My hometown

Right - I blather on in this blog a lot about my three citizenships and being a child of three countries etc but if you were to force me to choose one of the three, I'd have to tell you that in my hearts of hearts I'm mainly Canadian...not American or British. You see, I've spent most of my life in Canada and even though I live in the UK now I've got, um, another 21 years to go before I get close to my Canadian record.

I was reminded of this last week when I spent some time with my parents, hanging out in my home province of Alberta and my hometown of Edmonton. Despite all my wanderings over the past 10 years, Edmonton still remains my default place - this is where I can truly zone out - the essentially blank canvas on which I've redrawn my world.

I have massive mixed feelings about Edmonton - on the face of it it's a pretty unexciting place, and what little excitement happens there comes from the enormous harshness of the weather. The ground freezes from October until April, and there is only one month (July) in which I've not personally experienced snow. The snow normally hangs around from Hallowe'en time until Easter, and just when you think it's gone, it finds a way of coming back with a final flurry in May or June, just when you've gotten used to having (gasp!) green leaves and grass again. There are two ways of looking at this - my mother's and my own. I find the Edmonton seasons uniquely soul-destroying, but my cheery American-expat mother snowshoes in the winter and spends all of the scant summer months outside in the garden.

I wonder if you can guess why people live in Edmonton, Alberta? It used to be balanced by a few different reasons - firstly, it's the home of the Alberta provincial government and the University of Alberta (where I got my first degree: major: History, minor: Comparative Literature), so there are lots of people there for work. And secondly, and this one's the key, Alberta is a province full of oil- and Edmonton is the gateway to the reserves held up in the even more freezing north.

When I was growing up there was a good balance between the government/university people and the oil types: I felt buoyed by the fact that we were known as 'Redmonton' compared to the rest of the province, especially right-wing bully-boy Calgary to the south. During the 80s and especially the 90s (note: when oil was cheap), Edmonton was the kind of place where a starving artist could live like a king, if you could make that deal with the devil that you would put up with the weather in return for the comraderie and friendliness of the people and the DIY arts, music, and theatre scene blossoming in the frigid streets.

This was the city that I left behind 10 years ago. Sadly, it has been replaced by something else. The weather remains as harsh and unforgiving as before, but the starving artists have moved on. They have been replaced, instead, by people from all over Canada coming to seek the Alberta oil-rush dream, in their pickup trucks and their steel-toed boots. They have spent the last 10 years building road after road, leading further and further out of the compact city river valley, to conquer the parkland and lakes of the surrounding countryside, where they build houses for two which are as big as English ancestral stately homes.

My parents drive me around all the fresh roads and point out all the new houses - which look to me like miniature blocky jails or gymnasiums, stacked together as close as possible, each with an obligatory black-windowed SUV parked outside. Oh, I hate it, I hate it. I want to raze all these houses to the ground. But I know that if I were to walk into one of the houses I'd find some cheery, friendly Canadians, following a dream, with no idea that they are killing what little character my old hometown once had. I can only hope that it will end when the oil runs out...and then my hometown will be just another western ghost town- a memory of greed and hope.