Before I emigrated to Canada in 1954 I thought the Manchester Guardian must be much more boring than the Belfast Telegraph. After a few years in the high Arctic, where the postal service was highly erratic, I spent five somewhat more sophisticated years at a teachers’ college in Kuching, Sarawak, in Malaysia. The standard weekly news magazine there was Time.
I returned to the Canadian Arctic in 1968, and eventually, in 1980, ended up in what is now the capital of the territory known as Nunavut, next door to Greenland. As a permanent Christmas gift, one of my daughters provided me with a subscription to the Guardian Weekly. The mail service from great Britain to Iqaluit was creaky as ever, but I accepted her gift gratefully.
Unfortunately, history caught up with me. Eleven years ago an afternoon walk with the dogs ended in disaster: I slipped and fell under a bunch of rocks. I spent five months in hospital. This year I was obliged to move into an old folks’ residence in Victoria, British Colombia: God’s little waiting room by the sea.
The mail is only a couple of days late here, almost instantaneous. But frankly, I’d rather be in Iqaluit.
