Today

A little over £113 got me my €150 for Athens. Lucky me, a Canadian who works for Network rail dropped by the office yesterday. She was from Calgary but more importantly, she had been to Athens recently. To my relief, she told me that €150 would be plenty for three and a half days there. "Could you manage Ottawa on about $215 spending money for three and a half days?" she wisely put it to me.

Talking with her, I won't deny a little homesickness crept in. Actually, I've been wrestling with it on and off for the past two weeks. Partially because summer is coming and so my mind drifts back to last summer, one of the best in my memory to be sure. Then there's some recent family events which have brought thoughts of mortality to the forefront and made me have a few lingering thoughts about being so far away from my parents. Not to mention the little things, like Toronto's secret swing, concerts in Montreal or the Manx pub in Ottawa. Oh and maybe my friends, I guess.

But I'm still only nine months into this two year experiment of mine. Progress from the second to the third draft of Momentum is much greater than from the first to the second - I hope to have a draft worth shopping around before I leave for Athens. Though I've signed up for a little more time at Network Rail, job offers are coming in and eventually the right one will come. Though I don't like to prattle on about, what with my desire not to make the people I meet feel like their every move is being reported on the Internet, I have managed to get the seed of a social life to bear a little fruit. Being a writing hermit stopped being romantic after awhile!

The jury is still out on whether or not I'll stay in England for the extra-long haul. I have to say that on the negative side of things, I find it difficult to cope with how crushingly backward this country is when it comes to the general populations attitude towards the importance of the environment. More than once now I have hear a good deal of resentment directed towards the issue at large and I've even heard more than one person say "I fucking hate the environment".

What?

Is this not like a fish saying it "fucking hates water"? Perhaps while chewing a sausage roll and reading The Guardian?

Plus the culture of fear in England is much closer to America's hysteria than the general attitude of Canada. I know I was poking a bit of fun with it, when I made my posts about Brasseye, but pedophilia nonce-sense is still pretty bad. Though the Labour party has done a lot to block a lot of the proposed anti-terror measures which would bring England in sync with America's draconian, crippled joke of a legal system...it is still a contentious issue. Running parallel to both topics, the newspapers are just as shameless in exploiting these fears to sell paper as they were (and often still are, somehow) in exploiting the Princess Diana escapade of the late 90's. These are all things which can wear me down on a tired or otherwise down day, to be sure.

I'd like to have a clear conclusion to this train of thought, but I guess the point is that I don't!