At home in London

I often used to think when living in Toronto how nice it must be to live with a significant other.  I had the most wonderful roommates one could hope for, and I absolutely loved living with them.  But when I got home from work, too exhausted to cook, I would think...it would be nice to have someone to help take care of that. 

With roommates, we were each living our own separate lives, in the same house.  This is the first time I’ve lived with someone in this new way, where we’re delicately intertwining our lives: sharing a space, sharing costs, sharing a closet...

I love planning meals together, doing our grocery shopping, carrying home fresh potted herbs and then cooking together, and talking over dinner about what we’ve seen and thought that day. It’s all those little things, and then also the larger, more philosophical, sudden realization: I don’t have to shoulder the weight of life’s challenges alone any more.  We’re in this together.  And so far, that is a beautiful thing.

All that life can afford

I’ve been thinking that I should blog again for a couple of days, but I’m not really quite sure what to say.  Everything feels eerily normal.  It feels like we’ve been here for ages.  It feels like we belong.  Even Fred said yesterday, as we’re about to watch a movie on his laptop – “Robin, we’re in London England and it doesn’t even feel any different.”  And he’s right.  It doesn’t.

It’s not that nothing is different here.  In fact, everything is different.  Every detail is similar but slightly altered – the cars are mostly the same make but much smaller (Fred noted early on the lack of pickup trucks).  The streets are similar but the signs are different.  Traffic drives on the left side of the road.   The roads are tinier, and come and go from every which way.  There is one intersection nearby where we have to cross seven times just to get to the other side.  And don’t even get me started about navigating roundabouts as a pedestrian.

In the first few days we were here, all the newness culminated into a general feeling of unease, a slight discomfort with my surroundings.  Even though I’ve lived in the UK before, and I know what to expect, the changeover still has to happen.  It will happen when we go back too.  I think that’s what people who are uncomfortable with travelling to – and especially living in – foreign countries can’t deal with.  Life is more or less the same everywhere – we all eat, have conversations, get from one place to the next - but changing over from one culture to the next is…hard.  It’s challenging, anyway.  It’s like walking out of your house one day and seeing everything familiar flipped into a mirror image.

The way that I deal it is, every time I’m out, I think to myself “today that is new.  Tomorrow it will no longer be new.  Every day more and more things will not be new, and then I will be adjusted.”  And it happens much quicker than one ever expects it might.

We’ve now visited both of our campuses and done a fair bit of exploring around London.  It’s amazing how comfortable it all feels.  I think it’s because we know that we’re not just living here: this is our home.  Even if it is for just a year.

One of the more exciting things that has happened came about entirely by happy accident.  Fred and I had hiked it downtown to see about opening a bank account, we sat down in a pub to have a pint and a tea and two gentlemen asked if they could share our table for a bit.  We got acquainted, and soon found out that they were both East Londoners – who fit to the “T” the stereotype that North Americans would have of them based on Mary Poppins.  One of them even sang the “Chim-chiminee” song to me so I could place the Cockney accent.  They were out to celebrate a new job one of them had just gotten that day.  They were doing a bit of a pub crawl, and asked if we wanted to join in.  Of course we said yes – and we couldn’t have possibly found better tour guides!

They introduced us to London Pride, a darkish beer which I found to be extremely delicious, some hearty steak and ale pie, and Ye Ole Cheshire Cheese, a beautiful, dark, low-ceilinged pub just off of Fleet Street that oozed mystery and history, where Dickens is said to have penned a good portion of his famed novels - it's even alluded to in A Tale of Two Cities.  We also visited a statue of Samuel Johnson’s cat, which was in a courtyard outside of where they used to live.

Among other things, Johnson wrote the first English dictionary, and is well known in London for having said of the city “"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." 

After a whirlwind of a first week in this beautiful, historic and bustling town, I couldn’t agree more!

First post from London

I’m in London. I’m in London. I’m in London. It’s like a mantra I have to keep repeating in order to make it real. It doesn’t help that I’m in that sleep-deprived, jet-lagged, fuzzy-minded mental state where everything inside your body feels like it is swimming. We’re here, and it’s like my body and mind don’t know what to do with themselves.

The good thing is that all the goodbyes have been said, and now it’s only time for hellos…many many hellos. Hello city, hello flat, hello left-sided driving, hello Freddy every morning and every day after school…! But more on that later.

Saying goodbye to Mikey at the airport was very difficult. I was definitely an airport crier. Then we had three hours to wait for our plane to board. We only realized after the first two hours that we in fact did have free Internet access, which is definitely a change from previous times I’ve travelled and cursed the idea that public access to the Internet might not be a basic human right.

And then there was the seven hour flight. It wasn’t terrible, but it did remind me of the hours spent on Greyhound busses going up north, where you want to sleep so badly but there is only the white noise of engines and other peoples’ conversations that keep you in a kind of static alertness, ever-restless. Freddy was definitely not pleased with how poorly his body fit between those normal-sized-person seats, but I think I appeased him a bit when I offered him half of my headphone set to watch Ironman 2. Which is not such a terrible movie, for that kind of movie, although I’m pretty sure Scarlett Johansson’s role in it was completely superfluous, no matter how dead sexy she may be.

And then we were landing in London, at Gatwick airport, and everyone was speaking in stereotypically English accents, which aren’t stereotypical at all because now we are the stereotypical North Americans – and as I recall from my time in Scotland, while we’re here we will indubitably be assumed American until proven Canadian. We weren’t even to the baggage collection area before Freddy started saying things like “cheerio” and “jolly good”. Fact is, it is almost impossible to resist the urge to put on a fake British accent once here.

And then we were trying to navigate ourselves through this crazy new megopolous to our flat in Hackney, which we were pretty much as far from as possible when landing at Gatwick aiport. Luckily transit here is just as straightforward as I remembered it to be. Cramming a large Fred with a large bag into a small Tube, on the other hand, was definitely a challenge. I don’t doubt that in that moment he felt the claustrophobic side of city life quite sharply. I couldn’t help but looking at him every five minutes to smile weakly and try to read whether his face was saying “why the hell did I let Robin convince me to do this”.

Yes, there are definitely doubts. I was feeling nervous, trying to find our way here. And that nervousness was magnified times one million by my being nervous about whether Fred was nervous, and whether he might come to hate me for dragging him, this lovely Northern boy who is most at home fishing in a canoe miles from civilization, to one of the world’s largest, most city-est of cities to live my dream. I’ve never been afraid to take risks, but taking risks while someone else is holding your hand is quite a different cup of tea.

Speaking of tea, I did have a lovely cuppa already, and also soaked in a luxurious deep bathtub. I don’t know what I’ve done right to be blessed by such beautiful flats in recent years, but I am glad that that good apartment karma has come my way. This post has been long enough, but I will just say that I already know this lovely space will be a needed and welcome respite while we settle into this new life.

Now for some sleep….

This life

What better morning to say goodbye than this one, when outside my windows the lake and sky blend together into a uniform greyness, and every leaf and needle drips beneath the slow and constant rain.

Such a melancholy setting calls for sustained hugs and red eyes, unasked unanswerable questions of what might happen between now and the next time we meet – how we might be different, what we might have missed, how much time less there will be in our lives when we come together again.

The summer has been short and long at once, leaving me with irreconcilable feelings of loss and gain that tug at my heartstrings from opposite directions – let go, hold on, let go. A deep and familiar aching for my childhood in this pristine northern wilderness collides with nostalgia and for my adult life of urban excitement, the complexity of grown up relationships, responsibility, all of what was mine now gone.

Now the independence of making and living a life made up of choices mine and mine alone seeps into the need to hold onto this one man. Now we are finding balance, sharing decisions, seeking common ground. Balancing personal integrity with compromise, learning how to love well and live long and well together. Fitting in all the right places and working on the rest of it together – and talking, and talking, and talking it all out until it is right and good. Until it is comfort and home in each other.

Soon each will rely completely on the other. This reality becomes clearer with every goodbye, slowly counting down each piece of stability we had found in our independent lives – the bookends that held it all together. Goodbye house, goodbye family, goodbye friends, goodbye cat. Goodbye to the city and goodbye to the lake. Even goodbye to our cabin tucked far in the woods, with its well-worn path, its chuckling woodstove, the only home we’ve known together, a place that recalls so many of our best memories, our most beautiful moments, our aloneness with each other and with the trees and mountains, with the stars.

Where we are going we will have so little of ourselves to bring with us we will fear becoming lost. We will need each other, in that difficult way that sometimes brings out the worst in us for fear of leaning too much and fearing the fall. We will learn together, travel and experience, taste and see – we will live together, we will really live together and tie ourselves to one another in a serious way that is difficult to undo.

I feel now, where I did not feel it before, that it is time to go. It comes with that kind of sudden urgency when here and now is slipping quickly into what is to come, and the in-between-ness of it becomes unbearable. One more goodbye may finish me. It is not the goodbyes I want now but the gone, the on our way, the we’re finally doing it. The plane lifts off, the ground quickly fades through a tiny oval window, and out there, far away, is all that was, and now it is unquestionable that yes, we are going and yes, everything that was going to change has now changed, and no, there is no going back. So make it good, and make it right, or at least make it exactly what it is going to be and don’t regret, not this choice, not this life, not anything from before or next or after.

The view outside the window tells me this. The melancholy morning. The dreary lake. The move from one season to the next. The finality of it all.

The time passing. This life.

It's time to start again

It's time to start again. It's time to change, again. It's time to say goodbye to dear friends and much loved things and places.



After six years of living in Toronto I'm leaving. First for two months on a lake at home in Northern Ontario, then a year in London UK, and then who knows. It's so hard to believe as I sit here in this apartment that I love so much that soon this place will no longer be mine. Not just the apartment, but the city. I won't be able to say "I live in Toronto". I won't be riding my bike to work every day past the Gladstone Hotel and the quirky - if somewhat pretentiously hipster - shops, bars and restaurants of West Queen West. I won't be going to work for a community-based non-profit at the Artscape Wychwood Barns, with a wonderful crew of young people who care to work alongside.

I love Toronto! I love working where there is such a warm feeling of community, with kids running around the park, with a garden outside and with art happening all around me. I love running along the boardwalk and Lake Ontario in the early morning, and doing yoga in the tiny sanctuary space near my house. I love going shopping for beautiful vintage pieces and buying sweet dresses from the independent designers themselves. I love long hot baths in our clawfoot tub. I love this apartment, with its antique stove and chandeliers, stained glass windows, and my tiny but cosy top floor room with its slanted ceilings. I love that our house is old and vine-covered and in the middle of a quiet tree-lined street, hemmed in by the most pulsing of city arteries - King, Queen and Dufferin.


I'll miss my roommates, who keep me sane and make me laugh and let me cry and cry and cry (because I do that, you know). I'll miss my dear friends, who I've hand-picked to trust and love because they are all so genuine, so interesting, so un-judging and just such lovely people. I'll miss the dinner parties, the dancing, the live music, the late night street meat, poutine and shawarma. I'll miss the plays.

I'll miss my place in this place. Maybe that more than anything. I feel that I belong here now, which I didn't always think I would. I feel connected to a community of people that care, and who want to make a difference. Who inspire me every day even though the future does not look good for our world right now.

I have been lucky to work with so many organizations who do such good work and who have such passionate people at the helm. Organizations like Not Far From the Tree, the STOP Community Food Bank, Bells on Bloor, Pleaides Theatre, PEN Canada, Clay and Paper Theatre, Schools Without Borders. I'll miss this feeling of connection, and belonging.

I remember just before moving to Toronto that I had this idealistic vision of what it would be like to live here. I would live in an old apartment with eclectic charm, I would go home at night and put on some jazz, I would grow herbs on my windowsill, have tulips on the table, and cook delicious meals with my roommates. I would know interesting people, and we would have deep and important conversations.

It seems silly looking back on that, it was naive of me I know. But in another way I think that even then I did know what I wanted, what would really make me happy, which I don't think is that common. Happiness is so slippery, so hard to define. I didn't want a lot. I just wanted a place where I belonged, where I felt at home. A place I could make my own, build a life for myself on my terms and around my personal values. And I think I've done that.

The thing is, I don't know if it's one of those things in life you can just check off and say - done. Or if it should be something that once you have it, you should hang on to it?

The Doras

This morning I attended the Dora Mavor Moore Awards press conference, where the nominees for that award for the 2007/2008 season were announced. This season, which is now coming to a close, is the first season that I have been a figure – albeit a small and inconsequential one - in the arts scene in Toronto. But here I am, in this room, at this event, part of it all. What a great feeling. How lucky I feel today. I don’t know everyone in the room, but I know quite a few, even if they wouldn’t recognize me I know them and their contributions, I respect them, admire them and feel a camaraderie with them. I have seen many of the shows that were nominated for awards, and more excitingly have worked with quite a few of the people who put them on, since they were performed on our stages here at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.

What an amazing thing to be part of this community. To be in a room with the actors, dancers, opera singers, producers, directors, playwrights and administrators who make the Toronto performing arts scene hum. Who work together and collaborate and support one another. Who create and perform and support productions that electrify and provoke people, who evoke tears and laughter, fear and anger in their audiences. To see people honoured, like Fiona Reid, the late Richard Bradshaw and Bluma Appel, who have worked in this field for years to not just add to the aesthetic of the city – although that aim also holds its place in this city of concrete and steel – but who are political. They are dreamers, but they are active dreamers, who take it past the questioning to actively challenge the way things are and put forth ideas of how things might be. Who give their life and their personal finances to stage performances that provide this platform for questioning and change because to them it is what must be done. These are artists! Not flakes, not irrational idealists, but pillars of society, no less than lawyers and doctors, who are dedicated against some phenomenal odds to this career choice – no, this life choice, which is important, essential, and very, very difficult for so many reasons. As Ken Gass, Artistic Director of the Factory Theatre, put it, these are people who work to put bread on the table and raise families but who do so with a conscience of what is happening in the rest of the world. Above all, I think, they are free, and that is what the artist in me envies and admires the most. They have done what they wanted to do, and the results are beautiful.

Public Art - An Ode

I was riding up the Yonge subway line to meet my sister at Yonge and Bloor after work today. The car stopped at Wellesley Station and as we waited for the doors to close I looked out onto the platform and noticed that one of the gigantic subway ads was not an ad at all but a work of art. I barged my way through the crowded car, excusing myself as best I could, and ran out the open doors just as the last ding sounded and they closed behind me.

The car pulled away. I stood more or less alone on the platform, looking at a giant photograph. The picture was of a souvenir “Indian Brave” perched in the foreground, the same size as the CN tower way in the background behind it. It was a trick of perspective. The other three photographs were the same. Kitsch souvenirs placed in the foreground of the frame with well-known Torontoscapes in the background, placed in such a way that the former dumbed down the latter. A toy the same size as the lauded CN tower. Familiar landscapes, our urban spaces, made to feel unfamiliar, comedic, insignificant. The writeup nearby had a quote from the artist, Jeff Thomas, about his work: “As a transportation hub the subway station is a perfect example of how urban spaces simultaneously belong to everyone and to no-one. Here is a place where any cultural division –‘us’ versus ‘them’ – is blurred.”

I don’t know how I immediately recognized these images as art over advertisement. Maybe there was an earnestness in them that I couldn’t miss. I do know why seeing these photographs caused me to run frantically out of a subway car onto the platform. I have a thing for public art. I was touched beyond words to see these images here. They mean so much more in a public place than anywhere else. Hundreds, thousands of people mill by these photographs every day. They’re not much different than the advertisements that fill the other poster cases. They’re just images, after all; images that are there to take the viewer out of their present scene and make them think about something else. Only these images are not there to make you buy something, or want something, or feel you lack something. They are there to invoke feeling. The artist feels alone in the city. He is a Native man, caught between the Reserve and the city, caught between the past and the present, caught between racism and acceptance, between wanting to blend in and wanting to be unique, between wanting to have his culture be relevant and celebrated and wanting to not be judged or stereotyped. He is a specific story but his images – these photographs - are everyone. They are every person in the subway station. They are everyone in Toronto. They are isolation amongst the masses. They are the individual subverted by the congregation. They are loss of identity, the feeling of un-belonging, the eerie feeling that in this setting everyone is replaceable. And if this is the case what makes us so sure we really exist at all? We are all overlooked. We all overlook one another.

As Thomas said, the subway station is a perfect place for these images. In these types of spaces, nothing belongs to anyone. In a public urban space, no one individual is responsible; no one individual is accountable. A piece of garbage, a homeless person, a woman crying on the subway, an injured pigeon in a public square. No one has to stop. No one individual needs to stop and help, or care, or even look and notice. The city gives us glorious freedom: freedom from responsibility. It absolves us of our personal accountability to others.

Whenever I think about this societal phenomenon, it reminds me of learning how to use “soft focus” in professor Trisha Lamie’s theatre class. Soft focus was part of the Viewpoints technique. It was incorporated into our movement classes, one of my favourite performance classes of my undergrad. You stand in a group of performers and together you focus on nothing specific until your awareness slackens and you acknowledge your surroundings in a peripheral way only. If any one person begins a movement, the entire group must copy and follow through with it. A group in soft focus moves in flawless unison. A society in soft focus acts in glorious collective irresponsibility. These are natural to humans acting and living in shared spaces. Collective action or collective inaction. Mass movements or mass stillness. The subway cars fill with discarded newspapers and rolling bottles. We are all just kitsch; symbols of people placed beside the CN tower to see which one comes into focus. Which is the background, which is the fore.