It's been two weeks (and fifteen hours and thirty-three minutes) since my return to Ottawa, and two weeks (and fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes) since the basic elements of this email fell into place. That I have not yet been able to put my thoughts to paper – paper … how quaint! – is due as much to the ever-useful “I have been busy” trope as to sheer mental laziness, spiced with a hint of my unsettled life in a new job while staying at a hotel (waiting for the apartment to become available).

I'm back in my home and more-or-less native land (for the uninitiates, this is an allusion to Canada's national anthem. The English version. The French version refers to “porter la croix“, which isn't really my thing. I digress.) and waiting for the culture shock to hit. I suspect it will, sometime around February 10; but for now, the charms of Canada's National Capital Region are mitigating the disorienting impact of not having the Alps and the Jura and Lake Geneva all around me. Ottawa in summer is beautiful, active and busy. My daily walk to work takes me alongside Parliament and across the Ottawa river, and from our offices we have an unbroken view of the entire valley – the Gatineau Hills to the left being the only bumps in an otherwise unbroken flat horizon of green and gleaming water.

There are good restaurants – better than I recall – and passable cafés here and there; grocery stores are big and offer a bewildering variety of choice to someone used, in his daily shopping, to the Migros or the Coop around the corner. The fresh fruit and vegetables do not taste of anything, to be sure, and while cheap, the quality of much of the food leaves something to be desired; but these are minor quibbles – unless you live on a farm in Italy you are not going to get tasty tomatoes and so there is no point in dwelling on it. What you miss in terms of taste and quality, you gain in terms of choice, and that, at least, is something.

(Not all is bleakness on this front. I have waited four years to indulge in my biggest Canadian vice, the Liberty yoghurt – at 8% fat, it is certainly not “diet”, and as it comes only in 500 gram tubs, it positively invites gluttony. That and President's Choice Butter Cookies. And Tim Horton's plain donuts. And large juicy steaks.)

The greatest bonus of being back? I'm still size 32 in pants and have regressed to being “small” in Ts and shirts. At some point in the distant past, size 32 indicated a 32″ waist. I suspect it still does in some parts of the world. Not here, apparently – at least, no longer. Despite the fact that almost nothing I owned four years ago fits me and that I am at least five kilos heavier than in 2003, miraculously I have remained the same “size” here in North America. Now isn't that a boost to my ego. There is more. In Europe, I gradually began changing over to “large” in some clothes. Not here; I used to be a Medium, but five kilos and four years of gym later, I have regressed to Small. Oh joy. Now I can really enjoy my Liberty yoghurt.

So these are the positives, and for my own sake – not to sound too Pollyanna-ish – I have to linger on these before mentioning, in passing, the less salutary aspects of my return. The Return: aye, there's the rub.

I leave aside, for the moment, the grander philosophical question of whether one can ever “return” anywhere, unless of course one limits the meaning to the physical “go back” rather any deeper notion of “recapture”. For I am “back” in Ottawa only in the sense that I used physically to live here: but I am not back, because I am not who I was, and Ottawa is not what it was, when I left. We are discovering each other anew … but, I will leave this point for moment.

But on to the physical journey back.

So far as I have been able to gather from years of reading and travelling and “self-improvement”, there are three types of hell: the Hell Divine, the Hell Human, and the Hell in limbo.

The Hell Divine is your usual, run of the mill fire and lava and brimstone and impaled bodies, devils prodding sinners with tridents, Satan chomping on traitors, home od sodomites and fornicators and usurers and popes or other divines of various persuasion kind of thing. This is the hell of Dante, of St. Paul, of Zoroaster. The smell of sulfur. You get the picture. Even for an Arnie-admirer like myself, this is too strong a picture – somewhat unsubtle one might venture to add, a tad overwrought, a pinch too much. I like my hell a bit more elegant, if you will.

Well, leave it to an ugly toad with crooked teeth, bulging eyes, a sulfur breath and a predilection for mass murder to devise an understated though far more troubling hell, the Hell Human. In what must be the only line in his massive outpouring of Mots – the cognoscenti among you will have guessed who our hellish author is – that does not concern himself, Jean-Paul Sartre (the self-same toad with attitude) described hell as other people. (Mind you, it is possible that in this, as in much else, he was plagiarising his long-suffering companion Simone de Beauvoir. L'enfer, c'est les autres she might have sighed as Sartre brought yet another left-bank waif into their matrimonial home to pork, with Simone the feminist looking on. But it was Sartre who gave it wide currency. Well, bully for him, for nothing explains the human condition, and the Hell Human, better.)

But neither Hell can claim the level of torment, of sheer pointless torture, of that greatest of hells, the Hell in limbo.

Just imagine: a cavernous hall of endless dimensions; masses of unwashed aimless wanderers; waiting, waiting, waiting forever for nothing at all to happen; going round in circles; being treated like cattle; being pushed and prodded and searched and stripped and tagged and examined and zapped and rayed; eyes glazed; sweat dripping from every pore; feet and ankles inflamed; interminable, endless (the redundancy is for effect), waiting, waiting, waiting; the stale air; the overpowering, dizzying odour of fried and burnt flesh and of vats of boiling oil … Welcome to the Modern Airport.

Every time I think I have hit rock bottom in my airport experience, the Gods intervene to teach me humility. And we are talking about someone who has assiduously, almost religiously, stuck to travelling only in “developed” countries. Next time I cross the pond, I'll try an oceanliner.

I don't want to end on such a negative note, so a word or two on work. I'm learning a whole new discipline and new procedures, and of course trying to familiarise myself with the lingo/jargon as I go along. I cannot claim a great sense of joy and excitement each time I utter the words “I don't know what I am talking about” – fifty times a day, by the way – after fourteen years of practice. At the same time, it is certainly good to be back on a learning curve, sometimes struggling to keep my head above water, often simply listening and absorbing.

A student of mine at Science-Po wrote in his class evaluation that “the Professor is too full of himself.” (In a subsequent email to me he suggested that he might have been too full of himself to have made such a comment in the first place, but that is a separate point.) No danger of that now. It is an eminently humbling experience, throwing myself into a new field and a new role. Where it goes in the end, I do not know; for now, it's both challenging and interesting.

Next Episode: “The Highlander” , a journal of my travels in and about Scotland