How I ended up in Toronto

Thursday, 15 December, 2022

Once again I find myself having written dozens of blogs all in my own head. I can hardly believe that I’m sitting here actually typing…but I am. I had to check what I wrote in my last blog and at that time I was aware that I’d have to move but had no clue it would be such a monumental one.

My plan is to just keep blogging and I may skip around a bit while doing so. I don’t know. If I’d blogged all the way through this experience it would either have been therapeutic or mindblowingly depressing/confusing/traumatic – to me at least. What I envision is filling in events throughout rather than hitting anyone with too much pouring out of misery!

Somehow in most of crisis times I’ve not been able to write a thing. I find that intriguing. I’m a big believer in writing things down during difficult moments or times, but somehow during every major crisis of my life, I have become numb and unable to do this. So at least I can write about things after the fact and shorten the timeline enough to make it bearable.

Looking for a place in Hackney was tough. So many bad looking places, so many that were above our budget. I applied for some anyway but heard nothing back. Sometimes I felt I was close to seeing a place but then the trail went cold and I can only assume they were somehow snapped up directly. We did manage to see one but it wasn’t for us – it had a single counter open plan kitchen and was above a pub, which would have made it noisy.

We finally got an interview at another place. We played our hand when we saw it was quite nice compared to others. To avoid a long story, it became a nightmare of an application. We got the place (in theory) but the demands were overwhelming. We needed to bid over the stated price, we needed to pay a whole year’s rent, we needed to accept a lot of the current furniture, we had to jump through many hoops to satisfy the landlord’s wishes. It got more and more crazy and we couldn’t understand why, after paying so much more than the advertised price (and the amount we were comfortable paying) and promising a whole year’s rent, we were badgered for every sort of check possible.

In the end, we’d had enough. We had had thoughts of this being our last year in Hackney after which we would return to Toronto so I could be closer to Robin. All of these hoops for a year in a place we couldn’t really afford and didn’t love – it just didn’t feel worth it. So we made a decision to move our Toronto journey up a year.

For the next couple of months (or was it less) things couldn’t have been more difficult. Arranging shipping, packing for the day everything would leave, listing things for donation and sale, fielding the potential buyers, sending things off to new homes, taking things away to people by ourselves, all the admin work… Every day felt worse than the last, our stress level was crazy. What had seemed like a good decision suddenly felt like it was killing us. Krish questioned our sanity in returning to Toronto. Every day he was reading about all the reasons not to. I tried to buoy him while all the while questioning it too. I felt that one of us needed to stay resolute somehow and I seem to be better at that than he is. He’s the person who I say will have a one word epitaph – ‘OR‘.

We were up against a tight deadline – we had to leave our place, we had booked our plane ticket, our shipment date was looming. But finally, our stuff was shipped off. Our furniture and the belongings we didn’t need to hold onto were disappearing day by day. It felt good to know we weren’t going to be stuck with stuff but it also felt bad to know our Hackney life was dwindling.

We thought we could get out a bit to see the things we knew we’d miss but every time we did find a couple of hours to do it, it was mostly sadness I felt – a need to be out but at the same time a need to get back to the safety and comfort of home. I want to blog about these experiences and I hope I will – if I do, I’ll be skipping about in time. I’ll cross my fingers.

I may or may not blog about the agonies of the physical move, or I may allude to it here and there, but I do have photos…

Our living room and kitchen became a war zone slash obstacle course for about a month. Sorting took forever – what to pack, what to give away, what to try to sell. We chose to ship our belongings and got our ‘plan’ in place – a piece of plastic that outlined the dimensions of our container. Krish planned and planned and then planned again, calculating over and over every day. His Tetris expert status was going to come in very handy, but the headache…

The daily shuffle of stuff. And Krish calculating, packing, taping…it went on for days and days and…

And then one day, the van arrived to pick it all up. Krish had staged it carefully and carried it downstairs to go out. The boxes began to leave our hallway, one by one, until they filled the container box. And then at the very end, there had been a half centimetre miscalculation and one slim box had to be sacrificed and brought back in to reconsider. (We unframed several pictures and mum’s needlepoint – the only heartbreak since it had been custom-framed and looked amazing – and mentally tagged them for carry-on baggage.

When everything was gone, goods sold, stuff donated, friends happily (we hoped) taking leftover food and toiletries and bits and pieces of furniture, we were without a bed.

We slept two nights in the nearby KIP hotel. I liked that little black and white room over by the Narrow Way. Then we went back, finished our packing and cleaned up. The rooms were bare at last. We drank champagne and waited for the cab to take us to Gatwick for our final night in (sort of) London.

We don’t like flying. We’d carefully chosen the cheapest day to get a premium economy on Air Transat. Such a good choice. We were comfortable, well taken of, fed and fed and served as much champagne as we could stand (that’s not much for me…) and there was very little turbulence. Krish rightly felt thoroughly spoiled right up till we landed.

Eventually I’ll have the time and energy to blog about our time here.  I will at least catch up for now. It hasn’t been easy. In fact, it’s been a continuation of the nightmare that started in the UK. We’re going through a patch of calm at the moment and grateful for it. We miss Hackney and London very much, but most of all we miss our life which seems to have been lost, at least for now. Our only goal is to find it again no matter where we are.

Stick with me and see what happens. Just don’t get motion sick as I jump around in my timeline for the next little while.