In the early 2000s, a young Canadian writer who shall remain nameless found herself in the backseat of a car with her hero, the legendary Alice Munro. A local volunteer had picked them both up at the train station and was delivering them to the Eden Mills Festival, not far from Clinton, in rural south-western
I am on a retreat in the Portuguese mountains outside Faro, a heavenly place called Moinhos Velhos. I have not eaten food in three days. I have practised hours of yoga and meditation. I have swum many cool, slow lengths of a blue-tiled pool and sweated in a wood-fired sauna and walked for miles through
23 min listen
Matthew Parris, just back from Australia, shares his thoughts on the upcoming referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice (01:08). Dan Hitchens looks at church congregations and wonders why some are on the up, while others are in a spiral of decline (08:32), and Leah McLaren describes the delights of audio and tells
Recently I stumbled across a file of conversations I’d recorded with my seven-year-old son Frank back when he was four. Topics include his travels through wormholes, why he finds planet Earth ‘boring’, the tragic story of how his ‘first family’ died and how he got his ‘laser eyes’. It was only by listening to these
15 min listen
This week: Cindy Yu discusses Britain’s invisible East Asians (00:51), Leah McLaren discloses the truth about single motherhood (06:02), and Hannah Tomes reads her notes on dining alone (12:08). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.
If you believed Hollywood, you’d think the world was madly in love with harried, struggling single mothers. I mean, who doesn’t love Erin Brockovich? Or Renée Zellweger’s character in Jerry Maguire? But in real life, that’s not how it works. In recent months, I have unexpectedly found myself the sole-care single mother to two young
In the grim locked-down winter of 2021, I drove three hours to Wales where I sat in an isolated cottage and wrestled with a memoir I could not figure out how to write. While I was there, my mother sent me a link to a two-page personal essay she’d published in a tiny but venerable
22 min listen
On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from James Heale on the Zac Goldsmiths’ secret shadow cabinet. (00:49) Next, Leah McLaren on Covid in Canada. (07:20) And finally, Nicholas Farrell on the march of the Italian Wolves. (13:58) Produced and presented by Sam Holmes Subscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher:www.spectator.co.uk/voucher
Two-and-a-half centuries ago in 2015 I had a video call with a Canadian friend who lives in my hometown of Toronto. As we spoke, she was putting together a Middle Eastern spice box for the Syrian refugee family she’d sponsored through her daughter’s school, carefully printing the labels in Arabic. Canada had recently committed to
In 1966, a year before Pierre Elliott Trudeau first blazed to power, the bard-poet Leonard Cohen published his second and final novel, Beautiful Losers. The book is a hallucinogenic, stream-of-consciousness steam bath of Catholic allusions, French separatist indignance and extra-marital forest porn with hot indigenous chicks. Needless to say it’s basically unreadable. Back home in Canada
Next week my compatriots will cast their votes in what has arguably been the worst Canadian election ever. By ‘worst’ I don’t mean allegations of voter fraud or political corruption or scenes of civil unrest but a collective release of hot prairie wind followed by a vague sinking sensation — the feeling of a prosperous
Canadians, like the English, are known for our tendency to apologise. The difference is, we actually mean it. Our modesty is not false. Our inferiority complex is not a polite, self-deprecating joke. We really do feel inferior. And we really are sorry. Sorry for taking up so much space for so few people. Sorry for
The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was a radiant person, smiling and full of light. Devoted to her daughter, successful at work, always good for a laugh at the school gates. No one — save those loved ones who knew her private
The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was a radiant person, smiling and full of light. Devoted to her daughter, successful at work, always good for a laugh at the school gates. No one — save those loved ones who knew her private
The first thing you see after leaving the baggage carousel at Toronto’s Pearson airport is an enormous photograph of Mayor Rob Ford. In it, the former high school football coach grins in his blingy regalia, teeth yellowed, one eye squinting in a semi-wink. His scalp is flushed and shiny through a receding blond hairline and
An Italian friend who lives in Rome texted me to ask about the current political crisis in Canada that is threatening to topple the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. ‘I honestly can’t see what the “scandal” is,’ he said. ‘Is it all just because Justin forgot to say “please” when asking his attorney-general for
One thing I love about my adopted country is the widespread cultural contempt for dullness. Unlike North Americans, intelligent British people rarely drone on in a witless or self-aggrandising manner. They deflect, make jokes and generally aim to please. But there is one boring subject no one here ever seems to tire of and that
Whenever there’s another mass shooting in America, like the one in Florida yesterday, I think immediately of my Uncle Bill in Texas, a retired military man, practising Catholic, Republican, NRA member, community volunteer and civil libertarian who lives in a gated community with my Aunt Bev (a retired nurse) on the outskirts of Houston. Uncle
Whenever there’s another mass shooting in America, like the massacre in San Bernardino last month, I think immediately of my Uncle Bill in Texas, a retired military man, practising Catholic, Republican, NRA member, community volunteer and civil libertarian who lives in a gated community with my Aunt Bev (a retired nurse) on the outskirts of
When I first came to this country nearly a decade ago, Britain wanted immigrants like me. Back then you could get a visa just for being creative. It was called the ‘Artist, Writer, Composer Visa’ — a Blairite flight of fancy if there ever was one — and all you had to do was fill
