Country No. 33 - Canada
I have just returned from a family wedding in Canada’s Saint Adolphe D’Howard - a beautiful lakeside settlement located 100km north of Montreal in the Laurentian Mountains.
“Glad you’re finally visiting a proper country not a two-bit tax haven” remarked my Aussie pal Rhys while @oldspeechwriter thought I should be able to count Quebec as country 34 quoting Charles de Gaulle’s famous ‘Vive le Quebec libre!’ speech. Tempting as it is to bag another country, not even I am that brazen.
We were there for the away fixture of a two-part wedding. The home leg took place a few months ago on a blustery day at Marylebone Town Hall. It was a joyous occasion where Canadian friends and relatives were crammed in with us on a red Routemaster bus, squished into a quaint old pub sharing canapés, before crashing out at our boxy Kilburn apartment. When I think about the sheer vastness of Canada I now realise quite how toy-town ours must seem to them.
Although I’m not going to try to make multiple country claims, I do feel that French-speaking Canada is a land unto itself. I’m reminded by the best man that our warm Québécois hosts are atypically typical. The groom works for Montreal’s celebrated Cirque Du Soleil . The groom’s mother is an active Bloc Québécois supporter. The family owns maple woods and a sugar shack, selling maple syrup produced using traditional means. “It’s rather like marrying into a Scottish family who just happen to own a distillery” he says.
I feel lucky, of course, to get this peek into a different world, and what a world. We’re here in the peak of their summer, during a heatwave, staying in a lakeside mansion where the wedding reception is taking place. The place came with its own boat for Chrissakes. But the residents of Saint Adolphe are not moneyed yuppies. This is a rural place, with an ageing population and few local jobs to keep young families here. The winters are too long and summers too short for a thriving tourist industry. Despite this, it’s hard not to dream of forgoing the depressing London property ladder for a lakeside cabin in the wilderness.
