Our move to Kingston, Ontario
didn't work out as we had hoped. The limestone of Queen's University
proved infertile ground for growing a research program in statistics,
and Kingston got to feeling too small and too remote (not to mention too corrupt)
for our taste. With some exertion over a period of several months, we
found what look to be much more promising jobs, in the UK. Perhaps this
is our second way station on the way back to Europe: We started out in
Berlin, then moved together to the far end of the US, to California.
Canada was a small step back toward Europe: it has socialized medicine
and gun control, like Western Europe; Canada is more socially
egalitarian than the US, and less theocratic; it is generally reticent
to bomb the less fortunate of the world; Canada has a multiparty
democracy; and Canadians -- even anglophones -- are at least bilingual
enough to understand that English is just one of many languages in the
world, unlike the Americans who I have heard (on several occasions)
joking that "when they go home at the end of the day and unwind, they
secretly speak English".
On the other hand, in most every sense of everyday life,
Canada is indistinguishable from the US. Consumption follows US
patterns, for all that the Canadians like to chatter about their
commitment to environmental protection, and public transportation is
abysmal, outside of a few major cities. Geographically one hardly has
the sense of being separated from the US: From our rear window we can
see New York. For all that Canadian politicians occasionally like to
poke the US in the eye, one is always sensible of the fact that Canada
exists only by sufferance of its powerful southern neighbour.
Britain is a good deal closer to Europe -- so close, that some would even call it a part of Europe. It shares with the US both a language and a commitment to monolingualism, not to mention an abiding faith that the first step toward making the world new is blowing up the old. On the other hand, for all its grumbling, the UK has accepted the compromises and the benefits of limiting its sovereignty by binding itself to the European Union. It has a National Health System (highly regarded for the equity of care it provides, though not quite at the top in international comparisons for the overall level of care provided, particularly as regards intensive technological care), committed to equality of access above all, a complete ban on handguns (and low violent crime rates, despite the moral panic that settles on the country every time two people are killed in the same city in the same year, provoking the tabloids to invent a nickname for the city involving some variant of gun or shoot), and public transportation that actually functions, albeit only in good weather and at a price that can seem shocking.
So, we're off to Oxford, home of the oldest university in the English-speaking world. I will be a University Lecturer in the Department of Statistics and tutorial fellow in Worcester College. Julia will be Lecturer in statistics at the University of Warwick. Chaya will be in Year 1 at St. Barnabas School. We'll see how it goes.
