Toronto

When you say you're from Canada, people always ask if you're from Toronto (they usually have a relative there). I'm not from Toronto, and for the record, the only time I was ever there was at 11pm on a wet June evening, travelling by train from Halifax to Vancouver with my just-6 year old son, on the way back to England, via a visit to my parents, after living in Halifax for three years. The train stopped for an hour. I (bad mother!) left Thomas asleep in our roomette and had a spinach salad in the station restaurant, then a quick walk just outside, looking at the reflections of tall glass buildings on tall glass buildings against the heavy, dark sky. When I got back to the train Thomas was still asleep. He missed Toronto altogether, and doesn't seem to have suffered from the experience. (Next stop was Winnipeg, where we had time for a delicious Sunday brunch.)

Of course I didn't have my little digital camera with me to take lots of photos on that trip - it was 1982 - the image above is from google's cache. The image below is from this site  and shows the Royal York Hotel, one of the grand old railway hotels - but not the iconic CN Tower, which was once the world's tallest building (553.33m).  I'd like to go to the museums in Toronto - especially ROM (the Royal Ontario Museum), which in addition to "world culture" galleries has a collection of 50,000 textile and costume pieces, of which about 200 are on show at any time. One of its publications, Cut My Cote, has been on my bookshelves since about 1980. It's by Canadian textile expert Dorothy K Burnham and deals with the relation of the cut of garments to the width of cloth in traditional cultures. Dorothy worked at ROM from 1929 to 1977. Toronto's newspaper, the Globe and Mail, had a good obituary of her (11 November 2004) but it's not available online [why?], nor - like so many textile people - does she have an entry in Wikipedia [why?].