I was washing my hands in a Toronto airport bathroom recently when I noticed something in the vending machine that made me chuckle.  I suppose that it isn’t easy to come up with a good name for a condom company, but I think they could have tried harder than this.

The sexiest international agreement around

Protocol condoms?

A quick look at dictionary.com tells us as that protocol is defined as “the customs and regulations dealing with diplomatic formality, precedence, and etiquette.”  It has to be one of the least evocative names they could have gone for.  I’m not suggesting that sex is something you should associate with fairytale style superlatives but protocol?  Really?  It paints such a stringent, mechanistic and ultimately unsexy picture.  They might as well have called them ‘Bog Standard Johnnies’, brought to you in association with the Run-of-the-mill prophylactic company.

The pouring rain made getting the train an obvious choice, even though I usually preferred to walk home from the town.  It was shortly after 5pm and the Cumbernauld train was getting close to full.  I walked through to the second carriage and spied a free seat next to a man in his 50s talking on his mobile.

He had a large coffee perched on his pull out table, the container a little too large to fit into the cupholder.  I sat down on the aisle seat with a bump and the vibration caused the cup to fly through the air and spill all over his lap.  He continued his conversation on the phone as I readied myself for a confrontation.

It’s never nice when the first thing you say to someone is “sorry for spilling piping hot coffee all over you” but he was surprisingly pleasant.

“It’s alright.  I take a lot of milk so it was just a little warm.  Besides, I wasn’t really enjoying it anyway!” he said with a smirk.

I offered to buy him a new one but he wasn’t having any of it.  We struck up a conversation, talked a bit about ourselves. The usual: jobs, family, sport and he seemed like a happy, settled guy.  I was on my way back from a job interview and remarked how I didn’t really want the job.  He asked me how hard it would be for me to look for a better job and that if I could afford to.  I said it wouldn’t be difficult and that I could.

“So why do it if you know it won’t make you happy?” he asked.

Sometimes you just need to spill coffee over a stranger to get some clarity.

Following the resignation of the my local MP Michael Martin, former speaker of the House of Commons, in June this year my local constituency, Glasgow North East, today held an election to decide who the new man will be.  It has thrust Springburn into the media spotlight, which has made for uncomfortable reading in most articles I’ve seen that detail a number of damning statistics about how poor and deprived the area has become.

A quick look through the history books though would seem to suggest that this campaign for every party is merely a formality.  Springburn has been under Labour rule for 74 years, with only one election in the past 50 years resulting in a majority of less than 10,000 votes.  Perhaps this might explain the novelty presence of some of the names on the candidate list.  74 years and we’re bottom or thereabouts of nearly every social statistic league table you can think of, but surely it’s not yet time to bring in a former Big Brother contestant or (bless him) the hero of the Glasgow airport attack in 2007, John Smeaton.

Despite most of the negative press, I do like this little video on the BBC website, it doesn’t pull any punches but it makes it clear that it’s not all bad. I think that is something that people on the outside looking in seem to forget.  We’ll find out the results tomorrow morning, but I’m not bracing myself for a shock.

The Preparation

When I rolled out of bed and into another miserable March morning for a light jog, the idea of running a marathon had never really crossed my mind.  Job hunting in a strange city was bringing me down and I needed something to take my mind off of it.  I had met a group of Irish lads in the city and after playing for their indoor football team I realised that a couple of months of inactivity had left me horribly unfit and I needed to take swift action if I wanted to make an impact playing 11s in the summer.

After a couple of weeks of jogging laps I was at an acceptable level of fitness and starting to regain some of the sharpness and pace that were lost during my drinking days at university.  I didn’t want to stop there though, I wanted to be the quickest and the fittest and to achieve this I’d have to set aside a lot of time for sprints, suicides and laps.  I stuck to the schedule and it was paying off, by the middle of June I was running my heart out on the pitch and not even feeling tired the next day.  It was around this time that two of my teammates were discussing the possibility of entering the Toronto marathon in October.

I had never been a distance runner and didn’t really know what I was getting into when I agreed to give it a whirl.  The training I had done up to that point was all geared towards being more effective on the football pitch, acceleration and quick direction changes, and even at school while I was a strong sprinter I always suffered in longer races.

The training scheme I was following kicked off in the last week of June and I was finding it easy enough to up my mileage slightly on a week by week basis.  I was doing two training runs a week rather than the three shown in that schedule because I was still playing football three times a week as well.  My shifts at the Hard Rock were relaxation periods in comparison to the miles I was clocking up in July and August.  It began to look like I would be running the race solo too when I learned that the two lads who put the idea of the marathon in my head were pulling out, one leaving the country and the other without the time to fit the training in.

As the days passed the runs were getting tougher and tougher but I still felt as if I had a big psychological edge every time I laced up my runners. I had never pulled up on any of my training runs,  every time I had set off I had finished where I expected and no injuries, aches or exhaustion had stopped me in my path.  Things like this would give me a huge mental boost on race day and I was hoping to cling to it all the way through.

Unfortunately the risks of playing football three times a week eventually got the better of me and a late knee high challenge during a crucial league match for the Toronto Irish at the start of September threatened to shatter the dream.  Along with that impact injury I was aware that a summer of five days out of seven running around was very hard on my knees and I was in danger of burning myself out. I lost my psychologica edge on my very next training run, a projected 17-miler, forced to pull up after just four miles unable to bend my knee without recoiling in pain.

I took the necessary precautions and iced the knee often, skipped a few training sessions and tried to stay off of it as much as I could.  I didn’t feel much pain in it on a day-to-day basis, but after around thirty minutes of exercise it began to ache and I’d have to give in.  I barely kicked a ball at the tail end of the football season, a 45 minute appearance in the end of season cup was all I managed out of the final few fixtures.

I sought some advice from the doctor in the final few weeks but my name never reached the top of the waiting line and by race day I was merely clinging to the simple ice and rest formula.  There was still a lot of training for me to do, but the risk of further aggravating the problem forced me to stay on the couch for a few weeks.

Race Day

I am notoriously bad at getting up in the morning and knowing that I was required to get up at 6am on race day, I decided to set three alarms as a failsafe.  Fortunately, the adrenaline was more than enough to wake me and one of the most testing days of my life began with some cereal and a nutrigrain bar.  The race start was at Mel Lastman Square in the north of the city and with it being Sunday morning the subway was not yet running and I was forced to rise at the crack of dawn to get on an extremely crowded specially chartered bus destined for the starting line.

The bus arrived shortly before 8am, an hour before I was due to begin, allowing the half marathoners to get to the starting line before the gun went off.  For the 26.2 mile club though there was a lot of waiting around.  I nervously jogged around and stretched my muscles in every conceivable way, trying my best to keep warm on what was a very chilly October morning.

When 9am finally rolled around I was in a huge crowd thirty yards from the start line and anxious to get started.  I felt a little nervous, as I always do before I participate in any type of sporting event.  The good thing here though was that this was something that would be going on for hours and hours, so after the initial nerves subside I would have plenty of time to enjoy the day.

I maintained a slow pace in the early going, wary of my knee trouble and trying to keep it feeling good for as long as possible.  The bad news came a lot earlier than I expected though and it began to cause me some pain in between the 2nd and 3rd kilometre.  After barely five minutes I was already doubting if I had any chance of finishing this monster.

I had done a lot of reading about mental preparation for the marathon in the week leading up to the race.  I was hoping it would give me an edge and a little more belief.  If anything though, it hindered me.  Every article I read generally had a theme of ‘If you ever think for a second that you might not finish the race then YOU WILL NOT FINISH THE RACE.’  The knee trouble combined with the fact that humans aren’t really supposed to run this distance meant that I was severely doubting myself for most of the time I was training and reading these articles was making me even more stressed.

Fortunately, I can tell you that those assertions about having doubts were complete bollocks.  The knee was a major worry but when it was causing problems before it tended to ache a little more every minute until it became unbearable and I could no longer bend it or put pressure on it.  This time for some glorious reason it just stayed as a minor inconvenience for the bulk of the race.

Crossing the halfway line in 1 hour, 47 minutes was respectable and seeing as I hadn’t been pushing too hard I still felt like I had lots in the tank as the second half of the race began.  I could feel that my pace was dropping in the third quarter though and some minor aches were beginning to develop alongside my ever stiffening right knee.  It was only once I passed the 32km (~ 20 mile) mark that I started to genuinely believe that I could get through this thing.  But the injection of some real self belief was sent off kilter by the onset of some severe aches and pains.

I kept telling myself ‘Six/five/four more miles, just six more, that’s all, the hard part is over’ but in my heart of hearts I knew that this just wasn’t true.  The longest run I’d successfully completed in training was 16 miles and the new ground I was treading came with a jolt of pain in every part of my body.  My knee was as sore as ever, but along with that my ankles felt like they were a few bounces away from snapping, my shoulders like I’d been giving Godzilla a piggyback to Tokyo and even my nipples felt like they’d been jabbed with a rusty razor, chafing under the strain of over three hours of continuous running.

As I came up to the final mile though I knew that there was literally nothing that could have stopped me.  I haven’t felt like I was going to cry from physical pain since my early teens and even though I was a little worried I would burst into tears in front of the many watching spectators I knew that I was so very close to achieving something I had worked like a dog for.   The slightly uphill final stretch on University Avenue was like slow torture for my aching muscles but when I did finally cross the finish line I felt absolutely fantastic.  My original goal of finishing in under four hours was not met (I finished in 4 hours, 6 minutes) but looking back on my injury interrupted training and agony infused final six miles made it rather easy to let myself off the hook on that count.

The pain didn’t wait around though.  Within five minutes of stopping my entire body was as stiff as a board and I wasn’t even able to walk without making my roommate laugh hysterically for about four days.  Still, it was all over and I had done it. The feeling of elation and an overwhelming belief that anything is possible with the correct application were worthy souvenirs to go alongside my new shiny medal.

Believe!

There are always a lot of different things that can get in the way of me keeping up a regular presence on this blog.  Often it might be down to sheer laziness, a lack of interesting things to talk about or even a lack of interest on my part.  While I can’t deny that these factors have played their part in a very quiet (on this site) 2009 for me, I must stress that it is difficult to maintain the habit of writing at a computer when you don’t own a computer.  I mean, I had easy and regular access to my roommate’s laptop but that just made it too simple for me to say that the environment wasn’t right and I wanted to do the writing on my own PC in my own room with no one else around.  If that sounds like a cop out then I suppose it probably is, but hey, I’m back now with my own things and that means I’ve no longer got that excuse.  I took to the old fashioned habit of keeping some of my thoughts written down in ink this year and I have a few things in mind that I might work on and edit for public viewing.  I wrote the following entry on paper six weeks ago and decided to fine tune it today for posting here.

——

So it appears that the summer is on its way out in Toronto.  We’re being treated to some chilly showers as an aperatif of what I can only assume will be a brutally cold and unforgiving Canadian winter.  It makes me a little frustrated that I didn’t spend more time this year writing in the blog, along with pursuing other writing projects that have never got beyond the ‘that might be a good idea?’ stage.  Still, I decided to start again after meeting with an ex-girlfriend of mine in the city tonight.  I don’t actually like referring to her in that way anymore because any ill feeling between us is long in the past and she has actually grown into being one of my closer friends.  While I’ve been living in Toronto she has been on her own North American adventure this summer, living in Indiana on a whim after taking on an unattractive door to door bookselling job that she got roped into through uni.  I did predict that it wouldn’t be a very enjoyable job and it turned out that I was right after she and her pals got into a wrangle with the woman they were staying with, who turned out to be off her trolley and tried to get them all arrested by falsely telling the police that they had all entered the country illegally.

Despite that she still landed on her feet and got another job, allowing her to stick around in the US long enough to have a fun summer and see some pretty cool things.  She briefly visited me on her way home in August, but it wasn’t a particularly happy visit for either of us.  I already had two friends from the UK staying over meaning that space in the house was at a premium and she arrived with one of her friends who I’d never met before.  Still, you never want to write off a friend because of a few niggly arguments and I was happy when she told that she was going to be passing through Toronto again the next month.

We had a good laugh catching up and it was nice.  She told me that she looked at the blog now and again to see what I’m up to but had stopped now because I simply don’t write enough.  That gave me a little kick over restarting it, and it’s also always nice to know when someone is thinking of you when you’re not there.  After continuing down the same route I became very impressed with her memory, she remembered a number of things that even I had forgotten I once said.

We said goodbye at the bus station and she carried on her journey back into the US.  I started feeling a little strange on the walk home.  It’s very difficult to predict when you’re hanging out with someone whether or not you’ll still want to in a couple of years time.  You don’t always appreciate the fact that someone is listening to you and genuinely cares about what happens to you.  I suppose that’s because you don’t know for sure without the benefit of hindsight.

Still, this new knowledge made me a little guilty.  I began thinking back that she held up her side of the bargain but that I could’ve done so much more and with a bit of effort it might have been a lot better.  If something breaks down because you just didn’t try then you are more likely to feel regret than if you gave it your best shot.

But this isn’t a declaration that I want to move the moon and earth to put things right.  What’s done is done and you just have to get on with it and learn from your mistakes.  In fact, every now and then when you realise you’ve mucked something up it might actually be a good thing.  You’ll change things around and that means you’re a little bit closer to getting it right next time.

At the beginning of the Toronto city worker strike on June 22 I thought it would be interesting if it turned into a long running dispute.  Purely due to the anarchy in the city feeling that would go along with no garbage service and having all parks and recreation centres shut down, it’s the kind of thing that’s intriguing to read about if it’s happening somewhere else.  However, the reality of the entire city resembling a jakey’s sitting room is enough to make me wish for a speedy resolution.  We are on day 23 and I am officially fed up with it.

My football team has nowhere to train now.  Don’t get me wrong, Moss Park was far from a thing of beauty beforehand but since the city named it as a temporary garbage dumping site we’ve been forced off of it for training and made to roam the city looking for a patch of green to kick a ball around on.  After the dump was reduced to just one corner we made a return to it last week but unsurprisingly the stench of hobo crotch remained and we’ve decided to take a risk and wander looking for somewhere else this week.

Moss Park's Trash

Three cheers for the refuse technicians!

It has been three and a bit lightning fast months since I last wrote and I can scarcely believe that I’ve now been in Canada for more than five.  The trip hasn’t been exactly what I expected but so far I’ve learned quite a lot and despite the gross expenditure it all feels like a worthwhile exercise at this point.

The opening six weeks were a bit of a nightmare.  With no place to call my own I accomplished very little and let everything slide.  When we finally moved into our flat on March 1st things improved immediately but the job hunt led me into a new set of problems.  Bar and serving work was very difficult to come by at that time of year and I was wrestling for a handful of positions of thousands of would-be staff.

I’ve suffered through employment droughts before but being thousands of miles away from home with a big flat to pay for (though I reckon it’s worth every penny) added a lot more pressure.  I was feeling desperate midway through April when I embarked on a FOUR interview journey just to get a job in Starbucks.  It was a route I didn’t want to take and thankfully I was offered a much better position in the Hard Rock Cafe at the end of April which resulted me binning the coffee shop before I’d even worked a shift.

The training process at the HRC was lengthy and involved a quite ludicrous amount of product knowledge (there are exactly 1.9qt of tortilla chips in the nachos, in case you were wondering) but I got through it without any hassle and began clawing back some of the deficit I had racked up.  By the time my Mum came to visit at the end of May I was just about back onside money wise and a trip back to Barrie plus a few lazy days lounging in the sun certainly helped make me feel that the struggle of the past few months had been worth it.

I’m pleased to say that the time without a job wasn’t a complete waste.  I spent a lot of time running, playing football and tennis and I’m in the best shape of my life now and contemplating marathon training for a race in October.  I’m back playing 11-a-side with a good bunch of Irish lads, we’re second in our league with five wins out of six and it’s been a lot of fun to be back playing competitively after a spell out of the game.

The grey clouds and slush of the first third of the year have given way to a much brighter outlook.  Suddenly summer has arrived with a spate of hot, dry days, I’m spending my free time playing a game I love and making a decent wage while still having enough time left over to relax and enjoy myself.

I arrived home from football training tonight to an email from two of my closest pals containing their flight details for their on a whim trip to Toronto.  I need to get that barbecue on the deck fired up, things are looking rosy in the garden.

Grin

I was having a look at the Sunday Mail’s website last weekend in an attempt to keep in touch with what’s going on in Scotland and I was a little shocked to read this story about a murder in Springburn.

Unfortunately, these things happen in Glasgow.  It’s especially terrifying when they happen less than a mile from your old front door, and where my mother still currently lives.  Apparently it has come as a result of a dispute between the young Springburn Peg (YSP) and a rival gang.  I’ve seen the graffiti all over any vacant wall in the area (usually something daft like ‘fuck the Polis, YSP#1) and also the dodgy types huddling around in big groups but suddenly the problem seems a whole lot more real with a boy of just 19 being axed to death in a planned attack.

If you read on you can see that the boy did not have a very nice life.  His mother stabbed his abusive, alcoholic father to death when he was just 10 and he was also involved in a bungled police raid whilst on the way back from visiting relatives in prison at age five.  Incidentally, it is worth noting that his mother only got three years for the murder of his father but admittedly no further details of the case were published there. I’m picturing a Trevor and Little Mo from Eastenders type scenario in my head.

How do we stop this from happening though?  This culture of violence paints a very sad picture of life in the west of Scotland.  Is it a matter of poor education that Scotland, particularly Glasgow, has such a high murder and violent crime rate?  How much blame can we place on the council for not giving the kids enough to do?  The huge imbalance of the city council’s spending between the affluent areas in the west end in comparison to the likes of Springburn, Shettleston and Govan is very unsettling indeed.  Why do we seem to have so many young people in poor areas that don’t give two shits about life to the extent that they’re willing to stab and kill other people?

There are those that would argue that gang related deaths are of little concern to the common punter in Glasgow because you’ve essentially got idiots pursuing and killing other idiots.  I walked to work in the city centre and university in the west end from Springburn for years and although I never felt threatened I was always questioned by those who thought it wasn’t a risk worth taking.  When stories like this come out it’s not hard to see why.

Are we just hoping that the problem will fix itself?  Is that the best solution we can come up with?

Somewhat typically I followed up another guarantee of regular blogging with the sound of silence.  However, my current circumstances make it easy to let myself off the hook.

I haven’t been myself in February and  I blame the flat search for this.  The buzz of being in a new country was already beginning to wear off on January 30th when Jon and I found a beautiful, big flat in Little Italy  on a tree lined street.  It was both the nicest we had seen and peculiarly also the cheapest.  We viewed it just one hour after the advert went online and had our rental application submitted by 10am the next morning.  Over the next few days Jon charmed the landlady with status report seeking phone calls and it looked as if we had secured the dream pad.

But the line went slack.  She stopped answering her phone and we were bewildered.  Some ten days later we finally got a negative response.  We weren’t best pleased.  We were still scouring the market during the waiting period in anticipation of our failure but found it really hard to get excited about smaller, dirtier flats for an extra $400 a month.

As we stretched further into February the chances of quickly finding a place dried up as landlords began advertising for March 1st starts.  The temptation to settle for any place we could get our hands on and resume a normal home life was kept at bay only by the dilapidated states of most of our potential homes.  We found a huge place at the heart of downtown but there were twenty reasons for why it was totally unacceptable without even mentioning that I fell down the rickety stairs.  Basements with prison cell bedrooms and apartments the size of a car backseat were par for the course by now.  On February 13th we arranged a viewing that involved us wandering through an area with enough crack addicts to inspire an Irvine Welsh novel.  When we finally arrived we saw barred windows, a crumbling rusted roof and smoke coming out of little cracks in the front door.  We walked away without uttering a word.

Not every place we saw was terrible though.  In fact, there were several nice options that we tried in vain to secure.  The lengthy application process was often our undoing as we didn’t measure up to our competitors due to our foreign backgrounds.  For the dream pad we were up against fifteen other applicants and by the time we saw any other nice place we were warned that there were already plenty of people swarming around it.

The initial intrigue of searching for a new place to live had long since been replaced by anger and disillusionment.  More unsuitable places came and went on a daily basis before the wait was finally made worthwhile last Sunday.  A huge, two-level place with a living-room-sized bathroom in Cabbagetown was to be our saving grace.  We said we wanted it and we got it.  No dumb ass application process, no 200 job referees, no bullshit.  A handshake, a cheque and it’s all ours.

We move in on Sunday and I cannot wait.  I’m looking forward to taking my life off of pause.  My own room, my own things and time to think with this weight off of my mind.  And if the temperatures rises a few more degrees then I’ll be back on the tennis court soon too.  Things are looking up.

With no place to call my own maintaining this blog could prove tricky.  However, I have maintained a steady internet presence since I left for Canada last Wednesday so I really have no excuse to neglect it any further.

I arrived in Toronto on January 14th and after a brief wander around the city I hopped on a train to Barrie.  It certainly was strange to be back in the town where I grew up after eight years away.  The place has changed so much but at the same time it’s still pretty much as I remember it.

I spent the week visiting old friends and taking it easy.  Going out drinking with people who’ve never heard of Billy Connolly and don’t find temperatures of -25 celsius strange has certainly been hard to adjust to.

I’m now in Toronto to begin the job and flat search.  I suppose when I think about it I don’t really know what I’m doing.  But that’s all part of the fun.