O Canada

I don't want to suggest that I spend all my time watching television, because I really don't. Especially as I don't currently have a television, so it must all be consumed through the Internet, which can be limiting but also liberating. Nevertheless, I have been watching Michael Portillo's railroad journey through New England and eastern Canada which I think is due to finish in Toronto tomorrow evening, having taken him from Boston to the Cape and the islands then up through Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire, guided always (apart from a film crew) by his trusty Appleton's.

A few admissions here. Although it never manifested itself beyond Lego as a child, I am quite interested in railways, and have read several of the excellent Christian Wolmar's books on Britain's sprawling rail network, and I find the history of the Tube absolutely fascinating, so I know more about cut-and-cover and other such things than perhaps is healthy for a man of my age. I never had a railway set in my youth, though my friend Charles's venerable father had a vast table-top set which impressed me greatly (a room solely for your model trains! Imagine that!).

I also find Michael Portillo a sympathetic narrator. This was not always the case. In the mid-1990s, when he was Defence Secretary and I was an undergraduate, he seemed to me everything that was wrong with the post-Thatcherite hard-right of the Conservative Party, and I laughed like a drain at people gathering on College Green during his leadership bid-that-wasn't in 1995 who dressed in sombreros and ponchos, waving placards that read "Portillo for El Presidente!" and "Vote for Portillo or he kick your ass!". But his defeat by Stephen Twigg in the 1997 general election seems to have had a genuinely transformative effect on him. Although he returned to the Commons for Kensington and Chelsea, and indeed was Shadow Chancellor for a while and a leadership contender in 2001, his heart never quite seemed to be in it any more. He had shifted far to the left, and perhaps realised that politics was no longer the be-all and end-all of life. I think he has a rich wife. Some might argue that he was, and is, a loss to the Conservative Party, and maybe they are right. Certainly, it is hard to imagine him performing more badly than Iain Duncan Smith if his leadership bid had been successful. On the other hand, it seems to have made him a much more human and likeable figure, and one set free to pursue his passions.

Final admission (and I promise this is not going to turn into another maudlin meandering, because I have promised myself to refrain that): New England and eastern Canada are very dear to me and hold a lot of highly-cherished memories, and are in fact the only parts of north America I know at all well (though work once took me to Washington DC, which I found a congenial but perplexing place, and I have 'transited' through Chicago). So the Portillo series has been a gift to me: ten episodes of pure nostalgic reverie.

I may return to New England in time, though I have written in the Cape Cod Times of my love for that little spit of land. At the moment, I want to talk about Canada. My first visit to that mad, huge, empty country was nearly 20 years ago, in 2000, when a family holiday took us (as part of a wider visit to New England) to Montreal, and I was captivated. It was in summer, and blazingly hot, and I have still never experienced a Canadian winter, though I do like snow, having been rather deprived of it as a child in the North-East of England in the 1980s. I found the place fascinating. The bilingualism, the co-existence of similar but very different European cultures, the architecture, the topography. There was something else too. Now, I have several American friends, and I don't want to impugn them. But Canadians are just a little bit more… relaxed. Bizarrely, given the hard and soft power of the US, they seem to have less to prove. I took to them to instantly. It perhaps helped that I'd had a very sympathetic Canadian tutor as an undergraduate (teaching Scottish history, slightly stereotypically). But there was none of the "America, fuck yeah!" attitude that some Yankees can demonstrate from time to time. There was a wonderful combination of British reserve and Gallic shrug.

Two years later (I think it was 2002 - my stepmother would remember these things), we spent the best part of a week in Toronto. It was only supposed to be a weekend, but then there was a fault with the septic tank of the farmhouse in rural Ontario which was our next destination. It took us all a while to admit it, because my father was meticulous in the planning of these family jaunts, but we were all secretly relieved at the extension of our stay. Toronto I adored for different reasons: firmly Anglophone, but no less cosmopolitan than Montreal, and staggeringly beautiful with its views on to Lake Ontario. We succumbed fully to the tourist experience, taking a Duck tour round the city and a day trip to Niagara Falls. We stepped on to Yonge Street, for many years believed to be the longest street in the world (this has now, I gather, been debunked). We stayed in a magnificent lakeside hotel and soaked up the atmosphere. It was simply wonderful.

My other significant visit was to Ottawa with the House of Commons Defence Committee in (I think) 2007. This was different again, as you would expect travelling as part of an official delegation. We were received warmly as allies - at this point Canada was doing a lot of the heavy lifting and taking a lot of the casualties in Afghanistan as part of the NATO mission there (Op HERRICK for UK readers). We had a very gracious welcome at the Parliament Buildings (Canada has the only other House of Commons in the world) and I put myself in very bad odour with two members of the Committee by persuading them to try a bottle of Canadian wine over dinner. Ottawa is a lovely place, though, like most contrived capitals, I think, a bit of a one-trick pony. Politics is all they do. The architecture also reminded me of the Gilmorehill campus at the University of Glasgow. But I enjoyed my time there, and would go back.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you cry. You've been to Canada a few times. So what? Well, it could all have been much more than that. As I finished my master's degree and applied for doctoral programmes, one of my applications was to McGill University. Reader, they accepted me. Indeed, they even offered me home student fees and some teaching. Why didn't I go? Well, in my day, if you applied for funding through what was then the Arts and Humanities Research Board, you had to nominate a specific institution. Being at St Andrews, and knowing they would take me for a PhD, I nominated them, as they were safe. I had also applied to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Glasgow, but St Andrews was my 'safe' offer. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had been able to take my funding wherever I liked.

Montreal would have been a damned sight colder (and in summer hotter) than St Andrews, that's for sure. I might have picked up vaguely serviceable French (my languages are appalling, which is a stain on my character which I haven't yet been able to resolve). Don't get me wrong: as readers of this blog will know, I had a ball in my four years of doctoral research at St Andrews, and I love that queer little corner of Fife with its ruins and rocks and links. But one always wonders about the road less travelled, surely? What would three or four years across the Pond have been like? Would I ever have come back? How would it have changed my prospects?

It is a bland truism to say that one can never know. What I will say is that I like Canada, and I like Canadians. In my short stays, I have enjoyed being there, and I hope I would have enjoyed being among them for a longer period of time. If I had to guess, I think it would have made me very much more British, because that seems to be how I react to being abroad (I know some people are the total opposite). I can't say if that would have been a good or a bad thing. It would also have required some domestic juggling, as it would have been only six months after I got together with my now-ex-wife. Quite how that would have played out, I have no idea.

Still, to conclude, the Portillo documentaries have made me wonder. An itch unscratched, perhaps, or, more likely, an unscratchable itch. I am still very fond of Canada and its inhabitants. I hope to go back one day, though the prospect seems very distant as I write.

Oh, one last thing. The only baseball game I have ever attended was the Boston Red Sox against the Toronto Blue Jays at Fenway Park. I sang both national anthems. Balance, what. O Canada...