Stumbling and falling over redundant thoughts, just to get to the goddamn airport.
And of course on the concourse I’m surrounded by goodbyes and farewells and selfies and then all of a sudden a very serious man asking me how long are you going away for sir and here is the wrong door – I always go through the wrong door.
I crawl so far sideways I end up going through security, buoyed by the weight of my carry-on possessions, tracked all the way to the bar, and all the time wondering …
At what point will it occur to me to ask someone (anyone) what on earth I’m doing here?
Now, having surrendered all rights to anonymity – my right to a free trial – to be sat here, on a plastic stool, airside, alongside people I’ve never met and will never know.
Outside, in the gloom, baggage cars are looking for planes. In the terminal, everyone is either looking for love, a drug, or a reason to be here.
Me, I’ve paid quality hard-earned for this, on a credit card I was given, to be catapulted into the near atmosphere with hundreds of strangers, just to watch How Can You Ever Forgive Me? with a bag of peanuts and a mediocre drink. I’m not sure who’s conning who here.
And we appear to magically hover over snowy gullies and rocky black bleakness where nothing lives or will ever live. Where still clouds betray movement.
Now I’ve seen the isolated peaks of the Gaspesie Peninsula, I can say I’ve been there and I’ve Seen It All.
At which point the captain thinks it’s a jolly good laugh to jolt us all around for fifteen minutes, yet he’ll be howling when he can’t get into the john – all of his passengers got there before him.
Plays it cool on a circular approach to YVZ, landing on a concrete runway which didn’t exist barely two minutes ago.
With our sour Manchester faces stowed in the hold, we disembark covered in eyeliner and a riot of smeared lipstick – bloody turbulence.
At security, instead of the expected interrogation by a mountie on a bear, I get grilled by a touch-screen machine. For my troubles, it provides me with a non-recyclable piece of paper with a black-and-white mugshot printed on it.
I am a wanted man.
If only I could find the damn rental desk for a swift escape. Turns out it’s hiding in the brutalist multi-storey parking lot – where else? – where a smile is quickly exchanged for an unlocked Equinox parked mere yards away.
Gather my thoughts and throw them in the trunk. I will trudge through the mist and the murk of heavy-going suburban traffic for the next two hours, everyone heading for the same place, to see the same person (Barrie).
White lines and the median merge into the wings and the fenders, passing by in a semi-conscious flow of ribbons, all at 30mph. Heavy rain concentrates the mind, then lifts on the off-ramp into town.
Surprising that no-one is following me now. For the next two nights, I live in a house on a residential street near the Dutch bakery and the abandoned cinema. The kind of area where the locals eat bagels for breakfast and go on boating holidays twice a year.
In dowtown, the flying monkeys are holding court in the old courthouse. I can climb onto a high-chair here and order a beer like I know what I’m doing.
And the monkeys all say ‘Welcome to Canada’, in a hoptical illusion which sees me recast as ‘the British guy’. Normal is weird, they say. Nowt as queer as folk, I mutter in reply.
Here I am on the other side of the Atlantic, in Trees Lounge – minus the swill and heavy on the psychedelic.
Knowledge is power, and I leave the joint with stacks of it, which I proceed to leave on a table in a burger bar up the road. Where the whole town has arrived to see a singer blurting it out in front of Olive Oil, but all the while are busy talking into each other.
At the opportune moment, I make good my escape. Canada, will you ever forgive me?
An Outside World 