Summer in the comfort zone of London

So it wasn’t until the summer after my fourth year (my second-last; I took the scenic route to a BA) that I spent a whole summer in London. It was work that kept me there. My first real newspaper job. An editor at The London Free Press wanted to hire me for an internship. His boss thought it was a horrible idea but relented, grumpily. I was in. So for the first time, when the city substantially emptied of people my age, I stuck around.

 

It was magical. I freely admit that nostalgia may be making me an unreliable witness. The further I get from my undergrad years, the more all of it seems magical, although with a little reflection I do recall that at the time much of it was barely tolerable. But that summer of 1988 really was lovely.

 

Partly it just felt like home. I’d grown up only an hour away in Sarnia. So London had the deeply satisfying ordinariness that home always has. Only later, by contrast with the great out-there, would it reveal its quirks and gifts.

There’s a different feel to the summer air in southwestern Ontario, a deep calm, a sense that the day will bring no worry, that the night will last about a week and a half, and that in that night anything can happen. A decade later, riding a campaign bus in late May through the same part of the province while I covered the 1999 provincial election, I saw the impossibly lush green fields and felt the just-right humidity and realized that this was why summers elsewhere don’t feel quite right, because they don’t feel quite like this.

And it was like a little secret shared among friends. If you’re 21 in the north end of London during the school year, you’re amid the mob. Which is fine because the mob brings its own mix of anonymity and possibility. But when the mob goes home your circle shrinks to comprehensible size. In that long summer I deepened friendships I would barely have noticed in the din of autumn. I got up close to bands at Call the Office that would have filled larger venues if more of my tribe had been in town. My birthday is in the summer; on the Call The Office patio I celebrated with a dozen friends late into the endless heavy-lidded night.

Summer is for making promises to yourself and not worrying too much about keeping them. I made a list of books to read and mostly ignored it. I had a bicycle that could help me get into better shape. It didn’t. Oh well. In my apartment, with no roommates around to jostle, I could finally learn to cook. Or not. Thirty times I swore I’d ask the cute girl from work out. Thirty times I put it off til another day. No great loss. She probably wanted a guy who could cook anyway.

I want to claim it was that summer at The Free Press where I honed my craft, but it wasn’t that kind of summer. I was an intern in the entertainment section. It wasn’t exactly a pressure cooker. Record companies sent us stacks of LPs for review. I fell in love with Tracy Chapman’s debut, which you know, and Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick, which you don’t, but Thomas Dolby and I are right about that one and you just missed out, is all. I interviewed a high-school ska band; they argued amongst themselves about whether this guy with the pen and notepad was really old enough to be with The Free Press. Bruce Cockburn complimented me on the necktie I wore to my interview with him. I remember that tie to this day. If you saw me wearing it you’d say, wow, is that ever an ‘80s tie.

A year earlier I was in Quebec City, so lonely I could barely breathe. A year later I would be in Montreal with my entire formal education behind me and no way to know what lay ahead. This was... easier.