As a 23-year-old Scotsman, I can’t imagine there were many like me who migrated to Quebec at the start of winter with their cricket bat. I'm here because, while gardening  in Romania last summer, I met a Quebecoise called Candy, whose family owns a chocolate factory. After securing a one-year work visa at great expense, I pursued this dangerous woman to begin a new life in Montreal.

The move has demanded adjustments on all sides. Two weeks ago, I noticed Candy’s mum reading the romance novel, Taming The Scotsman. Meanwhile, I've had to forsake wearing my kilt, for fear of losing a limb. In Scotland, it never dips below minus sixteen. Here, it takes me twenty minutes to dress up like a tartan ninja just to check the mailbox in the lobby. I see people going to the shop - sorry, store - on skis. In Canada, I walk down something called a sidewalk, not a pavement. When two inches of snow fall in Britain, the motorways become car parks and the headlines scream, “Country In Crisis!” In Montreal, people can lose their cars and cats until spring melt. Now that it's beginning to thaw, I find myself sweating at four degrees.

When I say I’m going on a two-hour drive in the UK, people normally respond with, “Wow! Will you be stopping overnight? Do you need me to feed the cat?” But in this big continent, people drive an hour for cheaper petrol. I mean gas.

When I think of the buildings in Europe, it seems they were fashioned in an era of dwarves. Till I came to Canada, I’d never seen anything the size of the CN Tower, let alone our refrigerator. It’s like the gateway to Narnia. And restaurant portions are calorific. I’m used to leaving restaurants in Scotland with hunger, not doggy bags.

Candy and I have undergone transition in the home, too. She recently purchased an apartment on the Plateau, which smelled like old lady and 20 years' cigarettes. We spent a fortnight washing cat hair from the walls and painting over the pink. The next task was finding a flatmate. After turning down a family of four from Mexico, an illegal immigrant from Burundi, and being abandoned by a seven-foot German exiled from the US, we settled with Eriko, a Japanese student; female, non-smoker. Always safe.

So, all in all, the transition has been a success, and as soon as Candy gets Taming The Scotsman off her mum, life might settle down a little bit.

Arriving in Toronto for a season, I found a cricket culture unlike any other. Used to a vandalized Edinburgh park bench for changing on, or in Wales, a collapsing mining valley hut, where teenagers with golf clubs would steal the team’s boxer shorts, in Canada I found at a multi-million dollar complex. The club had a pool, an ice rink, a laundry service, a sauna…and naked men wandering around, hands on hips. Nakedness is less of a taboo in North America. Old men see no problem in flashing you their tackle.

The Club was a hangout for bridge players, ballroom dancers and their lucky kids. Toronto’s elite were paying over five figures in annual dues. I felt fortunate to escape with a $140 student pass. And one didn’t just walk in to The Club. One had to be recommended by an existing member, and pass an interview with a director. One had other commitments to “The Club”, like a minimum $30 monthly expenditure at the bar and restaurant. (That would buy a Coke and some crisps – sorry, potato chips.) And then an invoice for all this would arrive at the month’s end.

During warm-up around the field on my first training session, I suggested we liven the evening's croquet match with a streak across the pitch. “You’ll have the shortest club membership in history,” said the coach. "You can't even take your shirt off here."

An angry looking croquet player approached us next lap, shaking his mallet. “You take your cricket elsewhere!” he shouted.  “I warn you, if one of your balls comes near us, I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got! Every penny, you hear?” He'd only been too happy to have his balls near me in the sauna 20 minutes earlier.

Teams in Canada were almost exclusively made up of immigrants from a single country. One week it would be Bangladeshis, next, the Sri Lankans. Then the Punjab Association and the Caribbean President’s select, et cetera. Within these teams there’d be former Test stars – like West Indians Grayson Shillingford and Larry Gomes – and even current internationalists in the country for a weekend cottage party.

On match days, temperatures and humidity soared into the forties. “Can I borrow some sunscreen?” I’d ask in the dressing room. “God, Scotsman!” all my teammates said. “Look at us. We're all black. We don’t wear sunscreen.”

Whenever I’d batted in Sydney the previous year, I was always greeted with, “Here we go, it’s the f***in’ Pom. He’s shit, like all Poms. Take his head off!” But every time I approached the crease in Canada, the opposition would say, “Hey, good luck, man! Let me get that for ya. No problem, buddy. Take it easy.” There was something quite unsettling about it all. 

The most vicious sledging I got was, “Come on now, Angus. Concentrate.” 

Stranger still, batsmen in Canada gave their condolences when a fielder dropped a catch. “Bad luck, man. Nice try,” they'd say. These northern colonial cricketers could certainly teach some manners to their southern counterparts.  

Three years on, as I prepare to embark on my first season of French-Canadian cricket in Montreal, I have again adapted my game-plan. I've substituted traditional appeals of “Howzzat!” for the local “Comment ca?” – and brushed up on my Punjabi.

© 2004-2007 All rights reserved. Angus JJ Bell.