadic life and have a flat of my own.

The notion that place defines your identity is not something to take lightly. I’ve had my share of adapting to a new place, struggling in that place to find the right fit for me, and making what I could of it; but, as life-affirming, character-building, adventurous and liberating as it is to float through life with one laptop and one suitcase, I feel, deep down, that I am a homebody of the most archetypal definition of that word. I need to have a home (whatever that really means), which is mine, to really feel at ease in my day-to-day life.

Allow me, for a frivolous moment, to go back more than 30 years, when my first home, for nearly eight months, was my mother’s womb, and my flatmate was the other half of a split egg, a zygote known as my twin sister. I don’t expect those of you who aren’t a twin to fully understand what this means but, those who know me very well, it is the foremost, most defining living arrangement I have ever had.

Being born a twin, whether you like it or not, means that your identity is defined as one half of a single being. You are born, and grow up, in a bubble that encompasses the two of you. We had our own joined-up life, our own language and our own relationship that, put quite simply, never fit into any other tangible category. For a large portion of our lives, we were two halves of one whole, and as much as I love her (and would never trade the experience), being a twin was quite detrimental when it came time for me to carve out my own place in the world.

All of this sappy observation on what it truly feels like to be born a twin, I imagine, makes it hard for anyone, let alone a single-birth child, to fully understand how I picked up my life in Toronto three years ago and moved across the pond, alone, to live in London. But, for the task at hand, which is my explanation of my nomadic life over the past 13 months, it is necessary background information.

I have become, over the past three years, a proud Londoner, but I have also come to the realization that home is truly where the heart is. Let me convey, at the risk of contradicting myself, how much I love living in London, have grown and been nurtured in my life here, adore the relationships I have built, the experiences – both professionally and personally – that I’ve had, and know that all of this has been integral to my growth into the person I am today.

But, deep down, I just can’t shake it. The French translation for the term ‘homesickness’ is the truest definition of the word I have ever heard: ‘mal a pays’. I miss my home, I miss Canada; I miss who I am in that place, in those relationships, in that true definition of my identity.

I won’t go back to my university years, where I had that first call to create my own identity, and where I was as miserable (and, ultimately, happy) as I have ever been. But it puts into context the way I feel today. That broad, and indefinable, sense of floating through life; feeling so content, but also so unsettled; it is really difficult to fully put into words. In uni, I had the worst homesickness I have ever had (for the other half of my identity, my twin, and for the home that formed me), but today I have a real heartache for my home, that place that is my own, that space that defines who I am.

Anyways, enough of the background context; I don’t imagine I have truly managed to put the way I feel into words. But, regardless of the history, for the past 13 months, I have been living the life of a nomad.

Last August, I was moving out of my flat on Florence Street, the first place in London where I truly felt at home. It was a necessary move; my flatmate of a year, and best friend in the city, Lauren, had made the brave move back to the homeland in May, and had left, in her place, a Canadian friend, Donna, who was a great replacement. Regardless of the new arrangement, we were finishing our lease at the end of August, and it was time for a change. We couldn’t settle on (agree on/afford) a two-bedroom flat in Angel, a neighbourhood I stubbornly refused to leave, so Donna was setting up her new home in Pimlico, while I was hoping to find a flatshare in my favourite London borough.

Without going into too much detail, it didn’t quite work out, so I floated around the area for a little while. My cousin Pearl, my London Mom, kindly took me in for a few weeks, and then I had two wonderful months house sitting for my friends Jenny and John, while they were honeymooning in South America. That took me to Christmas, and a fateful and fortuitous arrangement, which found me in a beautiful five-story house in Angel for six whole months, once again house sitting (for Pearl’s best friends) and living a life that would have never been possible without the connections and relationships I have here.

Fast forward to this summer, to early July, when I was once again tossed out into the nomadic life. I had made plans to share a flat with my friend Nelly, and a friend of hers who was moving back to Europe after nearly 20 years in New York. The search for a flat in London is a soul-destroying and wrenching experience, but I’ve chronicled it before in this blog and won’t dwell too much on that. Needless to say, after seeing our fair share of the Islington borough, a flat was found that would be our home. It ticked all the boxes we had laid out – except that it only became available in early October.

At the time, I was spending a lovely couple of weeks in Canada, so it made sense to prolong my nomadic life until the flat was vacated. Again, I was blessed by the amazing kindness and hospitality of my friends and family in London, and have been able to spend the last two months floating around the city. I spent some time in the spare room at my friend Christine’s in Finchley Road; on a Murphy bed at Liz and Iain’s flat in Myddleton Square; back in the West Wing at Pearl’s, the closest place I have in London to a real home; house sitting at my friend Ellen’s beautiful Georgian flat in Barnsbury and again at Jenny and John’s off Upper Street while they traveled the world.

The end of September finds me now excitedly anticipating the move into my new flat. I am longing for a place to call my home, to free my humble belongings from their storage locker in Camden, and to turn my single suitcase and nomadic lifestyle into a proper home. I haven’t even seen the flat yet (how crazy is that?), but love the neighbourhood, the price, the descriptions I’ve been given, and am counting down the hours until I am settled once again.

I will miss, in many ways, the freedom of the past 13 months. Only someone who has experienced the real estate market in London, the price of renting, the extra costs from bills and council tax, can appreciate how truly lucky I have been these past few months. But, I think, most of all, I will miss the blissfulness of living alone. I am moving in with two girls – which I really am thrilled about – but haven’t been in such a living arrangement since I was 21 (10 years!) and making my first home, post-residence in Kingston. It will be an adjustment – for me, and for my new roomies – to share my space again.

But I am more than ready for this next chapter, hopefully my last big move until I’m packing up my life in London to return to Toronto in a couple of years. And, though the nomadic life has been a real experience, I can’t wait to trade in my single suitcase for a real home, a real place that I can call mine – at least for the foreseeable future.

London 2012 – The Paralympics

I mentioned in a previous blog that I’m not really that bothered about the actual sport of the Summer Olympics. Over the past seven weeks, I’ve come to realize that this event is not really about the sport, it’s about the athletes and the parathletes, the heroes and the characters who have instilled in all of us a brimming nationalistic pride, inspiration and absolute awe.

Months ago, when I didn’t manage to secure any tickets to the London 2012 Olympics, I immediately applied for the next best thing – tickets to the London 2012 Paralympics. At the time, I wasn’t really thinking about the sport and the athletes, but about getting my chance to stand in the Olympic Park and be a part of the amazing experience of living in a city that is host to the Games.

Those tickets, purchased at random many months ago, gave me a phenomenal introduction to disabled sport. I had chosen a Friday night in the Athletics Stadium and a full Saturday day-pass, both over the first weekend of the Paralympic Games.

Just climbing up through the stands of the stadium, where so many Olympic dreams had already come true, was reward enough. But then, as the sky above the stadium turned to a vibrant pink and the air cooled way down, we watched Hannah Cockroft win Britain’s first track and field gold medal of the 2012 Paralympics, finishing the women’s T34 100-metre race in a world-record breaking 18.05 seconds (she would win gold in the T34 200-metre the next week); we saw Dave Weir qualify for the men’s T54 800-metre, the final of which would garner him one of his four gold medals later in the week; and we even saw Canadian Virginia McLachlan win a bronze medal in the women’s T35 200-metre final.

The next day I headed back to the Olympic Park with some friends. We had £10 day passes, which – depending on availability – would allow us access to a variety of sites. I came home nine hours later, thoroughly exhausted but still buzzing with excitement, after watching goalball, seven-a-side football, and both men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball.

The goalball was the most unique to watch, as it is a sport played only by parathletes, so I had never seen anything remotely like it before. There are three blind players on each team, lined up on either side of a court, guarding a shoulder-height net the width of the court. The audience is kept strictly quiet (a real struggle for me), as the players listen for a bell in the ball and the vibration as its moves across the floor, trying to stop it from entering their net.

Next, we headed out to the Riverbank Arena for a stunning view of the Park and a truly humbling match between the Ukraine and the US in seven-a-side (cerebral palsy) footie. And then, we set up at the Basketball Arena, where I was thrilled to get to first watch a men’s wheelchair basketball game (Germany vs Japan) and then the Canadian women’s team take on Australia. I was draped in my Canada flag and seated next to the Cape Breton parents of one of the players, and I cheered the ladies to a 55-50 victory. What an unforgettable day!

Now, I consider myself very lucky to have got those tickets, to have seen the Paralympic sport and to experience a side of the Games, which unfortunately, I don’t think a great deal of other people around the globe got to experience.

The final medal tally for Team GB yesterday was 34 golds, 43 silvers and 43 bronzes. The US came away with 31 golds, 29 silvers and 38 bronzes, while Canada finished with seven golds, 15 silvers and nine bronzes. While I am very proud of the Canadian team, the fact that I live in the UK right now is the only way I got to see full coverage of the Games.

In the US, for instance, the events are deemed not worth televising, with only a few hours of round-up broadcast on US channels throughout the event, and a lot of the sports not scheduled to be shown until the whole thing ended last night.

Very little coverage was shown in Canada either. The Opening Ceremony, which took place on 29 August, was broadcast on CTV on 1 September. A daily highlights show, which rounded up the day’s performances, medal winners and athlete interviews, was broadcast each night on TSN2 and Sportsnet. The Closing Ceremony is scheduled to be shown in Canada today (though it was live in London last night).

As to newspaper coverage of the events, only 200 articles were published in Canada between 28 August and 7 September covering the Paralympics, while the Olympics’ coverage, between 26 July and 12 August, in the same newspapers, counted up to 5,488.

In the run-up, the London organising committee made deals with about 90 global broadcasters worth £10 million in revenue, a record for the Paralympics. However, compare the figure with the scale of broadcasting rights for the Olympics – NBC alone paid $4.38 billion last year for its rights to show the Summer and Winter Games through to 2020. I think those figures are shameful.

It was an entirely different story over here in the UK. Granted, we are hosting this thing. And there is an adrenalin rush that lit us all on 26 July and just never left. But that’s just one reason for the UK to show full coverage of the events, not an excuse for other countries not to do so.

In the UK, this year’s Paralympics drew its biggest-ever television audience, and the attendance at the live events didn’t disappoint either. The night I was lucky enough to have tickets to the Olympic Stadium, I was one of 80,000 in a full house. Most other venues were sold out too.

Later in the week, it suddenly occurred to me that I had never watched the Paralympics before. The reason for this? In Canada, it was never broadcast. Or, at least, it was done so in a condensed, easy-to-digest synopsis at the end of each day.

But for London 2012, four weeks after the Olympics’ Closing Ceremony, I can barely remember the able-bodied athletes and their wins, which I followed almost compulsively from early morning to bedtime. My mind is now so full of the faces, the names and the stunning accomplishments of the parathletes that have mesmerized me for the past 11 days.

During the Paralympics, 40 world records were set, and names like Dave Reid, Ellie Simmonds, Jonnie Peacock, Sarah Storey and Richard Whitehead became household names and heroes. And those are just the British athletes.

The motto for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralymic Games was ‘Inspire a Generation’, and I truly believe that – even if you don’t really care about the sport and you do find the money spent for this extravaganza rather over the top – watching the competitors, following their moving stories (a young boy born without his left hand or a young girl born with cerebral palsy, the solider who was blinded by an attack in Afghanistan, the young woman who lost both her legs in the 7/7 attacks on London), and cheering them on to victory is something that will stay with many young Brits for years to come.

Today, both Olympic and Paralympic athletes paraded through the streets of London (the Brits love a good parade), and we have all painfully settled into our London 2012 hangovers. Rio and 2016 can’t come soon enough.