Diary

By this time we had got married, had lots of great holidays and generally had a lovely lifestyle in Brighton. It is a wonderful city to live in and it was a lot of fun.

We had spent several of those holidays in Canada. My husband had lured me over by telling me that I could see bears. I know there are lots of other different animals in the country but bears are just the best creatures ever. For a start they are sensible enough to sleep through winter, and then they have all the fun of getting very fat before hand as they enter a state called hyperphagia where they never feel full. They get to spend the spring, summer and autumn eating, and then they sleep it off during the winter. While some of us humans spend all our time eating we are not lucky enough to be able to sleep it off. If there is reincarnation I really want to come back as a bear.

We had seen bears in Whistler, as there is a thriving population of black bears there. You can book tours with local bear expert Michael Allen, and he will take you up into the mountains to view the bears. They all have names, and he knows all about them as he has studied them for many years. If you are watching a BBC programme on black bears then his name is frequently in the credits.

We had also seen grizzly bears in a remote part of British Columbia. Getting there involved travelling over to Vancouver Island where we stayed in the capital city of BC which is Victoria. We then travelled up the island and stopped at a town called Nanaimo. It was completely unmemorable and seemed to have nothing to recommend it. It was then on to Campbell River, which seemed to be a logging town where if you listened carefully you could hear the banjos playing, just very quietly in the distance. From here we caught a float plane to the middle of nowhere. It was a half hour flight over some of the most picture perfect scenery you could imagine.

We stayed at Sailcone fishing lodge with a shared bathroom. I could only contemplate suffering like this to see the bears. To be fair it really wasn’t a problem. The lodge was very clean and comfortable, and the food was excellent and all freshly prepared, and they would even cater to for any special dietary requirements. Our fellow guests were all very well travelled, all were American and very pleasant. Each day we were taken out in a boat , just us and the guide, through stunning scenery to see the wildlife. We saw plenty of it. We had a day of seeing the killer whales, and a day of seeing the grizzly bears and black bears doing their stuff on the shore. This mainly seemed to involve flipping over boulders with a paw to see if someone tasty was underneath. There was the occasional curse when a boulder landed on a foot.

It was lovely to see the bears, and it was tempting to move to a country where they were able to run wild and free. But was it enough? Could I live and work there. It wasn't just a question of getting accepted for immigration although the form was daunting enough. Would I be able to work there and what would I do if they did not accept my qualifications? A cursory search on the internet revealed some unpleasant news.