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Ten years ago today I published First Post, the very first entry on Cooking in Someone Else's Kitchen. As I explained in my most recent post, life has rather got in the way of my blogging of late, but this anniversary seems a good time to sit down and reflect about the way this emigration journey has gone.

Ten years ago our small family was about to make a leap into the unknown. We had no jobs to come to in Canada and we knew very little about the country. A lot has changed in those years, both here and in the United Kingdom. Mike and I both have permanent full-time jobs in our respective careers, and our kids have grown up into thoughtful young Canadians.

These last weeks I have been watching the news coming out of the UK with rapt interest, as the country dealt with the EU referendum vote and then its aftermath. One of the best things I've seen about the impact of the Brexit vote was by Michael Dougan, an EU law professor from the University of Liverpool, who presented an analysis of the Leave arguments before the vote and then again after the vote's results were known.

I did have a vote in the referendum, and I voted Remain. My motivation was primarily one  of keeping options open for my kids: having an EU passport gave them the opportunity of living and working anywhere in Europe if they wanted to. If the withdrawal from the EU goes ahead, they will only have the option of living and working in Canada and the countries of the UK (and that's assuming that the UK holds together as one nation). Which is still better than only being able to live and work in the UK, of course, but I feel bad for the British youngsters whose futures have been trammelled by those who believed the empty promises of the Leave campaign.

One of the consequences of the result of the vote has been an increase in British people investigating how to move to Canada. It will be interesting to see if this will cause a spike in applications. This is a country that welcomes immigrants, but doesn't actually make it all that easy to become one, so good luck if you are in the UK and thinking of applying!

And speaking of new immigrants, my mother-in-law (and her dog) will soon be joining us from the UK. She arrives at the end of the month and we are busy making space for her and her things (it's amazing how much junk we have accumulated after being in the same house for nine years!). We sponsored her back in 2010, so this moment has been a long time coming. I'm hoping she'll arrive before civil war breaks out in Britain. Just joking! (I think...)

A bit of a rant and some greens

All the family went out for a meal last night to celebrate Mike's birthday. I was looking forward to trying one of the 'Countylicious' menus at local restaurants. This is a month-long celebration of the County's 'culinary community', according to the initiative's website - it's basically designed to tempt people out to local restaurants in the slack season between the end of summer and the Christmas party rush. It's been running for a few years but this is the first time we'd got organised enough to try it.

And I have to say that I was disappointed with the meal I had. The meat was local, but the vegetables were anything but fresh, local, and seasonal: asparagus in November and some carrots and broccoli that looked suspiciously like they'd come from a packet of frozen veg. With farm stands still selling fresh vegetables in the County: root crops, leeks, cabbages, squashes, there's simply no excuse for a restaurant claiming to be celebrating local food to be serving up frozen vegetables at this time of year.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the Brussels sprout plants have been refusing to produce any actual sprouts, despite looking green and healthy. I think the weather conditions this year just haven't been right for the formation of sprouts. I don't like to think that I've grown a vegetable which is producing nothing worth eating, so instead of vainly hoping for some sprouts to appear at this late period of the year, I'm focusing instead on those healthy green leaves and am harvesting those.

I've not picked or cooked Brussel tops before, so this was a bit of an experiment. I cut out the stems, shredded the greens and then lightly braised them with a clove or two of garlic in a little butter and water, finished with some freshly ground pepper and a little salt.

They made a tasty and brightly green side dish to our Sunday lunch of local lamb cooked with  herbs, onions, carrots, potatoes and parsnips, all from our garden. Even those who would refuse to eat sprouts were willing to consume them. If we can eat these seasonal, local crops at our own table, I'm sure that restaurants claiming to support County growers can do the same thing.

Disgusted at Drummondville

I've seen a couple of stories along the lines of the one reported by the CBC on Wednesday. A couple living in Drummondville, Quebec, have been told that they have to replace their front-yard vegetable garden with at least 30% lawn or face fines of $100-300 per day. There was a similar story about this time last year about a family in Oak Park, Detroit who also faced fines and possibly jail time over a similar issue. In that case, the charges were dropped after the city was bombarded with negative publicity. I hope the same will be true in Drummondville.

In both cases the vegetable gardens were a credit to their neighbourhoods and had been started with the best of intentions by the families involved. I find these by-laws baffling and anachronistic. I can (sort of) understand them being passed in the 1950s, when the suburban lawn was the height of fashion, but in today's world, where we are more aware that maintaining the monoculture of a lush lawn is a waste of precious water (and not to mention the toxic weedkillers and fertilisers that make their way into those water supplies)?

Out of interest, I went to Google Street View to see if there was a 'before' snapshot of the Drummondville front yard. By some fluke, I landed on the exact spot on my first look. So here is the garden as it looked whenever the Google car went past (if I've got the right property):

And here it is today as recorded by the CBC.

So much more interesting and vibrant, I'd say. Not to mention productive, health-enhancing, environmentally responsible... Sigh.

The Drummondville case is even worse than the Oak Park one, because the city is planning to ban all front yard vegetable gardens in homes built after this Fall. You can probably hear me banging my head on the desk from there.

Powerless

Last May I wrote a short post about how we're sponsoring Mike's mother to come and live with us here. We knew it was going to be a long wait before she would come out: parents and grandparents are not a priority for the immigration service.

Today's news about immigration rates is not good for our family and many others like us. There are 140,000 people in the parents-and-grandparents queue, it seems, and now they are only going to allow 11,000 in, each year. At this rate, it will be more than 10 years before our family will be reunited.

It's so frustrating and upsetting. A lot of new immigrants have no vote (ourselves included), so it's an easy way for the government to save money without losing the good opinion of voters. Indeed, reading the comments on that CBC article would suggest that this move is popular with many Canadians, who see immigration as a problem and people like my mother-in-law as a potential burden on the state.

All we want to do is offer my children's grandmother a place in our new life and the comfort of having her only family members around her. Apparently, it's too much to ask.

A political rant

What? Politics? That's not what you expect from this blog, really, is it? Well I'm not ranting about politics exactly - more about the process that enables politics to happen.

There's a general election going on in the UK this week and, in theory, I have a say in who gets to run the country. Well, the person who will represent the constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East, where we used to live, anyway.

Or I would have, if the voting papers had got to me on time. They arrived today, four days before the election. The chances of them getting back to Trafford Borough Council by Thursday seem negligible.

I've just come back from our local post office, where I asked the manager, Betty, how much it would cost to ensure that my vote reaches Manchester by Thursday. She laughed in a somewhat sardonic manner and looked it up. "Eighty-one dollars," was her reply. EIGHTY-ONE dollars!!! That's over fifty of your British pounds.

According to the Voter Power Index, my vote is worth a measly 0.038 of a whole vote (as Wythenshawe and Sale East is a very safe Labour seat). But even if we'd used to live in Bangor, Wales, where voters are the most powerful (each vote the equivalent of 1.308 votes), I don't think it would be worth forking out $81 to make sure mine counted.

I had a card in the post last week which told me that the postal votes would be sent out on Monday 26 April and giving me a number to ring if I hadn't received it by Friday. As post usually takes a week to get here, I was not surprised when Friday came and I had no voting papers. So I rang the number.

"You're not on my list," I was told, when I finally got through to a human being who was able to help. I gave him my voter number. "Oh, that's a Trafford number!" he said. "You'll have to phone Trafford Borough Council."
"Will that do any good?" I asked. "Is there anything that they will be able to do for me if my vote doesn't arrive in time?"
"No," he admitted.
Wonderful. So I've been given the wrong number to call for help, I've been sent voting papers which arrived too late for me to be able to use and even if they had arrived in time, my vote would have been fairly meaningless anyway.

I've been following this election more closely than usual, perhaps because I still don't have a vote in Canada, so this is my one opportunity to engage in the electoral process. I think there might be an element of nostalgia involved, too. Perhaps other ex-pats have similar feelings.

So I've sent my vote by regular mail ($1.70) - not expecting it to arrive in time (though there is a very slim chance that it might). If enough votes arrive late from overseas voters, perhaps the electoral organisers will realise that by sending the papers out so close to the polling date, they are effectively disenfranchising thousands of ex-pat voters. Or maybe that was their plan all along...