On the road to Kingston, we stopped in the town of Gananoque to have some lunch and to take a short boat trip around the Admiralty Islands just off shore in the Saint Lawrence. Gananoque is another eerily Amity Island-alike place, quiet in the off season and with the locals looking slightly askance at us furriners. “This place could be the setting for a Stephen King novel,” said Ash, summing it up to a tee.

The boat puttered out into the river and meandered through the islands, some of which were so small as to have enough room for a single house and absolutely nothing else. There’s something almost fictional about a little wooden cabin perched on a collection of rocks in the middle of a vast, lazy river, almost as if no-one would ever have imagined actually building such a thing.

A few of the islands were big enough to support almost-villages, and they looked like fantastic places to spend the summer. The cost of doing so is, of course, equally fantastical — it’s something like a million bucks to buy an island with a handy cottage on it. Some of the (rich, lucky) islanders live in their cottages all year round, and in the winter they commute to the mainland over the frozen river on snowmobiles. This seems both completely insane and utterly cool to me.

We jumped back in the car and hit Kingston by the mid afternoon. Ash was driving and showed me around the university quarter and the student ghetto, filled with frathouses and beat-up cars of earlier or later vintage. We met up with Helen, a friend of Ash’s from Peterborough who’d decided to get the hell out before she found herself still tending bar at the Only twenty years down the line. We gave her and her dog Luca a lift out to a little country park just outside of town and ambled around for an hour or so, coming across a deer and her fawn crossing the path at one point, and silently cursing the fact that I’d forgotten the camera.

We drove back to Peterborough for another few days of loafing on the patio, drinking at the Only and meeting Ash’s old friends all over the place. (And, incidentally, we did a bit of spontaneous quad-biking on Ash’s parents’ land. Not since I fell off one of these crazy-ass motorbikes gone wrong as a child of 12 have I been on one, and let me tell you, the fear remains.) Ash’s parents were great — ferrying us around, feeding us to bursting point and generally being superb hosts. We packed up on the Saturday afternoon to leave for Toronto, and said goodbye.