WHY CANADA?: Part 1

Disclaimer: I HAD NO IDEA THIS WAS GOING TO BE SO LONG. So I've chopped this story up into little parts for easier digestion. I apologise in advance. This is the story that I wish I could tell everyone when they ask me why exactly I want to go to Canada, but, sadly, not many people have the time. So here it is, in three parts for you.

PART ONE

When I get asked why exactly I'm going to Canada - whether I have family or friends there, or even an actual job - I'll shuffle my feet and smile sheepishly before I explain that there is no real reason. I have no connections, pretty much. I'm leaving home for a country that I've never been to, without any concrete idea of what I'm supposed to do when I get there. Cue two thumbs up in the air: "cool!"

That's normally the answer I give "adults" (I put "adult" in quotation marks because, technically, I'm an adult, but I'm using this word here to talk about people who have mortgages) who then knit their brows in concern for my unborn children who they imagine springing into the world unprovided for and covered in a thin film of maple syrup (tasty!). Sometimes I'll throw in a couple of promising job prospects to soothe, if need be. The answer I give to "my people" (hopeless Millenials such as myself) is quite different: it's a long-winded, rose-tinted fantasy fable involving figure skaters, teenage angst, a rock from Alberta and a fortune-teller. Sit tight.

In 2006 (yuh, we're going back that far) I fell hopelessly in love with the Winter Olympics. I was enthralled by snowboarding, bobsledding, and - most importantly - figure skating. All right, all right: men's figure skating. I obsessively followed the stories of four American, Swiss, Russian and Canadian competitors as they progressed to the finals. Through the stages of the competition my sister and I started to develop little characters for each of them; in fact, I ended up writing a Winter Olympic fan fiction before I even knew what fan fiction was (it involved a huge snowball fight and a lot of slapstick and remains one of my favourite pieces of writing ever). My personal favourite was the Canadian skater - the adorkable little Jeffrey Buttle of Ontario. His teeth were perfect. His duck-butt hair was perfect. He was perfect. I was totally smitten.

The men's figure skating finished with JButtz getting the bronze, which was a pretty good deal but goddamnit if he just hadn't fallen over trying to attempt that triple lutz (oh! the imaginary tears I cried over that crucial mistake! take your damn hand off the ice, Buttle!)! Never mind, next year my sweet little Canadian would take the gold, I told myself, and I would be there to see it. 2010 - the Olympics will be held in, huh, VANCOUVER!?!? [CANADA INTENSIFIES]

I sent a lot of e-mails around this time to my core group of friends at school, adamant that we were all going to go to Vancouver in 2010. It was real, and I told my parents that they couldn't say anything because by that time I'd be 19 so I could do whatever the heck I wanted to by that point. I wrote about it in my diaries for a whole year… the idea had wedged itself in my brain.

The sad reality is that I watched the 2010 Winter Olympics in my then-boyfriend's room at university in Edinburgh. I didn't manage to catch any of the men's figure skating. Jeffrey Buttle wasn't competing, he had decided to end his stint at competitive skating years ago, and was now just concentrating on exhibitions. I felt a little pang as I sat in bed, watching brave athletes rattle through the luge: I could have been there, I wanted to be there, so bad. I inwardly apologised to my fourteen-year-old self.

*interrupting record scratch* SKIP BACK, to a party in February, 2006! The Winter Olympics were still going on, I was young (ah!) and going to a party hosted by some kids at the International School in Aberdeen. My friends and I were deadly excited because there were going to be cute boys with accents.

The party took place in a living room/conservatory with the furniture pushed back to the walls. There were chips and dips (which us Brit girls would have called crisps, but, when in Rome!), and Coca-Cola cans cooling in a sink full of ice. Dim lights twinkled, and a laptop was rigged up to the sound system in the corner. This was the first time I heard Lil Jon's Get Low (an experience I know many of my friends will also keep with themselves through life), and the first time a boy ever actually asked me to dance (not to Get Low, though - thank God). I vaguely remember this experience, through a haze of hormones: Aerosmith's Don't Wanna Miss A Thing starting to play, the crowd parting to reveal hair gel and denim arranged in the form of… a BOY. I do remember actually looking behind myself to check that he didn't just ask a much prettier, taller girl if she wanted to dance, but hey, no, it was ME! Success!

That fateful dance was the beginning of the main source of my TEEN ANGST for the next four years. I didn't catch his name that night, in fact, I can't remember if I actually said any words to him at all, I was in a state of shock (but I do remember making OH MY GOD faces behind his back to my friends as we passed by on our Slow Dance Transit). However, like the creepy, determined 14-year-old girl that I was, by the end of the week I had procured his MSN address (haaa-zaaah!). Cue awkward chats and questionable use of emoticons!

There was a lot (oh boy, and I mean a LOT) to that relationship which I will not go into (it mainly involves angry diary entries going "WHYYYY????", as teen girls are wont to write), but the important thing I want us all to take away from the whole deal was that HE was CANADIAN. By this point I had attuned myself to every single Canadian thing - I had Canadar (like radar, duh): I realised that the bands I listened to were Canadian; I met and fell in love with people and then learned they were from the Great White North; I insisted that my parents buy Canadian cheddar, and I couldn't even look at maple syrup without feeling a spark. I felt like my life was one of those spinning coin charity donation boxes, and I, an unsuspecting one-pence-piece, was heading down the vortex to my inevitable event horizon: Canada.

Once people get to a certain age, they can easily denounce their entire teenage experience and claim that their awkward, embarrassing selves were totally different people. As much as I'd like to say that Olivia at 14 years is not who I am today, I would be lying. My teenage self was the one that put up the picture of Vancouver city on her bedroom wall, she was the one that traced the shape of North America in her diary, she was the one looking at flight prices to Vancouver during her after-school hours. My teenage self was mad, obsessive, positively cringeworthy, but she was determined as hell that at one point in her life she would get to Canada. 

And that's stuck with me ever since.