Life :)

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

What’s the frequency?

July 27, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

It wasn’t a bad day at work. That’s because almost nothing happened. Last week’s desk move is still having an effect on me. Until last Wednesday hardly anybody walked past my desk, because you sort of couldn’t, but now people walk either in front of or behind me at a rate of 55 an hour. Yes, I did a traffic count today from 10 to 10:30 and from 2 to 2:30. This isn’t the first time I’ve counted things at work. I once had a boss who dropped 59 F-bombs in a single day and a colleague who had a DAFA (daily audible fart average) of just over three. I even used to count loo rolls or beer bottles when I overlooked a Pak ‘n’ Save loading bay. All this counting, and the fact that people walking past me at work bothers me enough to measure their frequency, might be a sign that I’m ever so slightly autistic.

On that note, I saw Life, Animated last night at the Paramount. It told the story of Owen, a now 25-year-old autistic man who as a child could only communicate by channelling Disney films, every one of which he’d memorised line-by-line, and who as an adult is going out into the big bad non-Disney world. It was a fantastic film that at times moved me to tears. He hero-worshipped his older brother who at one point tried to talk about sex to him. How do I do that, his big brother wondered. Through Disney porn?! This comment was met with much laughter in the cinema. Although the story was heartwarming I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of other Owens out there who don’t have a Pulitzer Prize-winning father, who might not even come from a loving family, and who certainly won’t get a fraction of the help he did. We were privileged to have the director, Roger Ross Williams, present for a Q&A session.

On Monday I gave another English lesson. My lesson plans rapidly went out the window, not that I minded. Quite the opposite in fact, as I helped my student and his wife buy a car seat for their small daughter on TradeMe. I did get him to talk about the start of his Monday (he said he woke up at 9:30 − lucky him) and because so many verbs with irregular past tenses cropped up I talked a bit about those as well as the regular -ed verbs.

Today is my brother’s 35th birthday. Only 15 months separate us. He and his girlfriend recently bought a house in Poole on the south coast of England. I got to see bits of the inside of their house on FaceTime. They’ve got a cat called Major Tom. (Great name. They’d better not mess with him.) I saw all the “new home” cards on their bench. It would have been nice to have had such cards when I moved into this place. It would be nice to have a cat too, but the body corp rules prohibit them. For that matter it could be nice to have a girlfriend.

I filled in for a social tennis team tonight and got obliterated in both doubles matches, even though my three service games were free of double faults.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

Moving day

July 24, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was half-way up the stairs to our office on Wednesday morning when I remembered it was desk move day. The move was a two-hour operation involving physically moving desks. It was effectively a team-building event, and as always happens, the teamy people took over. I ended up in a fairly prominent position with far more foot traffic than before and far less privacy. Luckily I won’t be in that position very long. I have a cousin in Auckland whose workplace enforces daily desk moves. You’re not allowed to sit at the same workstation two days running. That sounds bloody terrifying.

In last Monday’s English lesson we focused on the letter F, or rather the f sound. I explained, with accompanying words and pictures, that the f sound can be written as f, ff, ph or gh. I think I said that ph is always pronounced f, hoping that he wouldn’t be wandering haphazardly through Clapham any time soon, or getting anything upholstered. That would be quite an upheaval. As for the gh combo, I tried to emphasise that f is far from the only pronunciation, without actually mentioning the numerous (and infamous) other possibilities. I think I failed badly. He first attempted to pronounce laugh something like “large”. When I then said the word correctly, he responded with “laffjjj”, and likewise “coffjjj” for cough. I think I got there in the end. Tomorrow I’ll concentrate on final consonant blends; he has a habit of omitting final sounds in speech. As I was driving home from the lesson, the guy who runs the marimba workshop happened to be giving a radio interview. I had two lessons with him. He was talking about an African instrument called an mbira. I thought it was interesting that we have to say an mbira rather than a mbira.

I haven’t mentioned Brexit for a while. Theresa May will be OK, I hope. She looks a safe pair of hands at least. The other contenders all seemed dangerous in their own ways. Still, May’s appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary is questionable to put it mildly. My biggest concern is a lack of effective opposition to the government. Labour are deeply divided. There is now a gaping hole in British politics which a new positive progressive party (like Podemos in Spain) should be able to fill, but alas the electoral system makes the emergence of a new party extremely difficult. Perhaps the best news for me is that Article 50 is now unlikely to be triggered before Christmas, but I wouldn’t assume anything in the current environment. I was reading an article about the Erasmus scheme, the EU student exchange programme that I took advantage of in 2000-01 when I studied in Lyon. Brexit puts UK access to the scheme in doubt beyond 2017. Yet another opportunity potentially lost.

I don’t want to write about Donald Trump because it’s too depressing and too scary. So much fear and hatred. Fivethirtyeight.com gives Trump a 42% chance of becoming president, and those guys know what they’re talking about. That 42% includes a 6% possibility that Trump wins the presidency despite losing the popular vote. We could be looking at a horrifyingly supercharged version of 2000.

I’ve now booked four of my five trains from the UK to Romania. They will hopefully get me as far as Budapest (quite an adventure in itself), and when I’m there I should be able to get a remarkably inexpensive train to Timișoara.

Life :)

Auckland – Part 3

July 19, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

We had our team meeting at work this morning. They always do the go-round-in-a-circle what-are-you-up-to-this-week lark. A new bloke arrived in our team a month ago. He talked at length about all the juicy stuff he’s already getting involved in. He’s pretty switched on and I can tell he isn’t bluffing. Should we both still be there in three years’ time (completely hypothetically of course), he’ll be 26, I’ll be 39, and he’ll probably be my boss. When it came to my turn I felt embarrassed that nothing had changed from last week, and relieved that I’d only be embarrassed eight more times.

Back to Auckland. On Saturday I took the train to Papakura to see Bazza, a bloke I used to play tennis with. My experiences with this guy on the tennis court were memorable, not always for the right reasons, and I’ve often wondered whether I should write a book about them. He’d just been to an auction for a two-bedroomed brick house opposite that was described in the blurb as being “in dire need of a makeover”. Bazza said that was pretty accurate. It went for $515,000. To call the Auckland housing situation a crisis is no exaggeration. Bazza talked a lot while I tried to watch live coverage of the coup in Turkey on his TV. He watches a lot of TV. He had eight partly used loo rolls in his bathroom – I don’t know if that was more or less than the last time I visited; they might even have been the same ones – and the door was still wedged wide open. He reckons his own house has doubled in value since he moved in seven years ago.

That afternoon I attended the monthly autism group. This was a group I first went to in 2009. I’d read a bit about the condition and figured I wouldn’t mind working in that general area; it was bound to be far more satisfying than anything in the financial sector. I thought that these meetings might give me a foot in the door. As it happened I got on quite well with some of the people there – better than with most so-called neurotypical people – and it was upsetting for me to leave those people behind when I moved to Wellington. As usual they started the session by getting people to talk for up to two minutes on a specific topic. This time the topic was films and documentaries. When it was my turn I expected to be either interrupted or ignored, and as I tried to talk about Searching for Sugar Man I was both. There were some familiar faces to me and a few unfamiliar ones. It was great to meet up with Jen, who basically runs the group and wrote a book on Asperger’s some years ago, and Richard, an old friend from when I lived in Auckland.

I checked out of the hostel on Sunday and took the ferry to Devonport, the last place I lived before moving to Wellington five-and-a-bit years ago. I quite liked the North Shore when I lived there, but on a bus ride through that part of town all I could see was money. I caught up with somebody who lives on an estate near Albany where all the streets are named after birds, and who now seems to be a full-time conspiracy theorist, believing that MH370 and MH17 were the same aircraft. I have no problem with his beliefs, but he didn’t really need to share the ins and outs (or ups and downs) of them with me when I was there. Saying that, he’s a generous guy who dropped me off in town and would have happily taken me to the airport if I hadn’t had a return bus ticket.

Pokémon Go. It’s all go, that’s for sure. I’m positive about it: anything that gets people out and seeing places they wouldn’t otherwise gets my vote. It’s not too dissimilar to a phase I recently went through of photographing street art: I walked down side streets I might otherwise have ignored. The unsettling thing about the game, for me at least, is the speed of its dissemination. I asked my carpool mate about that last Monday. But … but … how does everyone know about it after just four days? In the sixties it took Paul Simon four days to hitchhike from Saginaw to Pittsburgh, which isn’t very far on my wall map, and now it takes that long for millions of people to get hooked on a game. Just how? He simply said “Facebook”. With Facebook and Twitter, four days is the new four months.

Life :)

Auckland – Part 2

July 18, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

My trip to Auckland was a success. I met everybody I hoped to and a few people I didn’t expect to. As I mentioned in my previous post, Thursday’s catch-up really brought home to me that I need to be myself in spite of all the pressure from society to be someone else.

On Friday morning I met up with an ex-colleague of mine, the only ex-colleague I’m still in touch with. She now works as an actuarial contractor in the city. She still has two exams to go and the road to qualification is even steeper now that she has bigger priorities in the shape of a 2½-year-old daughter. Her first few years after arriving in New Zealand in 2005 were tumultuous to put it mildly, but things appear to have settled down. Her reaction to my move to Romania was extremely positive. She seemed genuinely happy for me.

Later on Friday I caught up with a lady who used to work for Autism NZ in Wellington; she was one of the first people I met here outside work and my cousin’s family. She ran a successful fortnightly meeting for people at the milder end of the spectrum. The attendance at these groups was relatively small, conversation bounced around madly between completely unrelated topics, and nobody seemed to mind (if anything these wild changes of tack were encouraged). We even had the occasional show-and-tell, such as the time somebody brought in the output of a 3-D printer: bread tags as I recall (this was couple of years before the first 3-D-printed gun). Although I was undiagnosed, these meetings gave me a safe but engaging environment every other Monday. Alas, the facilitator moved to Auckland in early 2012 and everything else about the group, including the clientele, changed too. The ex-facilitator, who I would certainly now call a friend, picked me up from New Lynn station; as we walked from the station to her car we were greeted by a so-called cloud sculpture overhead, but I can’t ever remember seeing a cloud in the shape of a cock and balls. Apparently it even lights up at night. It reminded me of a work request I got recently for a plan of all the services in an unusually-shaped area highlighted in fat marker pen. Two presses of the zoom-in button later I had an I-wish-sized appendage stretching across my screen. Changing the subject, I had lunch at my friend’s place. Their house and garden look amazing without being in any way ostentatious. It was the attention to detail that got me. I wonder if interior (and exterior) design is something you either have talent for or you don’t. She clearly does, and has put in considerable time and effort on top. Her sister-in-law was also there − she was off sick − and the three of us had a good chat.

I then saw Fuocoammare, a documentary film set on the island of Lampedusa, some distance from the main island of Sicily. Many African immigrants make their way to Lampedusa by boat, and sadly thousands have died attempting the journey. The film was something of an eye-opener. It was part of the film festival, and would you believe, they’ll be showing not one but two Romanian films (which I expect to be eye-openers too).

Life :)

Auckland – Part 1

July 16, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m writing this from a crummy hostel in central Auckland. I’ve stayed in crummier ones than this, like the one in Boston last year where it was inhumanly hot in my room, particularly the second time I stayed there. But that time there was Boston! ready to be explored. Downtown Auckland ain’t Boston, that’s for sure. It does almost nothing for me. It’s certainly cleaner and smarter than I remember it, but that just makes the place look more clinical and stark, because all I see are big office buildings housing big financial institutions. The Vero tower with the loo-seat roof, the Lumley tower, the bloody Tower tower. As well as the insurers, many of which are owned by the same company anyway, there are of course the Australian-owned banks and the complete grand slam of Big Four auditing firms. There are nice little alleyways like Vulcan Lane but look up and you can’t help but see AIG or IAG, I forget which, towering overhead. At the bottom end of Queen Street there are souvenir shops and high-end clothes shops and Burger King and McDonald’s and not a lot else. I don’t have that big a problem with Auckland having an area like that; I just don’t think it should be the first thing you see when you get off the plane or the cruise ship. For someone’s first taste of New Zealand, it’s not very tasty. It isn’t even Colby or Edam.

On Thursday I walked from Downtown to Wynyard Quarter, part of the city that didn’t exist when I last lived here. Along the way there were new maritime-themed restaurants with mock sails flapping in the strong breeze that I’d brought up from Wellington, but all that newness and unremitting whiteness felt nautically nasty. Wynyard Quarter itself I felt more positive about, even if you still couldn’t escape ASB and ANZ. Kids and families were using the area – it was school holidays – and it was altogether a good place for exercising and socialising and Pokémon Go-ising. The fish market made for an interesting (and kid-friendly) focal point. Maybe the summer weather would bring out buskers. I hope so. I had lunch there and a lovely catch-up with a lady who worked at Autism NZ when I lived in Auckland and for some time after. Our conversation was more me-centric than I’d anticipated, and the message I got from her was clear: I need to be who I am and not ashamed of who I am. Going to Romania would seem to be a good start in that regard. When I started this blog nine months ago that was the overriding positive theme, and it’s time I got back there.

My room in this hostel is absolutely fine really. I’ve slept well – in contrast to my last few nights in Wellington – and have felt relaxed most of the time I’ve been in Auckland. And I’ve saved some money. I fly back tomorrow evening – I’ll write more about Auckland and the people I’ve met here in my next post.

Life :) - Tennis

Tennis and high taste

July 12, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Writing about a tennis match, as I’ve done dozens of times here and on my previous blog, has always been a useful exercise. I think that’s because tennis is such a mental game; when I read back my accounts of old tennis matches I get a pretty good idea of where my head was at at the time.

My head was not in a good place yesterday morning, but at least the sun was shining and I wouldn’t be out there for very long anyway. When we played in the club champs in April under a shorter format he thrashed me 9-1, rattling off eight games in a row. Before yesterday’s match he said he a bit of an upset stomach but even if he’d had a mild case of Zika I wouldn’t have fancied my chances. We practised our serves and a few more of mine went in than they have of late. He called W as I spun my Wilson to determine choice of serve. That surprised me: his name begins with M. It came up M and, encouraged to some extent by my practice serves, I opened proceedings. I immediately double-faulted, but I won my serve to 30, broke him and held again to move ahead 3-0. I defended well and was error-free in those three games. Gosh, I hope I’ll have enough pink Robinsons to see me through. I might be here a while after all. But my opponent picked up the pace, I mistimed a few shots, and it all started to crumble. By the time I next looked like winning a game, the set had almost gone. I fell behind 3-6, 0-2. Eight games in a row. It’s happened again! He then eased off the gas ever so slightly and to my relief I won a game. Two in fact. At 4-2 down the end was surely near, but he began to struggle physically and I sensed I had a semblance of a chance if I dug deep. I then surprised myself with the number of winners I hit on both wings. I served for the set at 5-4 and was broken to love, but I got a second opportunity at 6-5 and played a solid game to close out the set. One set all, and something wasn’t right down the other end. Will he carry on? Ask if I’ll play a super tie-break? He did neither of those things. Instead he shook my hand. It didn’t exactly feel like a win for me but I was happy to find some rhythm, some energy, and to cut down on the double faults. I’m playing again tomorrow night in this winter competition that I’d been hoping would just go away. Meanwhile I was happy to see Andy Murray win his second Wimbledon. For the first time in eleven grand slam finals he caught a break and avoided Federer and Djokovic. Serena on the other hand looks set to become the greatest of all time on the women’s side.

I spent a lot of time with my cousin’s family at the weekend. My aunt and uncle had come up from Timaru, and flew back down this morning with my cousin’s two youngest boys. On Saturday my cousin treated us all to dinner at Logan Brown, a place I’ve walked past literally hundreds of times and never thought I’d go in. Fain daining (that’s how you pronounce it, right?) is a completely foreign concept to me. But the kids helped make the atmosphere relaxing. I had gnocchi and gurnard and an apple tart and it was all amazing with drizzles and garnishes and Portobello mushrooms and the way they somehow cooked the cauliflower. It was so good I could have easily eaten it all again. Come to think of it there might even have been room in my tummy for a third go-around. I suppose being filled up isn’t what you go to Logan Brown for. Yesterday afternoon my aunt and uncle came over to my place for the first time. It was great to have a chat and to drag out the map of Romania and talk about some of the places I might go to with people who genuinely seemed to care. We then had dinner at my cousin’s place. How wonderful it was to spend time with people I feel comfortable with, and to share jokes and ideas and hopes and frustrations. That’s something I don’t experience nearly enough.

I gave a good English lesson tonight. We talked about this morning’s final of Euro 2016 and words for countries and nationalities. When I talked about plurals of words ending in ‘y‘ I’m sure I lost him, but his wife was in the room, she knew what a vowel was, and she clearly understood why we write countries and nationalities but boys, days and trolleys. We discussed flight times and routes to Myanmar and the UK, and we went through some airport-related vocabulary.

My parents will be back from their trip in about two weeks. They’ve had bad colds, the weather hasn’t cooperated, and it’s all taken quite a bit out of them. It’s easy to forget that they’re 66 and 67.

I’m flying up to Auckland on Wednesday evening.

Life :) - My big plan

It’s the pits

July 10, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Tuesday I fell into a deep depressive hole and had no real intention of crawling out. Oh god, I have no idea what’s going on at work anymore, I can’t think or concentrate or remember anything and what has happened so many times in the past is happening again. By the afternoon I was dangerous. I wanted to break something and could easily have done so. I got home and everything felt absolutely awful. I lurched from one wall to another, shouting. I sensibly took Wednesday off work and my mood improved during the day. That afternoon I had a complimentary space-age-style eye test (through my AA membership) and everything was fine on that score. I’m lucky to have good eyesight. I had dinner with my carpool mate, who has been so good to me, at the Willis Street night market.

It’s tough at the moment. I have very little and I am even less. This adventure is perhaps my last chance to be something, somebody, and there’s so much to do before I go. The Brexit vote didn’t help. For one thing, I’m poorer to the tune of five figures as a result (I didn’t mention that, did I?) and could have prevented at least some of that loss.

I have to play a singles tennis match tomorrow morning and expect to lose badly. The beauty of tennis is that one-sided matches usually end quickly.

Life :) - My big plan - Politics

Motivation

June 30, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I haven’t felt great the last few days. I’ve had no motivation to cross off any of the items on my overwhelming to-do list. Some of those items involve making decisions, so yeah, forget it.

I go away in under three months. The very thing that makes going to Romania possible – my complete lack of dependent family or dependent anybody – is what makes it so damn hard. I’m on my own here. But last night my carpool mate and I discussed my list over a drink, and what a useful process that was. Getting people to make decisions and draw timelines is precisely his thing. All the high-fiving and sentences ending in ‘dude’ and ‘bro’ would have been annoying if I didn’t know him better, but I’ve now got some plans in place that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for him. We decided that I’ll travel around Romania for a while to begin with instead of settling immediately in one place, except in the unlikely event that I get a job before I go. I’ll get to know the country much better that way, and besides it should be fun.

The Brexit vote and fallout haven’t helped my mood. The vote to leave the EU has caused political turmoil not seen in Britain since the Second World War. It’s fascinating in a way to see it unfold, but it’s also very upsetting. To see Nigel Farage speak with such pomposity and lack of magnanimity in the European parliament was troubling. To deliberately antagonise the people you’ll be brokering an exit deal with, what was he thinking? It’s like he didn’t care about British people other than himself. Millions of good people voted to leave, but the Leave-supporting politicians all seem bad, evil, despicable people. Millions of good people have nobody fighting their corner anymore.

It beggars belief that no coherent plan for “leave” was set out before the referendum. “Leave the European Union”. That was it. So much mayhem could have been alleviated with some planning. The Scotland referendum was a similar story, and I was thankful that on that occasion they voted for the status quo.

Just to rub it in, England exited Euro 2016 at the hands of Iceland, whose population is roughly that of Wellington. I saw the last quarter-hour of England’s embarrassing 2-1 defeat on the TV at work. I mentioned in my last post that English used to have a separate letter for the th sound. Well Icelandic still does, two in fact. They’re called eth (uppercase Ð, lowercase ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ). Eth is used for the voiced th sound, as in this and that, while thorn is used for the unvoiced th sound, as in thick and thin. Icelandic also has an interesting naming system. Supposedly 80% of Icelandic people believe in elves, and roads have been rerouted so as not to disturb their caves. Björk is from Iceland, as are the band Of Monsters and Men.

I’d dread to think where I’d be if my flatmate was still here.

Language learning - Life :) - Politics

In other news…

June 26, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday was a relatively normal Saturday. In the morning I watched my cousin’s youngest boy play football and dropped him off after his four mini-games. “I’m a defender,” he said with pride and excitement just before the games started. He defended resolutely and was awarded joint player of the day for the second week in a row. I had lunch with my cousin, then went for a drink in Petone with probably my best friend, or at least the person I have most in common with here in Wellington. We talked about Brexit, work, the Spanish election (go Podemos!), travel, and more Brexit. Later I saw Independence Day 2 with my friend from the tennis club. The rest of the world doesn’t accept “America saves the world” as it did in 1996, and there was more laughter from the audience than I can ever remember from a non-comedy film.

Today I haven’t been in contact with anybody and I’m fine with that. I’ve got my English teaching tomorrow; it’s time I concentrated on that and my exit plans. Kiwexit? Kexit? Plenty of portmanteaux have been bandied about for the possibility of other countries leaving the EU: Czech-out, Italeave, Finnish and so on. How about, off the top of my head, a Frog-off?

Here’s an article in the Guardian about Ebbw Vale, a Welsh town that once had a thriving steelworks but has in recent times relied on EU money (a lot of it) to stay afloat. It has very little immigration. Ebbw Vale voted decisively (62%) to leave the EU. The number of people who voted against their interests is quite remarkable.

EU-funded road in Wales

The road sign above is interesting to me. The word for Wales in Welsh is Cymru but, like other Welsh words, it undergoes mutation in some circumstances, meaning the initial letter changes depending on (I think) the last letter of the previous word. In some cases Cymru becomes Gymru, and in other cases it turns into the weird-looking (to my eyes) Nghymru. Another example: maes (which means field) turns into faes after certain letters such as n. Apparently Welsh speakers make the mutations when they speak without really thinking about it. This changing of the initial letter is just one reason why using a dictionary in Welsh can be quite challenging. Another is that some digraphs such as ff, th and ng act as single letters. (Imagine for a minute that th, when it makes a single sound, counts as a single letter in English that comes between t and u in the alphabet. This isn’t as silly as it sounds: th was once written as a single very-different-looking letter in English. The word think would then come after time in the dictionary, and athlete would come after attempt. But pothole, which just contains t followed by h and not the th letter (because there’s no th sound), would come before potion, not after it. I’ve lost you now, haven’t I? But these sorts of things crop up all the time when using dictionaries or other alphabetical lists in Welsh.) Welsh is fascinating but I need to be concentrating on Romanian. I also need to be getting into linguistics properly but have no idea how. It’s frustrating as hell.

Life :) - Politics

It’s out!

June 26, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

It was all going so well on Friday morning. Nigel Farage’s near-concession was splashed all over the front page of the Sun. But then actual results started coming in. Sunderland were 61% out, Newcastle only marginally in. Those two results were much more favourable to Leave than had been predicted. Maybe it was just a North-East thing. But as other declarations dribbled in from different parts of the country that favoured Leave, the writing was on the wall. I’d worked out the night before that for Remain to win they would need to be at about 53% by the time our meeting started because many of the Leave-friendly areas would declare later (the same pattern that you see at a UK general election but less pronounced because people were voting less along party lines). Instead it was almost a dead tie at that point, and I knew it was all over. I felt sick. Some other people at work were following it, but not as closely as me. “Look how close it is! It could go either way! And doesn’t that map look pretty?!” No, there’s only one way this is going now and it looks bloody ugly.

It’s sad for me because I’ve invested a lot of emotional energy into my plan to take control of my life (to use a slogan from the Leave side). It has created so much uncertainty. I’m now glued to Al Jazeera and news websites when I’d much rather be learning Romanian or making travel plans. I’m losing sleep. My take is that the exit process will take two years from when the infamous Article 50 is invoked; the UK will still be part of the EU during that time. So my immediate future should be safe. But I just don’t know for sure.

But it’s also sad for the country that it’s come to this. I perfectly understand the people of Sunderland sticking two fingers up to London and the South-East who have reaped most of the benefits of Britain’s supposedly strong economy. Mines, shipyards, car plants and steelworks have closed down in the last forty years with nothing to replace them except insecure data-entry-type jobs that a bright twelve-year-old could easily do. And with increased automation even those crappy jobs are disappearing. As manufacturing has vanished in Wales, the North-East, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands, so have communities. Successive Tory and Labour governments simply haven’t given a toss (and who do you vote for in a FPTP system when the two main parties are basically the same?). The influx of Eastern European immigrants after those countries were admitted to the EU certainly hasn’t helped either, but that’s only one in a very long line of reasons why so many people are struggling. It’s a shame that the EU had to bear the brunt of everyone’s understandable anger, rather than lying domestic politicians.

A lot has been made of the difference in voting patterns between the haves and have-nots, but to my mind it’s been overstated. It’s true that well-off metropolitan types voted to stay and have-almost-nothings in neglected areas voted to leave. But a lot of very well-heeled, often older people in rural areas will have voted out too. I can’t see the stats for Common Lane in Hemingford Abbots (two million quid, anyone?), not far from where I grew up, but I bet they voted out by a good margin. As someone who voted to stay, I see the Common Lane “outers” as my enemies. My dad, who is quite well off himself (but less so than before the pound and stock markets plunged), voted out. But he’s 66 and has very fond memories of Britain before it joined the EU in 1973. I’m pretty sure my brother also voted out. Mum didn’t vote, but she could hardly conceal her glee at the prospect of the EU collapsing.

The Remain side failed to make an emotional case for staying in the EU, and I think that’s where they lost it. The more they talked about economic risks, the more working-class people said “bring it on”, let those obscene edifices poking out of the London skyline burn to the ground, the system isn’t working for me. The new post-Brexit system, whatever form it takes, won’t work for them either unfortunately, I’m sure of that. That’s what makes the outcome so upsetting for me: the Leave voters were sold a complete lie. As for Nigel Farage who called the result a victory “for the ordinary people, for the real people, for the decent people”, seriously man, piss off.

Cambridge, where I was born, voted 74% in; Peterborough were 61% out. A huge difference, just as I predicted. Other liberal, young, affluent university towns like Oxford (70%), Bristol (62%), Exeter (55%), Brighton (69%) and Norwich (56%) all voted in. Mum talked about all those academic areas, implying that people who live in those places don’t know anything about the real world. How did we end up here? Anybody who knows anything about anything, and has studied or writes about the thing they know about, is now seen as some intellectual oddball who is hopelessly out of touch, and therefore can’t be trusted. Thirty years ago TV was full of shows like Tomorrow’s World, Johnny Ball’s Think It Do It, Open University, even Countdown, all stuff that broadened the mind. How times have changed.

Scotland of course voted to remain by a large margin (62%) and I don’t think it’ll be long before they exit the UK via a second referendum. Twenty years ago I couldn’t have imagined that. The events of Thursday night, and those of the preceding weeks, were like a massive earthquake. The rebuild will be long and painful. I can’t thank my mother enough for ensuring that my brother and I had New Zealand citizenship from an early age.