Cambridge is it... likely
And suddenly September is looking very, very close.
First up, the Vancouver Sun did a lovely story about Susan. The on-line version is nice, but the print one is just lovely.
Yesterday we sat down to look at finances, and ultimately, barring some incredibly large donations, Cambridge seems our likely destination. £40,000 a year makes the one-year Cambridge option a lot more accessible than a two-year program at Oxford.
We have our plane tickets, and I can tell you that the end of August suddenly looks very close. Yes, we’ve moved around a lot, and have really trimmed what we take with us (ignoring the barn and the attic full of stuff in Nova Scotia), but still we’re looking at multiple mail-forwardings, deciding if we can avoid paying for a Royal Mail box number in Cambridge, and figuring out how to ship boxes of books and paperwork from here to there without spending too many hundreds of dollars.
All of which also involves asking: what if we stay for more than one year? What then? At that point we’re also looking at a visa for me, and at figuring out what to do with our accumulated possessions, which live at the moment in three different places.
Today I am determined to finally sort out the various mailing addresses that we have for various Canadian and French credit cards, cel phone contracts, and other things. Fortunately, we live in an age when a lot of things just sort of go along, charging various credit cards each month, with little or no attention needed, but other things - like magazine subscriptions - aren’t that simple.
And can I safely assume that things mailed to our Nova Scotia address, and forwarded to our Vancouver address, and then to our UK address, will all arrive?
I guess it speaks to my background, and our shared travel history, that actually moving my physical body to another country seems like less hassle than managing bills and mail and phone numbers.
(Did I mention that French home prices seem to be falling, and that we’re also casually looking at those as well?)
As much as I’ve enjoyed being back in Vancouver, and honestly rediscovering a lot of things that you forget while living here, I’m also conscious of how expensive this city is, and how intensely car-centric. The traffic noise, and the way that pedestrians are third class citizens is just overwhelming - although it appears that Vancouver may be heading to way of France, and lowering speed limits to 30 kmh.
Of course given that Vancouver has virtually no real traffic enforcement, it will be a meaningless gesture.
This morning, while thinking about Vancouver, and Cambridge, and Nova Scotia, I was amazed to suddenly see my old employer, WMMT Radio in Whitesburg, Kentucky appear on the CBC web site.
Despite the many barriers that Trump is placing in the way of people trying to visit his country, it does feel like the world is shrinking, and people outside the borders of the US are understanding that ultimately we’re all in this together, and need to stand up against those who would harm us.
And yes, I know that window, and that mixing board, and the rack of equipment beside it.
We left Kentucky and returned to Canada just after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York (and elsewhere). Within hours and days it became obvious that the US was changing radically, and especially that funding for arts and for things like community radio were about to be slashed. The damage that was started then, under Bush, has continued, and it now appears that Trump will finish the job.
And, in Canada, it seems that cutting funding to the CBC, and the NFB, and other cultural institutions, is also part of the Carney agenda.
All of this leaves me wondering: do I want to live in a country where art, and music, and journalism aren’t considered important? Aren’t considered essential to our very civilization and freedom? Where the almighty dollar is the only measure of success?