Wednesday, 31 January 2007
Invite to contribute
We are still figuring out how the program works. We've invited lots of you to become authors so that you can create new posts as well as add comments. At the moment it is open to public viewing but we can change the settings so that it can only be viewed by selected people. I thought we'd wait awhile and see how many of us enjoy communicating in this fashion. If you have strong feelings about it being public let me know and I'll change the settings straight away.
First Hike
As some of you have already heard we went on our first hike in Yorkshire last week. Very enjoyable, lovely to get out of the city and breath some fresh sea air. Check out the album for pics.
Nell
Nell
Leaving and arriving
Home.
Everyone’s been asking me what its like to come “home”. For me at least, that’s a tricky question, not least because I don’t feel as if I have “come home”. It is true that I’m closer to my family, which is great, and that I was born in this country, but I think that the differences between Canada and the UK are so small these days that its hard to feel that I’ve moved back and forth between totally different countries – its more like moving provinces, or counties.
There are lots of reasons for this – one very significant one is that for a British immigrant in Canada, the UK is just a click of the mouse or a change on the remote control away – soccer every Saturday morning, Coronation Street every night, British pubs, beer and, if you were lucky like me, great English and Irish friends like Mark, Rachael, Claire, Maurice. So for a lot of us immigrants, we never totally “leave” our country in the first place.
The other thing of course is that Hull is different to where (and when) I grew up – accents are different, the climate has changed, the landscape is different, politics have changed, the EEC is a reality, and as a flip side to the point I made earlier, keeping touch with Canada is easy through the web, e-mail and phone cards.
Perhaps the world is so small these days, and people travel so much, that for lucky people like us (for whom moving is a choice), physical distance does’nt mean months between letters and years to save up for a two week voyage to visit relatives. The physical distances just seem, at the moment, to matter less.
So for me this is a new place entirely, and I am going to treat it like that. I love new places and I look forward to exploring Canada’s new province of Yorkshire, in much the same way as I enjoyed exploring the English county of Ontario.
Everyone’s been asking me what its like to come “home”. For me at least, that’s a tricky question, not least because I don’t feel as if I have “come home”. It is true that I’m closer to my family, which is great, and that I was born in this country, but I think that the differences between Canada and the UK are so small these days that its hard to feel that I’ve moved back and forth between totally different countries – its more like moving provinces, or counties.
There are lots of reasons for this – one very significant one is that for a British immigrant in Canada, the UK is just a click of the mouse or a change on the remote control away – soccer every Saturday morning, Coronation Street every night, British pubs, beer and, if you were lucky like me, great English and Irish friends like Mark, Rachael, Claire, Maurice. So for a lot of us immigrants, we never totally “leave” our country in the first place.
The other thing of course is that Hull is different to where (and when) I grew up – accents are different, the climate has changed, the landscape is different, politics have changed, the EEC is a reality, and as a flip side to the point I made earlier, keeping touch with Canada is easy through the web, e-mail and phone cards.
Perhaps the world is so small these days, and people travel so much, that for lucky people like us (for whom moving is a choice), physical distance does’nt mean months between letters and years to save up for a two week voyage to visit relatives. The physical distances just seem, at the moment, to matter less.
So for me this is a new place entirely, and I am going to treat it like that. I love new places and I look forward to exploring Canada’s new province of Yorkshire, in much the same way as I enjoyed exploring the English county of Ontario.
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