Posting under duress

Sometimes you have to get things down in writing even though it's the last thing you feel like doing. Not that anything has gone disastrously wrong - just that I feel in a state of continuing low-level stressedoutedness which isn't particularly comfortable. Neither of us is sleeping very well and there seem to be innumerable loose ends to tidy up at work and at home that are becoming overpowering at times.

The removal firm is going to be packing our stuff up on Monday and loading it into a 20 foot container. The ship leaves Liverpool on Friday 8th June - the same day that we leave Manchester. The children had their last day at school on Friday and today a man came to take away my little car. :(

I've had trips to the optician, doctor, dentist and blood donor clinic in the last few weeks as I attempt to get up to date with everything. They won't take blood from me in Canada, as I'm obviously riddled with mad cow disease, and to give blood here you need to have been in the UK for 28 days after any trip to Canada, so that might be my last time ever for giving blood. Annoying really. Maybe I'll have to cultivate some leeches...

Progress

Looks like we've come to some sort of agreement on the price of the property in Canada, so now we've just got to sort out the various things that are the conditions of the sale. This includes getting the water in the well tested, the house surveyed and the minor point of getting the finances in place.

We've had a couple of representatives of international mover firms round to give us quotes for packing up our stuff and sending it off on a boat. It'll take a little over a month for the container to get to our new house. We're hoping to complete on 19th June, so we will for a time be proud owners of a house with absolutely no furniture. It'll be like it was when we bought our first house in Aberdeen, back in December 1988, when we had a truly ghastly lime-green and brown bed-settee and pretty much nothing else. We can't take beds out to Canada anyway, so will be buying new ones as a priority for our first week I should think.

I'm thinking that I'll need to take out a basic set of kitchen utensils/pans/cutlery in our luggage so that I'll be able to prepare simple meals in the new kitchen. There is at least an oven there, so we'll be able to cook. One of the big selling points of the house for me was this lovely woodburning stove, also in the kitchen, which was a really welcoming sight the first time we saw the house (when the snow was coming down horizontally outside!):


Mind you, there was a bird in the chimney when we went back to the property for our second visit, so another priority will be putting a bird-proof cap on the chimney!

Back in Blighty

Got back at 6.00am yesterday. The children slept until 9.00am today, which made a pleasant change. Felt odd seeing the green of an English spring after the very brown landscape in Canada.

We found a property that we all really liked, but I'm not posting any details until the purchase is definite. I'm not generally superstitious like that (and would normally scorn any kind of superstitious activity) - but no-one wants to thumb their nose at fate.

Lots of financial things to sort out in the meantime, as our house here is not yet sold, so I think this option on the oven in the kitchen of the cottage in Canada was very apt.

... I am a free man

Or woman. But we've got our Social Insurance Numbers now, so feel like we're part of the system.

Met our realtor today and spent nearly an hour with her, going over our various requirements for property. We'll be spending next Monday and Tuesday with her, looking around various places in Prince Edward County. She reckoned we could do ten each day. I'll be frankly amazed if there are ten in total that come anywhere close to our needs, but I'll be happy to be proved wrong.

At least all the schools in the County are very good, so we don't need to worry about catchment areas. Nearly everyone we talk to tells us how great a place this is to raise kids, which is helping to convince us that we're doing the right thing. Makes a change from being told how brave we are, which is what a lot of people back home keep saying (and which just makes me think of Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister).

Had another drive around this afternoon, covering the north-east this time. Very little traffic around and lots of lovely views of the lake.

Permanent Residents

Well we're back in Canada again, and now we're officially immigrants. We 'landed' at Toronto on Saturday 7 April. This was a remarkably straight-forward process. We were off the plane very quickly and got straight to a passport-checking point. The woman there examined our visas and asked "Are you landing today?". She then marked our customs form with pink highlighter pen and red pencil and sent us off to the immigration section. Here all our paperwork was checked. We had to start up the computer at this point as we'd realised on the plane that we didn't have the address where we were going to have our permanent residents' cards sent (my father's fiancée's brother's house). But that was all fine - just had to sign all the paperwork and have new photos taken. Bet they'll look lovely - we'd been travelling for ten hours and were shattered!

Then we were given a bunch of information for new immigrants and sent off to the baggage reclaim section. Our flight's cases turned up about five minutes later, so the whole immigration process was really quick. We had to go through a special customs section with our lists of 'goods accompanied' and 'goods to follow', and that took another fifteen minutes or so, but the woman on the checkpoint was very pleasant and very complimentary about the neatness and completeness of our list of goods to follow.

Picking up our car we found we had to fire up the computer again to get an attachment to our car hire confirmation email printed off. We had nearly left the printer at home, so were very glad we hadn't. The car itself is pretty hideous - a Dodge something or other. We left Toronto at around 7.00pm and drove up the coast to Prince Edward County, arriving at the cottage at 9.00pm. Of course by then it was completely dark (and snowing!), but our hosts were very welcoming; half emptying their fridge so that we'd have something to eat for breakfast the next morning (supermarkets are shut on Easter Sunday here too).


The next morning... that's when we saw the view from the back of the cottage. The children came rushing up to me to tell me that "Lake Ontario is in our back garden!". They've spent ages outside playing at the water's edge already, and the temperature is barely above freezing.

Yesterday we saw a fair bit of the County, often through a fine snow which was being blown about by a biting westerly wind. We had lunch in Trenton and drove along the waterfront to Belleville before coming back across the bridge to potter along the road through Rednersville and then back to Consecon. I watched a movie with the kids while Mike talked to our hosts about our plans and got a few more contacts from them, to do with banks and mortgages. Once the children had gone off to bed we enjoyed our first ever bottle of Prince Edward County wine.

Today we stocked up at the A&P supermarket in Trenton. Got there bright and early at 7.40 (still mostly functioning on UK time), so pretty much had the store to ourselves. I was impressed by the range of food on offer - seemed better than the Safeways we shopped at in Calgary when we were staying there. Except for potatoes - they were obviously waiting for a delivery of those, so we will have to do without them for a few days!

Went back to Picton and Mike talked to a banker while I took the children to the park to play for an hour or so. Horizontal snow at times, but they didn't seem to care! Had a lovely lunch at the café next to the Regent Theatre. Will cook a meal in the cottage tonight, but as this kitchen is better equipped than my own (there's even a parmesan grater, for goodness sake) I don't think it is going to be too much of a challenge.

[Postscript - actually there are two parmesan graters in the kitchen. Oh, and although Canadian road distances are measured in kilometres, their ovens are calibrated in degrees fahrenheit (wondered why the chicken wasn't cooking very fast...). So cooking in this kitchen is harder than I thought. Oh well, at least the kitchen metaphor is holding true!]

Tomorrow we'll get our Social Insurance Numbers and then we've got our first meeting with a realtor, so hope we'll be able to start getting a better idea of the sort of property we might end up buying here. Then it's back to the bank again on Wednesday to open our accounts, get credit cards and so on. Feels like we're achieving quite a lot, considering we've not even been in the country for 48 hours yet!

Next big step

The house is now on the market - had our first potential buyer round today.

I wanted to make some hot cross buns this morning, but then wondered if I should, as the potential buyer might think I was trying the old trick of filling the house with baking smells to help sell it. Went ahead anyway (they were only proving in the oven when she came round, so she probably didn't notice at all).

I've developed a kind of spring-cleaning frenzy and wondered whether I'd hit a new obsessive level when I found myself cleaning the overflow hole on our basin with a cotton bud this morning. Hope the house sells quickly, I'm not sure I can keep this up.

Yew trees

Watched the BBC programme 'The Trees that made Britain' last night, on the subject of yew trees. It follows two tree experts from Kew Gardens on a tour of interesting trees around the UK.

The answer to the question 'Why do we find yew trees close to churches?' turned out to be 'because pagans thought of yew trees as their churches, so the early Christians built their churches next door to them, to tempt the pagans indoors'. What a fantastic piece of marketing. In a wet country like this, people were bound to go for the religion with the indoor venue.

The C word

Today my husband broke the news about our planned departure to his mother. He's down visiting her as his dad is back in hospital and in a bad way. Sounds like she didn't take it too badly, and he's already sorting her out a new passport so that she can come and stay with us.

"I mentioned the C word", he told me.
"What, Christmas?" I replied, rather stupidly.

I had no idea he was going to tell her about it. They've agreed that there's no point in telling his dad, who has maybe two months left of life at best. It's a great relief that Mum knows now, as the children kept mentioning things about being in Canada and nearly giving the whole thing away every time we saw them (we didn't dare tell them not to mention it, as it would be bound to have the opposite effect!). There never seemed to be a good time to tell them, particularly after the cancer diagnosis. I've told quite a lot of other people now, including my boss and immediate colleagues, although I have to say that I haven't put the news on any of the Christmas cards that I wrote this week - it seems better to tell people face-to-face, somehow.

At the parents' evening the other week my daughter's teacher asked us about our plans. She was pleased that we won't be going until next summer, as she didn't want to lose her from her class. She also was confident that she'll settle in well to a new school and a new country, which was reassuring.

Cartæ visæ

Our passports, complete with their visas, arrived back on Saturday. Very exciting, but then you begin to think about all the things that you need to do before you can actually leave the country, and start to panic.

We made a start by clearing a car-load of rubbish from the garage on Sunday afternoon and taking it to the tip. A small start, but as least now I can park in the garage without it being quite such the precision exercise that it has been for the last month or two.

We're getting some mixed reactions from friends and family. Most think we're making a sensible move, but some admit to being in a state of denial (probably because they're not daring to believe it's true...).

Top of the ladder

A letter requesting that we send our passports off to the Canadian High Commission arrived on Saturday. We posted them off today and will expect to get them back, complete with shiny visas, in a few weeks' time. Then we'll have to officially land in the country sometime before the end of August next year. So we've finally got to the front of the long queue (or somewhere near the front, anyway).

The stepladder-top pictured belongs to my father-in-law. I love the way it shows how much painting he's done over his lifetime, in a restrained-Jackson Pollock kind of way.

Not nearly an armful

Had the medicals and x-rays today. All very straightforward and relatively painless - apart from the bit where they took a blood sample. My son was very intrigued about the blood test.

"What did she just do?"
"Took some blood from my arm."
"Is she going to put it back?"

Oh, and the parental wedding date has been fixed for a different weekend in June. Hurrah!

Blood pressure rising

Came home yesterday to find my better half looking pale and clammy, convinced that he'd lost the family's passports. We need them for our medicals on Tuesday. Last time we had them was after our research trip to Canada earlier in the year. So it was a case of trying to remember which bags we brought through passport control.

He found them ten minutes after I'd got home, but that's the sort of stress we don't need...

Talking of unwanted stress, my father has recently announced that he is going to be getting married next year. That's fine, good for him, but there are already problems because I couldn't make the date his fiancée had set her heart on. I was planning to be at a conference in Canada on the weekend in question (and have already submitted a proposal) - typically it is the only weekend in the whole of 2007 when I had something pencilled into my diary. They hadn't actually booked the church when I dropped this bombshell, but I haven't heard since whether they have changed the plans or not. Sigh.

Hope we'll both be more chilled when our blood pressure is taken on Tuesday!

Tick tock, tick tock

The official clock has started ticking - a letter arrived from the Canadian High Commission today, asking us to organise medicals to prove that we aren't going to be a drain on Canadian society. Child #1 has her arm in a sling at the moment, with a suspected fracture of her elbow - perhaps not the best advertisement for a hospital-free family...

Complications

Bad news on the family front. Father-in-law has just been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Life expectancy seems generally to be less than a year. Horrible all round, and as far as emigrating goes this makes things particularly complicated. Mother-in-law is lovely and she would want to be near us if she was left on her own (we've discussed this already). She doesn't know about our emigration plans, although I think she has her suspicions. Now we have to decide whether we plough ahead, or shelve things for a while. Trouble is, in some ways the emigration process is a bit of an unstoppable train once you're on board, and at certain points you run out of options.

Ho hum.

First post

Just starting on an emigration journey from the UK to Canada. We spent a few weeks exploring the country in May and June, and I came to realise that going to live in a new country would be like trying to prepare a meal in someone else's kitchen. Hence the name of this blog.

It's very early days yet, but we're getting towards the top of the emigration queue (we sent our application off in July 2004), so it feels like it will be sooner rather than later...