It’s hard to ring home though, when you’re on the other side of the Atlantic, to hear the sadness of my father. To hear the grief of a man looking back at his life, and then thinking of his future to come without his dying wife, as he camouflages his thoughts and fears behind jokes and laughter.

So, yes, I thought of them today, back there in Dudley, as I waited for the 80 bus to arrive in a line of people standing on the corner of Ave du Parc and Fairmount, just down the way from the PA Supermarket, and opposite the Jean Coutu pharmacy here in Montreal.

I thought too, strangely for some reason, of the shop around the corner from where I live, back in Smethwick, and the strange man behind the counter who always asks me if I’m well and then who never listens to my answer, and bizarrely, for some even stranger reason, I thought too about his gold-capped shoes. I don’t know why. Above the shop counter, his clothes tell the world a story of a man who has given up on life, and yet below the counter, his shoes tell the world a story of a man who is secretly a made man, a wise guy of a 1980s crime syndicate. Those gold-tipped shoes, you have to love them.

Then the bus came, and for the next eleven minutes or so, I sat listening to conversations in French that I didn’t understand while I looked down at my phone, studying the app which would tell me which stop to alight at, and approximately every 1.5 seconds, looking up and out of the windows to see where I was.

3/5