No point claiming that I did anything other than this kind of thing today — and there were almost another three hours of it to go after I took this shot. Jet lag, I seem to have avoided. Work lag, I have.
I have never seen snow falling anywhere as early in a year as 17th October, but Iceland lived up to its name this morning and duly delivered, as my first flight home returned me to Keflavik. This seems even to have caught Icelanders unaware, seeing as it caused my second flight to be delayed two hours while we waited, seemingly endlessly, for the wings of our aircraft to be de-iced (“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking…. We are eighth in the queue for de-icing…. [45 minutes later] We are sixth in the queue….”). But I did get home in the end.
At one level this is a cheap rodent shot, but it does epitomise a particular feature of Toronto’s urban scene — because there are thousands, tens of thousands perhaps, of these critters around every tree and greenish space in the city. They’re all brown, too, rather than grey (as most of the UK’s squirrels are) or red (as a very few of them are). If anything, this example is uncharacteristically pale compared to his city brethren. Either way they’re lining themselves up as the runner-up species locally, I’m telling you.
Last day in Toronto. Home tomorrow, as long as my government decides to let me back into the country.
A trip out of the city. The suburb of King City is not as hick as this picture may make it appear, but I like this shot because it makes it seem like one of those tiny North American places with ridiculously grandiose names. You can almost see the weatherbeaten sign at the city limits: “KING CITY, ONTARIO (population: 47)”.
Yonge Street is the spine of Toronto, defining the point at which the west side becomes the right side and vice versa. As it is the address of the nearest pub to my hotel, I’ve been hanging out there a lot in the evenings. This picture pleases me because it’s basically the one I hoped would come out when I took the shot. The guy sitting in the gutter looks enveloped by the red tail lights that appear to have passed on both sides of him.
There are many good murals around this city — and this one is particularly fine. No further comment necessary.
These are the people I have come all the way to Toronto to work with — because we all decided, no, we are not going to sit and try to interact behind screens. We needed to work together. Ahmad on the left, Dina on the right. They look kinda happy about the prospect, as I was.
My destination on this long-deferred trip outside the UK is Toronto, the largest city in Canada. As the director of this movie about my life, I did consider going with the ‘establishing long shot’, but in a way I’ve already done that, as the Toronto skyline featured in August 2017, when I changed planes here on my way to Illinois to see the eclipse. So here’s a shot from this morning’s explorations; I liked this ‘whirlpool’ sculpture. In the background, Lake Ontario, or at least, an inlet of it. I am here until Saturday: some work to do, but y’know, it’s just nice to be somewhere else for a while.
Yes folks, after 615 consecutive days on the island of Great Britain, I have finally left it. It was February 2nd 2020, in Bucharest, that this blog last featured anywhere outside England, Scotland or Wales. You know the reasons why. And yes, I appreciate travel can be seen as a privilege, and I’m grateful that I’ve finally broken the run, for all that the last 20 months have, at least at times, seen plenty of interesting sights.
This is not my final destination: instead this was taken on my first descent, into Keflavik airport, where I and the family were last seen waiting out the 12-hour flight delay that EasyJet (never, ever again) subjected us to in July 2019. I changed planes here and moved on. You can tell it’s Iceland, though — only that island has random burned bits like this, huge lumps of volcanic cinder that just seem here to be a normal part of the landscape.
Perhaps this shot is unfair on a place that I’d never visited before today (thus, it becomes place number 364 to feature on the blog), as Leigh seemed lively enough, but I just liked the decrepitude of these two buildings. Maybe these businesses are rocking on a weekday evening, but not on this warm and bright Saturday afternoon. But if you want to find out, well, the phone numbers are there.
Being 42 