Toronto has a special kind of cold in winter; there are plenty of places where the temperature in winter is lower, but nowhere I have ever been feels as cold as Toronto in winter. As I stepped down the gangway I could have told where I was, even if I had been blindfolded, by the icy blast that engulfed me.

I hired a Ford from Avis and drove out of Malden airport. The car had a tag on the ignition which warned that it ran on low-lead gasoline; it also had a catalytic converter to re-burn the exhaust gases, an economy metering device, a computer which worked out the consumption, several hundredweight of plasticized rubber glued to both ends of the car to absorb impacts, and a pint-sized engine that with the best will in the world, a steep hill and a following wind, was going to be hard pushed to propel this frugal, ecology-minded, four-wheeled battering ram up to anywhere near the eighty-five miles per hour mark on the speedometer, which, in the States, is the maximum speedometers on new cars are permitted to read. The Canadians will soon be stuck with it too.

I drove onto the massive Highway 401 West which had a battery of central lanes running in each direction, a similar battery of feeder lanes either side of the central lanes, and twin slip-lanes on either side of those. There was enough room on that road for the RAF to have landed a squadron of bombers abreast. I turned off onto Highway 400 and then onto Highway 7 North towards the village of Kleinburg, home of Canadian art.

I turned off before Kleinburg and headed across country towards a village called Terra Cotta. I kept the map sprawled out on the seat beside me, but the route I had worked out was simple to remember, and I didn’t need to look at it. This road was packed with snow, and the over-light power steering gave me no sensation at all through the steering wheel as to what the front wheels might be up to. There is a knack to driving on hard snow, and since I managed to keep the car out of the ditches, on the road, and pointing vaguely forwards, I assumed I must have acquired that knack.

Some miles before Terra Cotta, I passed a gas station with a tumbled-down-looking café beside it. A large, rotting sign on the front of the café informed the world that its name was Rita’s Rest-Up, and that it offered a wide range of gourmet delights from hamburgers to cheeseburgers. A couple of trucks and a beat-up old Chevvy indicated that trade for Rita, whilst not altogether booming, was not dead either.