Stu Hall's Soup

The big idea was that I would bring my spiffy mobile phone from England over to Canada and just take out the O2 Simcard and replace it with a Fido or Rogers simcard. The plan went well up until the point where I dropped the phone on the ground, whereafter it would abruptly turn off at inopportune moments.

Upon moving to Canada, much of my money was put aside for the essentials until I could get a job and much of the rest of it was used to line the government’s pockets through astronomical immigration fees. Oh, and I wanged a load of cash on computer stuff. Anyway, I had to get a new phone and decided to just get a cheap one for the time being. A year later, I still have the same one.

The phone is quite shit. I get tired of having to delete text messages once every couple of weeks when the memory gets full, like it’s still 1989. I can win the java demo of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire every single time, having memorised every question. It has a camera built into it, of sorts. It can only hold about 10-12 pictures and the images come out blurred to such a degree that I often wonder if the phone’s firmware has a built in impressionism filter.

Since I cannot remove the images from the camera, only being able to keep 10-12 images has an interesting effect. I become more selective, deleting anything that I don’t really care that much about. So what I’ve found is that the small number of images tends to tell a bit of a story of the time I’ve spent living in Toronto. In fact, each image also tells it’s own story. What is also worth noting is that most of the images are from the first year I spent here, suggesting that everything is normalised for me now. There isn’t as much novelty and not every street I turn onto leads to a surprise anymore.

Because the phone is *so* utterly shit that I can’t download the images from it, I will have to describe the images I have kept.

1. Image000.jpg
One of the first winters I spent here, and it was a particularly harsh one. Around April, when the snow was still around but wasn’t as overwhelming, a baby racoon clambered over a fence and obligingly posed for a photo. Well, actually it was begging for food.

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My wife was away for a while studying up in North Bay. Taffy, her pet dog misses her and sits on the sofa looking out for her whenever she hears a neighbour. The picture is her with her eyes practically jumping out of her head when she thinks she hears Sara’s return.

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I went to the Ontario Science Museum with Tess. In the gift store, they have these tacky spaceman helmets. Tess wears one and gurns at the camera, alluringly.

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Photo of our street winding into the middle-distance. Practically everything in the photo is white, covered in snow. Taken as I walked home from a horrible day at work followed by me trudging trough 3 miles of snow off the bus-route.

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New job, new location. I started working near downtown Scarborough and my journey took me across a bridge over the 401 highway with the office buildings of Scarborough Town Centre in the distance. Not particularly impressive to anyone who lives around here, but at the risk of sounding like a country bumpkin, it was to me when I first arrived.

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Yet another job. I used to work for The Toronto Blue Jays. I would usually arrive for work early and just sit outside The Rogers Centre and read a book. One day a female mallard duck trundled up beside me and stood at my feet watching me. I took a photo, but didn’t have any food to say thanks.

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When I left that job I forced a work colleague who I started to get on with to have her picture taken with me. It came out badly, with us composed in the bottom of the frame and generally looking awkward. And my colleague, Stephanie, is doing her default photo pose face.

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On a trip to Pennsylvania my wife tried on a couple of dresses she liked. We couldn’t decide which to get because she looked great in both of them. I took a photo of her in one of them, but due to the blurred image and low resolution, no conclusions could be drawn from the evidence.

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I worked at a warehouse for a while and didn’t particularly enjoy it. I am a grammar nazi and many people working there were recent immigrants who didn’t speak English as a first language, much less write it. This included janitorial staff who left a poster in the washroom saying “HEY GUYS PLEASE KEEP IT CLEAN WE KNOW WHO YOU’RE DOING IT KEEP IT CLEAN AT ALL TIME". The sign basically represented everything I hated about the place.

10. Image010.jpg
Related to the above job. The warehouse stocked clothing. It was all quite, quite awful clothing. I have nothing against Bangladesh, but I’m not sure that the country is known for it’s fashion. New York, London, Paris… Dhaka? No. There was a catalogue with all the clothing, and the cover featured a woman wearing the centre-piece item: A wind-breaker style coat. Yellow and black. The woman was borderline model material, but to relieve any doubts about the cover photo, a windswept effect was applied with the addition of a wind fan to the photographer’s studio.

And, er. That’s it. Until I take anymore exciting images.

The Continuing Saga…

As I said at the start of my last post, I enjoy working as a bookseller. I like selling books and I enjoy providing advice and customer service to the majority of people. These posts might seem like I’m ranting. And I am. But it’s in the name of humour. So that makes it okay!

We are not the most famous bookstore in the World

Until we do become the centre of the Universe, here are some things that we cannot do for you:

Get hold of a book that we don’t carry - If we don’t carry it, we don’t carry it. We can only sell the books that our distributors can provide. Go on, keep asking. See if I suddenly change my mind.

Ask an author to hurry up and finish their book. – We do not maintain intimate relationships with book authors. I do not have brunch with Ken Follett in NYC or pay quick visits to California in order to walk Dean Koontz’s golden retriever.

You cannot talk to “the company owner” by calling our store. Like the majority of bookstores these days, it is a chain store and although ownership has changed a few times, it has been a chain store for decades. The CEO is at home receiving a massage while watching Oprah as a servant prepares Foie Gras for supper.

Sales Clerks are people
Sales clerks are not all stupid. They are also not omniscient. I’ll write more about hiring and staff another time, but basically you are not going to find biologists working in the medical reference section of the store. We all have varying degrees of general knowledge, but for the most part we don’t have *actual* degrees. You need to be able to communicate your needs to the person helping you. If you are either pressuring the sales person or you are purposefully withholding information from the sales person simply so that you can patronise them for their supposed lack of knowledge, then it is you that is failing to communicate.

Sales clerks are people and can only hold an interest in so many subjects. It is part of our job to know our stock…. But let’s keep some perspective. Most retail workers aren’t going to feel obliged by their sub-$10-an-hour-wage to research the excruciating details of the latest New Age nonsense fad.

We are more likely to learn about Mayan Prophecies, Pilates, Freud, Quantum Physics, Acupuncture, Edward Cullen and other subjects we don’t care about (often in our own time) because we enjoy doing a good job and not because we are paid the top dollars. Being treated like an idiot makes you feel resentful rather than motivated.

Another note: I find it bewildering that customers occasionally tell you they are looking for a particular book that was here a year ago and had a purple cover (totally useless information 99% of the time) and then treat you like an idiot when you don’t whip the book off the shelf for them. Browsing a bookstore and looking for advice is great – that’s one reason we’re here. But if you’re looking to buy a very specific book, you really should have a specific idea of what the hell you’re looking for.

Will you sell my book for me?
Very unlikely. You probably think it’s better than anyone else thinks it is.

Part three coming eventually…

I just wanted to make a quick post to put some perspective on the comparison between the Twilight series and the Harry Potter series. There’s a lot of excitement around online communities where some people seem convinced that Twilight is “better” than Harry Potter. A lot of trumpeting 14-year-old-girls seem convinced of this as fact. What I find equally annoying are press-releases from certain companies in the book industry like this one.

The Harry Potter books were released over a long period of time and The Twilight Saga has seen a much more sudden spike in popularity, so the content of the press release shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. The press release is simply an exercise in beating up book sales.

From my perspective, I’m not a big fan of either. I missed the boat on Harry Potter and have never really made the time to read it. During the peak of the anticipation over the Twilight series, I was working at a bookstore (and still am). I’ve occasionally been tempted to read it, mainly because I enjoy writing and I like the idea of satirising it and all the pre-teen girly excitement over it, but I never got around to it. I have seen the Harry Potter movies because my wife loves it, but I haven’t seen Twilight.

Here is a simple list of approximate booksales for each of the books:
120 Million Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (1st book)
77 Million Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets (2nd book)
66 Million Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire (4th book)
65 Million Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince (6th book)
61 Million Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban (3rd book)
55 Million Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix (5th book)
44 Million Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows (7th book)
17 Million Twilight (1st book)

I can’t find sales for New Moon and it wouldn’t be fair to show Eclipse and Breaking Dawn as they are only available in hardcover (in North America). The combined Twilight Saga (all 4 books combined) have sold 53 Million copies – beating only one single book from the Harry Potter Series. It is worth noting that Deathly Hallows sold 15 Million copies in the first 24 hours – almost as many as Twilight has ever sold.

Of course, there’s no accounting for taste (The Spice Girls have sold 60 Million records worldwide). In terms of entertainment, I’m sure the hormonal lusting in Twilight speaks volumes to the majority of the books fans. It’s never going to appeal to very many guys or very many adults, though – something Harry Potter does.

So if you can’t easily measure quality, here is an objective fact: In terms of literary worth, Meyer herself says that she should not be compared to J.K. Rowling.

I’ve worked in a bookstore for about 18 months, which by most people’s measurement is more than a year. But “A Year In Books” sounds better, so I’m sticking with it. Most of the customers who come into the store pass through pleasantly and without incident. We have a few regular customers and they are usually a pleasure to deal with. I enjoy my job, despite it not being a financially rewarding choice.

Okay, so that’s the disclaimer out of the way.

Staring back in to the misty past of 2008 as I began working at a bookstore, I would be surprised on a daily basis at how ill informed customers were about a product (books!) that are a part of everyday life. We’re not selling complicated electrical components, mortgage packages or your next wife. It shouldn’t be painful, but some customers make it so.

We are not Walmart
Just because Walmart sell a few books, does not mean that as a bookstore we sell a few rolls of toilet paper, wholesale packages of diapers or boxes of Rock Band 2 for the XBox 360. While it is true that we sell a selection of journals, bookmarks, chocolates and the odd DVD movies (more on these extra items later) we are a bookstore. We sell books.

It is a bookstore, not the inside of The Tardis
We can hold a certain number of books in our store. This is generally governed by the walls that make up the building. We might try to fit more books into the store, but then there would be no room for customers. I admit that this sometimes seems like a good idea, but it doesn’t make business sense. Once ever year, we “optimise” the store. This means that some sections are going to get larger. Since space is finite, logic dictates that other areas are going to get smaller. It is HEAD OFFICE who decrypt all of the sales statistics and compare this to how much shelf space is assigned to a particular section (see later how our store is not the centre of the universe). Sections that are under performing are going to shrink to make way for sections that do well (but could do better with more stock).

As I said, these changes are based on sales statistics. It is essentially the customers who dictate how much stock we have in a particular genre, by a particular author or of a particular format based on their purchasing decisions. It is painfully common for a customer to come into the store and whinge that we don’t have a particular book by Terry Goodkind. We have half a shelf of his damn books, that’s a very large proportion of shelf space in a small store. It is also very common for customers to come into the store looking for classic literature. We have some. We don’t have much. To repeat my point in simple terms: We only sell what sells. That’s why we’re still in business.

A lack of organisation on your part, does not constitute an emergency on my part
“I want a text book to revise for my nursing exam, I don’t care which but I need it in two days time”. Not going to happen, and don’t try to pretend that this is a surprise or that it’s unreasonable. Ten years ago you would have had to travel to a bookstore and get them to order it which they would do either by mailing or telephoning a request for a book. They would either have to know a suitable book for you, or would have to find it either in a paper catalogue or with the help of someone at the publisher. These days we have online booksellers where you can browse for a book you think is suitable and if you’re lucky you might get it in two days if you pay a premium. You have no excuse for being a lazy arse.

Yes, we have moved the section. No it’s not a conspiracy against you.
This ties in with an earlier section. Numerous customers, particularly older customers, often comment “Oh, you’ve moved such-and-such a section”. I’m convinced that half of these customers have a filing cabinet in their home stuffed with blueprints of our store detailing the precise location of each genre section dating back to 1970. They come into the store having consulted their records and then make their comment about moving sections with a hint of an accusatory tone. As if this is a sleight that you have committed against them personally.

The sections are moved during optimisation. We have to use all of our available shelf space, but we need to not mix sections too much. It’s fine if we have two shelves of a bookcase featuring Religion and another three shelves holding New Age. What becomes unacceptable is mixing True Crime and Religion or Sexuality with Young Readers. Therefore, we have to get creative. We have to move sections around to best fit what Head Office are asking us to do. It takes thought and planning and is the cause of many headaches. We don’t do it just for a laugh in the same way that you don’t do your taxes for a bit of fun. We do it because we’re fitting the books you want into the store in the best way we’re able to. What I’m saying is… it’s your fault.

Books are NOT expensive. You are wrong.

I’ve written this section three times, and each time it comes out far too long. I think I may have to write a more detailed version in the future, but basically: No. Books aren’t expensive.

Authors have to be paid, bearing in mind that even prolific writers take about 6 months to write a book and deserve to be paid for that time. And incidentally, authors take the smallest cut of anyone – a few cents per book.

The cost of the paper is a lot more than you’d think, and so the cost of the actual manufacturing of the book (not including printing) is around about $2.50-$3. I had a guy sat behind me at a baseball game gabbing on about books only costing $1 to make and then “they” make a 300% markup on that, whoever “they” is.

Complete bollocks from start to finish. As I said, it’s more like $3 before the ink hits the paper (depending on pages). Also a 300% markup on their suggested price of $1 is only a $2 markup. If he’s suggesting that everything over $1 is markup, (which it isn’t, for anyone) then it’s more like 700-1300%. Basically, the bloke is a gobshite.

The printing is very expensive and uses printing presses (which have a high setup charge but work out cheaper for big print runs of thousands). The author takes a few cents. The publisher takes a few cents and the rest at this point is spent on marketing, proof-reading, editing, designing the cover and gallery prints.

Even at this point the book isn’t ready for the bookstores. Publishers are publishers - that is their area of expertise. They contract out their distributing, so distributors (companies that store and ship the books to bookstores) take their cut and have their own costs. Finally there are the bookstores (who get about 40% discount on the cover price). They have numerous overheads to pay. You might think it’s easy to make a profit in a bookstore and I think I had enough evidence in my first and second write of this section to convince people otherwise, but now I’m trying to keep it short…. I’ll write more some other time but for now let’s talk coffee.

The markup on coffee is high. The markup on books (especially by the time the book is in a bookstore) is not. It is for this reason that any bookstore with the room to sell coffee will do exactly that. The vast majority of large bookstores have a Starbucks or other coffee chain in their store. It is for exactly the same reason that they sell chocolate, candy and other gift items. It is also for the same reason that I am only earning a little bit over minimum wage and make no commission while someone selling electrical items/cars/jewellery/flowers will usually be making more than I am.

Second hand bookstores work on a different business model. They are essentially selling just the book at more of it’s perceived value as a medium for holding text. They don’t deal with publishers or distributors (customers usually sell books back to them) and the author has already been paid. That is why second hand bookstores don’t typical serve you coffee, or sell you any other “impulse” items.

Stick to sports, asshole - they’re easier to understand.

I can get it for X amount at Walmart/Sears/Zellers/Shoppers Drug Mart!
Buy it from wherever you want to buy it, no bookstore is going to price match against a completely different business model. The majority of merchandise sold in department stores has high markup, which subsidises areas where there is more competition. It is not a new idea for a large store to take a loss on one item in the hope you will buy something else where they will profit. Take a look at how Tesco and Sainsbury’s in The UK sell petrol for 5 Pence less per litre… provided you just spent £50 on groceries.

Department stores only sell the most popular books. I’ll see you back in my store later, when you want something more than a couple of months old. Otherwise, go ahead and buy from Walmart. Without an employee discount, so would I.

Another small point: Bookstores usually have such generous return policies that, in my opinion, it’s completely crazy. They’re essentially libraries with newer stock. Again, I could write a completely separate article about customers who seriously believe it is their human right to return a book a month after buying it and get credit for it, even though consumer law only mandates returns on faulty goods or goods sold unfairly. “Oh, I read the first 100 pages and decided I didn’t like it”. Tough luck, fucknut – you chose it.

I’ll probably write a part two at some point in my life.

I was recently in The US, as you may already know from reading my last blog post. While visiting Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I took a look around a Borders book store. I wanted to compare their prices to the prices in the Canadian book store I work in, and to get an idea of the titles they carry.

Books in Canada are more expensive than books in The USA. Having said that, books anywhere in the World are more expensive than books in The USA. In Canada, this variation in price is a bigger deal because customers in Canada will often get angry with Canadian stores for charging so much more.

Now, I know I work for a Canadian book store, but I don’t think I’m in a position of unreasonable bias. I don’t think booksellers here are innocent of blame. I believe that the main bookseller in this country has, pretty much, an effective monopoly. Especially in Ontario. This gives them a lot of bargaining power when they deal with publishers which they should be using to it’s fullest extent. I’m not in these meetings, so I can’t say for sure whether they are or aren’t doing this.

There is one main reason why people in Canada complain about the price of their books, and I’m sorry, but it’s retarded. The problem is that the prices are printed on the back of the books in both US currency and separately in Canadian currency. Right next to each other. Well, okay, this isn’t the underlying reason why people complain about the price of the books. The underlying reason is a bit more complicated. My point is that if both of the prices weren’t on the books then it wouldn’t even enter into the customer’s minds to complain about it. In the same way that people don’t complain they can get a Big Mac Meal cheaper in The USA, a cellphone cheaper in Japan or a wedge of Wensleydale cheese cheaper in England. If I walked into a bookstore in Paris and complained that I could get Twilight for a quid less in England, they’d spit at me and accuse me of being an English Pig-Dog. They’d tell me to fuck off back to England and buy it there. Except I wouldn’t entertain complaining about it unless the difference was significant (LIKE CELLPHONE CHARGES IN CANADA BEING CRAZY).

Of course when a customer is stood before you, you have to choose your words carefully (unless you’re Parisian). You give them a watered down, easy to understand version of the truth that they probably don’t believe entirely but don’t usually have the energy to argue with. The watered down version of the truth, which is that the cost of doing business in Canada is higher and many of our books cost more because they are shipped from The USA, has two main advantages. Firstly the customer can’t really scream at you because the reply is reasonable and secondly it’s not long-winded and boring, so they don’t get bored. And it doesn’t hold up the line for half-an-hour like a discussion of macro economics would.

And that’s what it comes down to. Economics. Different countries have different economic models and while the UK and Canada have a lot of similarities, the USA is quite different. Social welfare comes with a hefty price tag, but most people would agree that it is a good thing. Especially “free” health care. Two reasons why you wouldn’t think free health care is a good thing:
1) You’re very rich and can afford all the care you would ever need and don’t want to pay for anyone else.
2) You’ve been told throughout your life that communism is evil and will destroy the planet. (IE you live in The US and have no exposure to the outside world).

So yes, health care comes at a cost. This comes in the form of various taxes. Businesses have to pay taxes, too. Yes!! Really!! These costs are passed onto consumers. I’m not saying that the sole reason that books cost more in Canada is because you get free health care, but it’s a contributing factor and it’s one that should be remembered.

There are many horror stories related to insurance companies not wanting to pay out for someone to have an operation in the USA. The way they try to find technical reasons as to why the insurance is not valid is sickening. I don’t wish harm to any of my customers, but given the choice, I hope that customers would opt to pay a little extra for their book and receive free health care than save a few dollars on a book.

God forbid, if you did come down with an illness and you bought a copy of Twilight in Canada for about 20% more, at least when you are bed ridden and bored it will be much more satisfying to slowly tear out the pages of that awful book.

S

Using Toll roads, the drive is about 8 hours. We decided to take more scenic routes and avoid toll roads, so it took longer. This was the first time that I’d driven through large amounts of New York State, and you can see why the area is known as New England. There are many familiar trees and rolling green fields scattered with dandelions. Excusing the common use of wood panelling on houses and the road signs, I could see the resemblance between here and parts of the western most areas of the West Midlands where I grew up (in particular the rural areas of Herefordshire/Worcestershire/Shropshire areas).

As incredibly tempting as it is to spend an entire column knocking Americans, I will try to keep much of it under control. The border was yet another experience, though. Not as bad as previous times, but having crossed the border by car into New York State numerous times I still believe the attitudes of the immigration control officers are generally poor and heavy handed. I don’t expect them to offer to take me out for a drink, but I also don’t appreciate being spoken to like an idiot (even if I was one) like I was this time, or having surly individuals slamming around the place because they’re so superior now they’ve been given a badge and a gun.

Sara and I talked about the attitudes of Americans and we tend to agree that the problem with American society basically comes from the top. Some of the most despicable people end up in charge and they treat the people below them like dirt. It filters down from the very top and works it’s way down through anyone with any authority. It’s no surprise that when someone gets a bit of authority after they’ve been kicked around for a while, they then start kicking out themselves. That’s how bullying works.

Another observation about America is that it’s a lot further from it’s British roots than Canada is. You hear British accents on Canadian tv and radio on a regular basis. For some reason British accents are nearly always used in commercials for cleaning products here. Winston Churchill’s statue stands proudly near City Hall (although he had a length of bird shit on his head last time I saw him). You get to see the Union Jack from time to time in Toronto. It’s in the Ontario flag, too. Of course the US Flag is red, white and blue like another flag that came before it, but there is an extreme desire to believe in freedom and independence in the USA so I’m sure America not only invented the flag from scratch, they probably invented the colours it uses too.

In Canada I am asked about my accent fairly regularly. Particularly when I’m working. I can have a day at work where up to four people will ask me where abouts in Britain I’m from. In America, I didn’t get this once. I’m undecided whether it’s because being British is to be un-American and therefore not a good thing or whether it’s simply because people are generally less chatty, less friendly than them folks up in the great white north.

People working in the service industry are treated quite harshly in the USA. In the UK, the usual phrasing when you are asking for something is to say “Can I have a mug of coffee, please?". In Canada the phrasing tends to be along the lines of “Can I get a coffee, please?". From what I heard in the US, it tends to be “I’ll take a coffee". It seemed to be fairly normal for people to just reach across and tap a waitress on the shoulder rather than just say “Excuse me". The usual suggestion is that not all Americans are arrogant and impolite, and of course that is true. However every observation that I have written about here was truly witnessed and took place in the course of just two days.

Going back to the border crossing for a moment, the usual procedure involves driving up to several lines of traffic queueing at barricades like toll-booths. At this point, travel documents (IE passports) are shown. As a non-Canadian/non-US citizen I am then made to park the car and sit in a waiting room with usually about a dozen other people of varied ethnicity. I then get called to a window where I am questioned about my plans. I have to give an address. I usually have to outline the nature of the relationship I have with Sara. I have to give my fingerprints and they take a photograph of me. They then place a card in my passport which I’m meant to surrender when I leave else it “might cause delays upon re-entry” (except nobody ever takes it). I’m then relieved of about $6.

When returning to Canada I am asked what goods I have purchased (for tax purposes), whether I have alcohol, tobacco or firearms and that’s generally it. On this occasion I was asked if I’ve been to Mexico due to the flu-outbreak. But, yeah. They then let me in. It is, however, the USA that believes above anywhere else on the planet in “freedom".

Anyway, far too much ranting.

Pennsylvania is a very pretty state. The weather wasn’t too kind to us as we arrived. There was a tourist information centre (or “center") near the border with a sign saying something like “I’m in Pennsylvania” out the back overlooking a very picturesque valley. Unfortunately is was misty from the rain and I didn’t want to kill my camera. That was the story of the first day, really. It was a nice drive with a fair bit of wildlife. Sara saw a bear by the side of the road, but I managed to miss it. We ate our first American meal when we pulled into an Arby’s (fast-food burger). We forgot how LARGE US sizes are and nearly died as a carton of “medium” fries stuck to our hearts and lungs.

The following day was mostly spent shopping. Prices on clothes were really low, but shopping for clothes isn’t something that excites me to the point of actually being able to write anything about it. As a bookstore employee I found it interesting to browse around a Borders bookstore. Canadian books are very expensive in comparison to books in the USA. This is something I’m going to write about another time because the reaction some Canadians have to this makes me want to go on a murder-spree. Anyway, we ate too much on a couple more occasions today and in the evening we went to a race track to watch some races. I think we probably lost more than we won, but not much. I have this annoying habit of picking an outsider and writing it down but not betting on it and refusing to tell anyone who it is. I then grin stupidly when it wins. As soon as I place an actual bet, it loses. I did this with three or four horses during the night and had we actually bet (and won) we would have left laughing with a case full of green notes. I even correctly guessed the first 3 horses in one race.

Our flying visit to Pennsylvania came to an end the next day. We had to leave fairly early as it is a long drive and we wanted to go back via the city of Eerie in New York State. It turned into a very long drive when we got a call from our hotel saying I’d forgotten my laptop. We were an hour and a half into the drive, so we basically lost 3 hours of driving time.

Eerie was cold. I dipped my feet into it and it made my bone-marrow scream in pain. It’s big as well. Just like all the great lakes. To my experience of living on a tiny island, these lakes may as well be the sea. The drive became even more frustrating because a bunch of Tamil “protesters” had blocked one of the main highways in Toronto. I don’t want to write more about that because I don’t want to give them the attention they’re looking for. The situation they are protesting is complicated and it’s hard to know the truth of what is going on. I did see video showing the Tamil protesters assaulting police officers, though.

Here’s a few pics of Eerie.

Went to the movies a week or so ago and watched movie called One Week starring Joshua Jackson. It’s very Canadian, and many of the early scenes are filmed around Toronto. It’s a movie worth watching out for, if it makes it over in the UK. If not, you can probably download it from your favourite illegal source.

Trailer from youtube is here:

If you are viewing this post via a syndicated website such as Facebook, you will need to visit http://www.anythingbutthepoutine.com to see the video.

Sara had one final day teaching at school. Once she was done we took a drive to Norwich. Since I am so painfully sad, I was pleased to be able to tick Norwich off my list of cities in the UK that I’ve visted. I was then slightly disappointed to realise that I’d only visited 23 of the 50 cities in England. This is the kind of thing that matters to me. By the way, Sara and I had a discussion about what actually constitutes “visiting” a city. For example, I’ve driven through Sheffield. We agreed skirting around it on the motorway and driving past it through The Peak District doesn’t count as visiting. I think Nottingham was my most tenuous city to have “visited". I’ve driven around it twice and I presented a radio show on University Radio Nottingham. Every other city was less tenuous than that, up as far as Worcester where I used to go nearly every day.

ANYWAY. Norwich was officially not tenuous according to the point scoring system that Sara and I devised. We were excellent at looking like tourists. I supposed I technically was a tourist, having been living out of the UK for a year now and having never been to Norfolk. Norwich is a nice city. It suffers from the same homogenisation as many British city/town centres, but it seems to be able to carry it’s own character.

We weren’t able to get to Norwich until late, and sadly the castle and cathedral were at opposite ends of town. We opted to visit the cathedral, without realising there were two of them. We first came to St John The Baptist Cathedral. As far as Cathedrals go, it was… well, it was a cathedral. Quite a large one. I’m not really impressed that much by them, however we began making our way back to the city centre and we stumbled upon signs pointing to another cathedral. Norwich Cathedral, as it turned out to be, is quite beautiful. I’m not a religious person and I’m not really into religious buildings (despite having visited more than my fair share). This was one of the most beautiful I’ve seen. Again, I’m not an expert on architecture by even the furthest stretch of the imagination and I’m too lazy to bring up Wikipedia or Google to find out what work has been done on the cathedral, but it seems to just feel a lot older and better preserved than many cathedrals. It’s very gothic inside and we were fortunate enough to have disturbed a musical practice, so the pipe organ was blaring ominously away.

This is St John The Baptist Cathedral. Sadly I didn’t get any of Norwich Cathedral as it was dark by the time we got there.

We decided that Norwich would be a good place to go to get ourselves a famous British-Indian curry. Maybe we just chose a bad Indian Restaurant, but the food wasn’t great. It was very oily and there wasn’t much actual curry to dip one’s naan into.

Much of the rest of the trip involved driving around visiting family and friends. On Saturday we took a slow drive up from Kings Lynn to Manchester. The journey saw us take the A1(M) North and scoot around Sheffield and through the beautiful Peak District. We dropped of Sara’s friend Joanna so that she could head off to Liverpool to sense The Beatles atmosphere while we visited a friend of mine who was celebrating his 10 Year Wedding Anniversary. It was good to catch up with some of the guys from teamfishcake.co.uk

On (Mothering) Sunday we headed back South and visited my Mum and Brother. We then spent various time re-visiting her and my Dad in Birmingham. We went out for Indian food, which was really good this time - we were glad we tried again after Norwich. i ended up spending far too much money on clothes in Birmingham (and again at Heathrow). We also went out for a meal with my brother on one of the nights to a pub somewhere between Stourport and Worcester.

All-in-all, the trip flew by particularly quickly. I’m wondering whose turn it is to come to Toronto, so I get to play the tour guide.

During my second day in England, Sara was once again teaching in Kings Lynn. Since there was an outside possibility that Sara and I would be living in Kings Lynn if things in her class went particularly well, I thought it might be wise to drop into the town centre and take a look around.

Well… meh. Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but Kings Lynn was phenomenal in it’s averageness. It has a few streets lined with shops with the usual names which could have been picked up from any one of many other towns around the UK and plonked down here. There’s a harbour, which is quite scruffy, and there is a tourist information office which was closed.

Kings Lynn seems to be a fairly conservative/middle class area, but unlike Holt which I wrote about last time, residents of Kings Lynn don’t really have any reason to be quite so parochial. A case in point is that Kings Lynn is called Kings Lynn, but many locals (and you see evidence of this online) in a particularly chuckle worthy bout of pretentiousness like referring to it as Lynn Regis because it means the same thing in Latin.

I have two points to make about that. The first one is that, beyond academic use and scientific naming, Latin hasn’t been spoken in England for quite a while now. The second point is that ‘Bum Nugget’ and ‘Arse Biscuit’ also mean the same thing.

I took some photos of Bum Regis, and to be fair, there are some scenic enough areas. The pictures are on another camera and I can’t be bothered to upload them. Instead, here’s a brief transcript of a conversation I had on Twitter where I was bothered by a Kings Bum Nugget resident. He must have approached this conversation and found my original post by sitting at his computer and specifically searching for people talking about his lovely town.

@stuhall: I wasn’t really all that impressed by Kings Lynn, to be honest.
@otherperson: @stuhall Kings Lynn wasn’t all that impressed by you either. Maybe you got off on the wrong foot.

At which point I called him a name.

Sara and I on the beach at Hunstanton

Later that evening we drove to the coast to get something to eat in Hunstanton. Hunstanton has a population of less than 5000 people who are living in the 1970s. It’s a fairly typical UK seaside town which is still living off the glories of the 1950s-1970s when Brits would flock to the beach for their annual holiday. This has it’s own particular charm, but when it’s still early in the year in chilly mid-March, you can’t help but wonder who (besides Sara and I) would come here.

We had a stroll along the slightly muddy beach and watched birds. Hunstanton is one of, if not the only, East coast ‘resort’ where you can see the sun set over the sea, since you’re actually looking in a Northerly direction across The Wash. The flip side of the coin is that The Wash doesn’t illicit scenes of golden beaches and sand dunes.

In defence of Hunstanton, we didn’t get much time to look around. We were there to eat. We ate fish and chips in a pub and perhaps in retrospect we should have gone for the more greasy chip shop variety like you’re meant to at the beach and we could have fed the fat birds.

I have a day job, so I’ll continue this… sometime.
To be continued.

A week ago I was back in England visiting my family and meeting up with my wife Sara, who was on an exchange-type programme. Sara actually arrived there a couple of weeks before me and had been spending her time in Kings Lynn, Norfolk teaching kids at one of the schools in the town. When I arrived there Sara hadn’t quite finished her tour of duty, so I hung around Norfolk while she taught and I visited a couple of places.

War memorial outside the grounds of Sandringham Palace

On the first evening I took Sara and her friend who was also teaching in Kings Lynn to the nearby Sandringham Palace. Well, just outside it, anyway. It was closed for the season. Like a trio of tourist-losers, we were hoping that perhaps we could catch a glimpse of the palace from outside the grounds, but it was not to be. The best I came away with was a picture of the not-so-scary looking gargoyles on the iron fences and the memory of Sara’s friend almost getting run over by a coach travelling too fast as it approached to park in roughly the position she was initially stood.

Guarding the entrance to Sandringham against pesky out-of-season tourists

Stood outside the gates to the palace. Moments before this picture was taken, Joanna was stood here and a coach careened onto the gravel area at frightening-miles-per-hour.

The sun breaking through the trees as twilight approaches.

Since Sara was still teaching, the next day I visited a small town called Holt. Apparently there are several places called Holt in England (and one in Wales), but in the interests of not spending several thousand pounds on petrol, I went to the nearest one. Holt in Norfolk has a population of around 3,500 and is a typical middle-England pleasant retirement kinda town with ridiculous house prices. It’s a market town with many crafty and antiquarian stores and it’s fair share of tea rooms. There is a church (St. Andrews) and it’s basically all very jolly and picturesque. I took a brief stroll around, but it was quite chilly. I dove into a tea room and had the mandatory tea and scone (not as nice as in Devon, but not bad either). Basically it was all rather pleasant and that’s about it.

Courtyard with various stores

Everyone drives cars like this in Holt.

Graveyard inside the grounds of St Andrews church.

That evening Sara and I went out to a Chinese buffet, which was pretty cool. It was buffet-a-la-carte. You chose a couple of items at a time from the menu and the food was brought over to you. We ate far too much good but bad food (good tasting, bad for your health) and crashed back at our hotel.

Still to come: Stu spends too much money in Birmingham and Stu makes diplomatic error - offends residents of Kings Lynn via Twitter.

To be continued in the next awfully exciting update at Anything But The Poutine dot com