Intend to drop off a couple of books and a shirt at the convent school’s charity shop, largely because it’s conveniently located on my way to meet J for coffee. It has extremely nice volunteers running it and also very low prices, which is not actually a good thing, because the point of my visit is not really to support the school but to dispose of items that we can’t easily take with us or store here, and being presented with desirable books at twenty-five cents apiece is not helpful.
But they also have very limited hours and I seem to have missed them. So head over to St Helena’s charity shop. It also has limited hours but Friday from ten till one is included. And I’d rather support them as their shop proceeds go to feeding the hungry. Get into long conversation with a new volunteer, triggered by a query about my accent. She, it seems, would love to move to Canada. What do I know about immigration. The answer really is not much for sure. Last looked into it fairly superficially about twenty years ago when a Scots cousin expressed some interest.
It gets more complicated. She likes the cold although her young Tunisian husband might not so much. He’s a hard worker, though, in construction. Feel sorry for her, both because her mother has rejected the marriage (on grounds of religion and some rather sweeping assumptions about terrorism) and because the UK, which has to take her back, won’t allow her husband in unless they have far higher income than they can hope for. Have heard this story before, the last time from a woman whose daughter worked for a UK supermarket and was married to an American with an army pension. Her income not high enough to sponsor him and his pension not, apparently, considered. Suggest that best odds might be to find a company looking for construction workers in a location with a labour shortage. Haven’t the heart to say I don’t think it will be easy, or even that the last spell of horribly disruptive British weather was neither cold nor remarkably snowy by Canadian standards. Heartbreaking, though, how modest many people’s hopes and expectations are. How little they ask and how unlikely they are to find it. “He’s a hard worker,” she says, “And I can do anything”.