They Think I’m a Drug Runner

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We’re up at the crack of dawn to bid our tearful farewells to Emma and Michael as they head off to the airport to catch their flight back to Alberta.

Today we’re supposed to be heading to Europe - San Sebastián in northern Spain via Lisbon. Well that was the plan, but I wake up in a cold sweat in more ways than one. My throat feels like I’ve swallowed a cupful of razor blades. It couldn’t be the dreaded virus surely, could it? I’ve been jabbed so often my arm feels like a pin cushion, and anyway I’ve had the disease already, only about four months ago. I Google the stats. It seems that somewhere around 3% of people in Toronto who currently have the virus have had it before, and getting yourself jabbed over and over again doesn’t seem to make any difference. I Google on. If I’ve got it, or even suspect that I’ve got it, I won’t be allowed to go anywhere for ten days, so there goes everything we had planned for Europe. OK, so what next; I suppose I’d better do a test. I watch the liquid make its way slowly across the strip. It passes the “T” (what exactly does that stand for?) and I will the dreaded red line not to appear. So far so good. The “C” line appears nice and clearly, but I’ve still got fifteen minutes of agony to endure. I check, and check, and check again. After half an hour I start to breathe again. I think we might have just dodged a very large and fast moving bullet.

I start to relax and browse my emails. There’s one from the CEO of TAP Portugal, the airline we‘ll be flying with today. That’s nice personal service. But hang on, it’s apologising for “all the problems”. He doesn’t say exactly what the problems are, but I’m not sure he’d be apologising if they were good problems. I start Googling again. It doesn’t look like that half its planes have suddenly tumbled out of the sky, or that it's gone broke overnight, so maybe we might yet survive the day. I start to dream that we might even get to Europe safely. …. now I’m really starting to get ahead of myself. It hasn’t been a particularly happy or relaxing morning so far.

Our flight isn’t till 11pm, so we’ve got time to kill. We dump our luggage and catch the subway out to High Park. This is Toronto’s largest park and is an absolutely massive forest of green, the size of a suburb. It’s even got its own subway station. We wander down along the shores of its resident lake, Grenadier Pond. The Canadian Geese are a tad overly friendly despite our assurances that we haven’t got any food for them. Maybe all the wildlife here’s friendly. A very cute small squirrel makes a beeline for our legs before swerving suddenly at the last minute when it realises they’re not the trees it was looking for.

We’ve still got a few more hours to kill so it’s back on the subway and out to Scarborough Bluffs Park beach on the other side of town. Yep, it seems to be a real beach, with a wide expanse of yellowish sand, life guards, and people sunning themselves. There are warnings about rip currents. Huh? It’s a lake. I don’t think too many people here have been to an Oz surf beach. We were told a couple of days ago that Lake Ontario was way too cold to swim in, but there are quite a few brave souls here that that particular bit of news doesn’t seem to have reached quite yet. They don’t look like they’re about to snap in half, well not obviously anyway.

We make our way dejectedly out to the airport for another round of torture in the form of multiple slow moving and seemingly endless queues. I’m sure we didn’t used to find airports quite this depressing before COVID. My backpack goes through the security scanner and is singled out for special treatment - a drug swab. The guy who’s doing it suddenly gets very animated and asks to see my boarding pass. It’s in the backpack, but when I go to retrieve it I’m told very sternly “don’t touch the bag sir”. This is not good. I’m sent off to get frisked. It feels like a strip search with my clothes on, well sort of, he’s certainly getting very touchy-feely with the inner workings of my armpits under my tee shirt. Do people really try to smuggle contraband under their armpits. Frisk guy tells drug swab guy that I’m clear, but drug swab guy’s now filling in a long form that’s got my name and passport number on it. Is that what an indictment looks like? He asks me whether there’s any prescription medication in the backpack, and when I tell him that there is he waves me on my way and tells me that what I just experienced happens multiple times every day. I wonder what he’s going to do with the form. That was a rather unsettling final Canadian experience….

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