Melbourne and Vancouver are the world's best cities to live in. So says a new Economist Intelligence Unit survey and I know the editors there made a deliberate choice of ending that sentence with a preposition as the change from 'best cities in the world to live' came along with the headline when I copied it into my word processor.
I have my own thoughts, however, about places I like and so I decided to run down the EIU's entire list of 130 cities, ranked by level of hardship for expatriates.
Melbourne I used to visit twice a year on investment marketing shows and every time the dwindling number of guests at the presentation lunch featured one or two who stayed on afterwards to ask if we knew of any jobs on offer. Great place to live, I quite agree, but Sydney for work, sorry about that.
Vancouver I know well. I grew up there (well, perhaps I never have) and a few years back met up with some old schoolmates to whom I proposed heading out to a pub to down a few.
'Hey man, it's Thursday, man,' was the response from one of them and, in case you cannot make sense of that remark, he was referring to the fact that pay day was Friday and they were all flat bust. Lovely place, ringed by mountains, and you can even see them once or twice a year when it stops raining.
But I agree that the EIU was right in rating Vancouver above Toronto although Toronto's No 5 slot was also much too high. Flat frozen concrete wasteland custom-made in my book for a demonstration of the peripheral benefits of an atom-bomb test. Ditto Montreal at No 15, hillier but even colder. Not to worry. The next Ice Age will finish both off anyway.
Hong Kong comes in at No 44, below Minneapolis and above Lisbon. I can understand why people in Minneapolis do not recognise the hardship. They are all Swedish and therefore well accustomed to both cold and dreadfully grim urban landscapes. Minneapolis certainly has both.