Bikes

The diary for 1988 suddenly ends, as diaries sometimes do, it was summer and the weather in Southern Ontario was amazing, even though we were both working we were finding plenty of things to do, after six months we still felt like tourists, as though this was an extended vacation.

Money had become a back burner issue and wasn't such a traditional worry as it had been, and even though we had a seventh floor apartment, a pair of bicycles appeared one day, two reasons for that, first we thought that they would make us fitter and second, they were incredibly cheap.

In the days of my brother Rob and the Prescot Road Club, back in the 1970s, an aluminum cotterless chainset cost a small fortune, and here, in Canada a ten speed racing bike, lightweight with full Shimano chainsets and gears cost a scant ninety-eight dollars. This was back when the exchange rate was around 2.40 dollars to the pound, so the bikes cost about forty quid a piece.

Even though, as time would show, they were never really used, besides a few trips down to Lake Ontario and back, they were very shiny and they were ours.

Carry On

After writing that I was reminded how much I'm not like Terry Thomas...

Readers Wives

Along with a pair of budgies we had bought a hibatchi grill from the local Zellers and I had told people at work that I was going to drag it to Darlington Provincial Park at the weekend and cook some sossidges.

One of the women at work said that she had an unused bag of charcoal in her garage and she would bring it in the following day, which she did, and at lunchtime she came over to my desk and volunteered to help me take it over to the apartment, five minutes away.

It was in the trunk of her car and we drove over to Falby Court, I said I'd be just a minute and she insisted that she would come up with me, so we silently rode up on the elevator to the seventh floor and took the charcoal to it's new home.

What followed was a very uncomfortable five or so minutes with this busty woman, a few years older than me strolling into the apartment and appearing to flaunt herself. I recall it finishing up with a comic, "carry-on" vision of her leaning over the budgie cage and wiggling as I, redfaced and halfway through the front door, managed to end the adventure without spillage.

In the Pink

It may have been the change in diet, the new job or simply the stress of moving from one side of the planet to the other, but in the middle of 1988 I was having problems, pains in my chest woke me up one night, like a tight belt around me.

The diet, well portions were bigger (and so was I) and the first six months in Canada had felt somewhat like a vacation, so drinking was, of course, an issue.

At work I had been thrown into an unknown area of loads generation and was blindly running landing predictions, in addition, Fortran was giving me constant headaches along with the cumbersome file system of the mainframe.

And the coffee, endless coffeeeeee....

After a visit to the doctors and a few tests, I was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer, something that could be cured with a pill and a reduction in certain foods, coffee, alcohol, chocolate cake and working stress.

And the pink stuff:

New Friends

It seemed to me that, although Canada was a vast unexplored place and excitement was just around the corner, the work environment was the "same old, same old" and in some ways, because everyone appeared to take themselves so darn seriously, I had lost something in the wash.

It had only been five months or so since we had been stuck in immigration, waiting on a sausage sandwich, and from those initial weeks of the language barrier and the inability to order even a pair of toasted bacon sandwiches, we had settled down into our new life, and, it was very similar to the old one, but without friends.

This was nothing new for me, I had lost all my school friends when I was ten years old and the family moved from Liverpool to Whiston, I had discarded my Whiston friends when I was sixteen and went off on an adventure to Essex and found new friends, then two or three years later, discarded the new bunch and found some more.

A process I would keep repeating.

The new friends here in Canada would take some work, I knew, to bring them to my way of thinking, the process of making work fun had to begin...