Life :)

I had a good Christmas with Mum and Dad and nobody else. It was far less stressful, particularly for Mum, than anything involving extended family would have been.

On Christmas Eve we went to the church across the way. We had the same priest as two years ago. He’s fluent in at least three languages, including Maori and Spanish, but I bet he knows more. We sang carols (well you could hardly call what I did singing) including some in Maori and a lovely one in Samoan that I hadn’t heard before. Unlike in Geraldine or Temuka (or our local church in the UK for that matter), the congregation was a real melting pot and the service was an interesting and uplifting one.

The weather could hardly have been better the whole time my parents were here. Island Bay on Christmas Day was simply beautiful. Our Christmas dinner included turkey and ham (as all six of my subsequent dinners have done). I got a new camera for Christmas and will put up some more photos when I get the right sort of adapter.

On Boxing Day we went to Palmerston North to see Mum’s younger brother and his kids and grandkids; one day of that kind of thing is enough. I was able to pop out and see a friend who has just moved there from Wellington. He was busking in the middle of town. I was slightly envious of him for being able to (a) play the guitar, and (b) do so in front of people. He said he gets a better hourly rate from his busking than from his job, and I imagine on a 27-degree Boxing Day it was better still. His repertoire is currently only twelve songs; he’ll need to expand that. I hadn’t been to Palmy since 2004 and it was good to have a look around. The Regent Theatre stood out as a very attractive building amongst some rather ugly ones.

On the 27th we went back to Island Bay so that Dad could take some photos (his batteries were flat the first time); I’d like it if he could do more paintings of Wellington. We all agreed that Island Bay would be a good place for my parents’ hypothetical fifth house. (I say hypothetical. I wouldn’t totally put it past them.) As well as being very picturesque, I think it would be an invigorating place to live. That evening Dad and I saw the latest Star Wars film at the Embassy. Dad hadn’t seen any of the previous films; I had but I’m not exactly fanatical. This one was great though. You didn’t need to have seen any of the others to enjoy it, and it was a whole heap of fun.

The next day went to Peter Jackson’s incredibly lifelike Great War Exhibition just across the road. I’d been there before and will definitely go there again. After lunch we went to Makara. I’d been wanting to go there for ages but I’d never really had anyone to go with. It was a lovely spot, and on yet another perfect day it was very popular. Someone had just bought a futon and transported it by (barely big enough) boat to their home. There are some good walking tracks there, which I’ll keep in mind should I ever get back there. My car had a good workout getting to Makara and back. Its clutch is slipping, and the cost of a new clutch (if I need one) might be prohibitive. I might have to get by without a car for a while, just like I plan to in Sibiu or Timișoara or wherever I end up. (I’m too far down the track now to let anything in my control stop me from going to Romania. Of course plenty of things could happen between now and September that are out of my hands, but otherwise if I don’t go through with this I’ll regret it. Mum and Dad are very supportive of my plans, and for that I’m grateful.)

After dinner that evening the three of us played Scrabble. Big mistake. Scrabble really brings Mum’s competitiveness to the fore. This time it made me more competitive too. Mum played very well and both she and I made big scores. I won in the end but that hardly mattered; the game really wasn’t fun. This morning I tried making a Romanian Scrabble crossword without a board and removing the K, Q, W’s and Y’s. I started with ten letters and then added another five whenever I had a completed crossword or got stuck. I tried to do as little rearranging as possible along the way.

My parents left on the 29th. It was almost a stress-free Christmas. We were able to appreciate the simpler things like the pohutukawas which are wonderful at this time of year, and the baby seagulls which hatched on the roof of the apartment block opposite, as they have done every early December since I moved in here. This year there are three, and they’ll fly the nest any day now.

We almost certainly had our last earthquake of 2015 this morning (there’s just half an hour left), and for once I’m optimistic about the year ahead.

Yesterday I sat on the bank of the Basin and watched some provincial cricket, along with, er, forty-odd other people. It got me thinking. Sportsmen are really tactile, aren’t they? During Otago’s run chase against Wellington there were fist bumps, high-fives, low-fives, shoulder slaps and all manner of other gestures that I can hardly describe. I hadn’t taken much notice of this before, in the same way that until a couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have taken much notice if two people were conversing in Romanian. And that’s precisely it: this vast array of modern gestures is a foreign language to me. When I drop my colleague off after work, he’ll sometimes want to shake hands with me. That’s a gesture I’m entirely comfortable with; to me a handshake implies acknowledgement of the other person, and it’s good to acknowledge the other person. But other times he’ll want a fist bump or even a high-five, and on those occasions I feel distinctly uncomfortable. I’ve even seen him fist-bump our boss, who unlike me, seems au fait with the concept. I’m guessing fist bumps are meant to imply mateship, something more than just acknowledgement.
As it happened, Wellington’s early declaration paid off, and they skittled Otago’s last six batsmen cheaply when all three results had been perfectly possible. As I walked home (all of three minutes) I passed what must have been the Wellington changing room and I could hear them singing something in celebration of their victory. That’s some kind of mateship going on there again, isn’t it? Even low-grade rugby and football teams have those rituals, don’t they? I’ve never been part of anything like that myself. I play my interclub tennis, and I win and go home, or I lose and go home, or I stick around a bit to watch other people win or lose, and then go home. I have certainly played in teams where we’ve been to the pub afterwards and had a good chat, but singing has never been on the menu.

Temperatures soared into the mid-thirties today. Not here in Wellington – that would just be silly – but on the East Coast of the South Island. Christchurch and Dunedin both broke their all-time records for December; Timaru equalled theirs. (Note that this is New Zealand where “all-time” isn’t that much time. In the UK I’d sometimes hear that it had been “the wettest October since 1806” and those two centuries of weather records would remind me of how pioneering the UK was.) My planned adventure will give me both extremes of temperature to look forward to.

The Spanish general election was interesting, and it will now take a long time to form a government. Sometimes a messy outcome can be a good one, and I think this is one of those times. The two-party system has been well and truly obliterated by two newcomers to the game whose leaders are barely my age. Interestingly, as far as I can see, Spain doesn’t have a significant far-right anti-immigration party. This result is a version of what might have happened in the UK in May if (a) the polls had been accurate and (b) they had a better electoral system, not that the Spanish system is perfect (it gives extra weight to rural voters). Gosh, when the UK exit poll came out on that Friday morning (my time) I almost fell off my chair. I had to go out for lunch and had a hard time keeping the food down.

My parents arrive here tomorrow night. They’ll be staying with me until next Tuesday; we’ll have a very low-key Christmas. I’ve blown up some balloons and hung a bit of tinsel around the place, but really I haven’t been arsed. It will be great to have them here though.

Last weekend when I was down in Geraldine, I saw my brother on FaceTime. Wow, what a difference. He had a horror year in New Zealand and needed at least another year to get over that, but he’s much happier now. I saw his girlfriend for the first time; it was quite disconcerting seeing someone who could easily be my sister-in-law, for the first time in that way, method, format, platform, whatever the word is. I’ll get to see her in the normal way when she and my brother come to New Zealand for three weeks in February.

On Monday I went down the North Otago coast with Mum and Dad. It was a grey old day. I’ve never seen quite so many seals as there were around Kakanui. We made several detours to look at potential real estate options. If they do buy something down there, it’ll probably be a holiday home. I asked Dad what they plan to do with their house, which will eventually be too big for them. He said to me, “Whatever happens, I know we’ll be stuck in fucking Geraldine.” He doesn’t swear that often. Mum was born in Geraldine; it would take a lot to prise her away. There was fog in Timaru on Tuesday early morning which delayed my flight to Wellington by 3½ hours, so I arrived at work at lunchtime. I didn’t mind being stuck at the airport at all; with a book and the various puzzles in the Timaru Herald I had plenty to do.

It wasn’t easy to watch my parents plan their future, which at 65 and 66, they (and especially Mum) expect to be long. Their time horizons are longer than mine at 35. From my perspective, watching them pore over real estate brochures and websites was a bit like watching the last ten minutes of the All Blacks against a crappy team like, I dunno, France, with the score delicately poised at 48-7. Look, I think the All Blacks are going to be OK. Mind if I change the channel?

I realise I never mentioned the All Blacks’ World Cup win. It was well worth celebrating, not just because that team is one of the best to ever play the game, but also because they were so gracious and sportsmanlike in victory. Other successful sports teams (cough – Aussie cricket team – cough) could take a leaf out of the All Blacks’ book.

Mum has worked hard and saved hard; she deserves to enjoy her later life. What annoys me though is her assumption that if you don’t reap the financial rewards that she has, that’s purely down to your own stupidity or even immorality. Wealth equals morality, who would have thought? She even tars a whole generation with the “stupid and immoral” brush. There are hundreds of thousands of baby boomers up and down the country who think the same way and vote the same way as Mum does, and they’ll all live to 108. (Yes I know I’m getting close to tarring a whole generation with the same brush here.) I was explaining this to my colleague on the way home from work on Friday. He’s 27, and on the face of it even more screwed by the system than me, except he’s not because he’s circumventing the system entirely. About time I did the same thing.

Thanks to my whitewash tennis win, I was able to attend yesterday’s TPP protest. The turnout was much smaller than the one in August; many people now think it’s a fait accompli. My colleague gave an impassioned speech outside Parliament, probably the best of the lot. I can barely imagine doing something like that. Someone (correctly) said that if Richie McCaw had made a speech decrying the TPP, it would have made a far bigger impact than all of yesterday’s speeches and protesters combined. I’m not very good at estimating these numbers, but I’d guess that about 1000 people turned up, along with one dreadlocked Hungarian sheepdog known as a Komondor.

I was oblivious to the atrocity in Paris until last night when my cousin and her family popped over to have pizza. Where do you even start? Tim said, “It’s Paris. What do you expect? People get shot and blown up there.” How sad that that’s what Paris means to a ten-year-old boy.

I flew down to Timaru on Friday. Ascending over Wellington, seeing the vast Southern Alps from 23,000 feet, and flying down the coast to almost skid over Temuka where I spent about a year of my life. It all made me feel good inside. Mum picked me up from the airport and within half an hour I was at my parents’ place which looked even more beautiful than it normally does in the springtime. They have probably a dozen fruit trees – apples, plums, plumcots, Black Boy peaches, you name it. They’ll even get a good crop of figs this year.

On Saturday some people came over to look at some of Dad’s paintings. They were doing a tour of gardens around Geraldine and the paintings were just a bonus. Dad said they were tyre kickers who would never buy. Their car pulled up and Dad dealt with them. Mum and I stayed in the kitchen. Mum said, “They won’t believe that an artist could live in a house like this.” I felt a bit sick. Jeez Mum, everything is wrong with that sentence. Why do you have to live vicariously through Dad? (You’ve had a long teaching career that you can be extremely proud of.) And why are you so concerned about your image? The next minute the tyre kickers were taking photos. “Oh no, they’re taking photos of the rhododendrons! But there are so many weeds!” This was code for “Please keep taking photos! Lots and lots of them!” They did buy a painting, of the lovely Central Otago village of Ophir. I was there last year, between Christmas and New Year, when he took the photo. It was a stunning evening. I loved visiting that part of the country; I’d never been there before.

When I was growing up, Mum had a spinning wheel, a guitar, she used to run, she spent time in the garden because she enjoyed it, she even attended maths classes in the evenings and taught me what she learned. Now the golf club is where it’s at. She spends a lot of time in the garden still, but it’s a very different place to the one in the UK. I love 2015 Mum so much, but I wish I could get 1987 Mum back.

I don’t really get social media but I’m trying Twitter (my handle is @PlutomanDotCom). I’d love there to be an option where you can just get every fifth tweet that someone spews out rather than all of them.

Saturday night was fun. Six of us – all blokes – met up at the pub next to where I used to work. One hasn’t got a job and wants to travel around NZ in a van, one hasn’t got a job but has a PhD and a house that he wants to sell so he can travel around NZ in a caravan for several months, one also has a PhD and is a mine of general knowledge but is struggling to get steady work, one is looking for a job but is only 25 so has heaps of time, one has a job but wants to move 11,000 miles away to do something rather different, and one has just started a very normal office job and seems happy with it. I’m not sure that any of us are in relationships – the subject never came up. If everyone had been normal with supposedly normal jobs and families, I’m sure I’d have found the evening horrible.

Last night I attended a quiz at a different pub to the one we went to on Saturday, but with some of the same people, plus some others. One of the women brought her two-week-old baby daughter along. We finished second out of ten or so teams. I was more helpful than I expected to be, but anything to do with movies or popular culture and I’m a complete dead loss. History and I’m not much better. We won a $30 bar tab and spent the money on ice cream rather than alcohol. The barman treated us like we were from Planet Zorg when me made our order.

I arrived at work this morning to find a notice attached to my monitor. Don’t log on to this or any computer because you’ve got another virus. (I had one about four months ago.) How embarrassing. I couldn’t do anything until about ten, and it felt good to almost finish the cryptic crossword (I used to enjoy those) and to start a new book. I was hoping I could go home where I could be productive, but I had to hang around all day and pretend to get work done on someone else’s PC. I don’t know, or particularly care, how I got the virus, but the IT manager made it pretty clear that he did care.

The Kansas City Royals, who won both the baseball games I’ve ever been to, have now won the World Series. For us outsiders, “World Series” is an easy name to make fun of – after all, the competition features 29 American teams and one from Canada – but I’m coming round to the idea that it’s just a name, and they could call it Dave if they wanted to.

Things feel normal again. That normal where nothing matters, I can’t take anything in, and I’m unable to be in the moment. Bugger. Just what I didn’t want. I desperately need to get not-normal back.

Over the long weekend I attended my first marimba class, went to the Watercolour Society exhibition on Queens Wharf (Dad had three paintings in there), did some muesli tasting (a friend won several boxes of Vogel’s muesli in some Facebook competition), went up Mount Kaukau, played some tennis, got 697 photos of America printed (what a shame that I lost the Boston ones – I guess I’ll just have to go back there), and learnt some Romanian, a bit half-heartedly because at this stage I could be going anywhere, or nowhere.

I also tried to figure out what’s going on with my mortgage. In 2009 I started a blog called Fixed and Floating, a reference to people taking out ridiculous 100% mortgages to get on the property ladder in Auckland, where I was living at the time. (Ha! An overheated Auckland property market in 2009! Of course it’s cooled down so much since then.) The mortgage I took out on my Wellington apartment in early 2012 is part fixed, part floating. In fact the floating bit isn’t just floating, it’s revolving credit. I structured it that way just in case the house of cards I’d built (a.k.a. my job) toppled over. Two days after I moved in, someone farted and that was enough to send it tumbling. Within weeks my salary had virtually halved. From the moment I got the keys, my apartment has felt like a shell, a monument to a career I had some time in the distant past (and even when I had it, I didn’t really have it). The seismic saga has since turned it fully toxic. When I opened the door of my apartment after a month away, I almost cried. This place is so bare. It’s about time I turned my burden into an asset. As I keep saying, its saving grace (and it’s a big one) is that it’s in just about the perfect location.
I gave up on Fixed and Floating last October; I’d run out of things to say.

The winner of the supreme award at the watercolour exhibition was a portrait of Ben Hana, or Blanket Man if you prefer. It was so lifelike that it was hard to look at it without getting a little emotional. Somebody had snapped it up for $600. He was a Wellington icon of course. That someone like that was allowed to simply be is part of what made, and still makes, Wellington a great city. It’s interesting though how some people develop a cult following. He and my grandmother died four days apart (and just before I moved into my flat); unlike Ben my grandmother lived a very full life, but I don’t remember there being a shrine devoted to her in the village square when she died.
Dad’s three paintings (why couldn’t they put them all together?) were of a café in St Mark’s Square in Venice, an antique shop in Cambridge, and an old steam engine near Peterborough.

At the end of last year I started a Brazilian drumming course. I quickly gave up when they changed the format of the class and it got too big for me. I thought I’d do something vaguely similar this year. The marimba is like an amplified xylophone, and when five of us played together at various ranges (soprano, alto and tenor) we actually came up with something pretty cool. Playing that sort of instrument is all about patterns, and I’m reasonably good with those. The problem comes when you switch off the auto-pilot and start thinking about what you’re doing; then things can quickly go to pieces. We only used two mallets each, but some clever people can do four. Or six.

At least 300 people have died in a magnitude 7.5 earthquake that hit Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. I’ve felt three (thankfully far smaller) quakes since I got back from America.

Here’s a song by Elliott Smith that I Shazammed recently. Smith was 34 when he died. I’m 35. It’s time I stopped messing around and finally did something with my life.

Four days a week I pick up and drop off my work colleague who lives near the zoo in Newtown. I talk to him more than anybody else on the planet. After work on Friday he could tell I was feeling like crap (well, I think I made it fairly obvious) and he asked if I wanted to have a beer at Bebemos. They have quite a funky courtyard area there. We had a long chat and I opened up to him, like I never do to anyone. Like me he’s a fan of Paul Simon, and we discussed and laughed about the lyrics from the Graceland album. He wasn’t even born when it came out but he knew all the words. When I got home I felt six times better.

The next day I was at the tennis club, basking in the sunshine and the glory of my two interclub wins (not really), but still massively frustrated with the latest chapter of my seismic saga. I had a chat with the guy I played in the singles and it turns out he owns an earthquake-prone apartment just off Dixon Street. He’s further down the track than me, and faces a six-figure bill. “You’ve got to get over this,” he said. But it’s hard when every time I drag myself up off the floor I receive another hammer blow. You bastards are going to block off my fucking window?! What next? “Do what you want to do. Don’t wait for this strengthening stuff to be over, because you’ll be waiting fucking ages.” This made me feel six times better.

I went to the market on the way home from tennis. I love the market. I’ve always loved markets. Although most of the produce is cheaper than at Pak ‘n’ Save, you do have to be careful. Anything with a label on it is best avoided because it’s probably been in storage for weeks. But some of the stuff there is amazing, like oranges, which I always buy from the same stall. These oranges are all different shapes and sizes, they have rough patches, they have bobbly bits, they have seams. Some of them even look slightly anatomical. They’re not uniform in colour. But they’re all heavy for their size, and when I cut one open, things quickly get messy because it has so much juice. It tastes so damn good. I can’t possibly only eat one so I have another. And another. They’re so good they’re addictive, and they’re about $1.50 a kilo. I buy them by the bucketload. I can’t do Pak ‘n’ Save oranges anymore; the ones from the market are cheaper, tastier and six times better.

When I got back from the market I met up with a friend at the Southern Cross bar, a five-minute walk from my apartment (which, in spite of everything else, is still in its same brilliant location). He’s one of the two blokes I went with on the TPP march just before I went away (as we now know, the march was all in vain, but it was still a great experience for me who had never done anything like that before). The main, indoor bit of the Southern Cross is absolutely huge, but the garden bar is just happiness: the plants, the lanterns, the wallpaper, and the benches all upholstered in different mismatched colours. I love it. If it was entirely up to me (and maybe it is!), the living room of my flat would look a bit like that, minus the wallpaper. It’s a funny thing: you’re supposed to keep all the tones neutral and not have too much clutter in your rooms, so that they look bigger, especially when you come to sell, which should always be soon. I’ve spent eighty bucks or something on my apartment since I moved in nearly four years ago, so my rooms are pretty bare. But they look fucking enormous. Some people even go further and match their lounge suite with their carpet and their décor art, while keeping that neutrality. These tend to be the same people who spend most of their time at work attending meetings about strategic goals or some such shite. How these people don’t get home from work one day, look at all their strategic furniture, and think fuck this, I’m booking a one-way ticket to Boston and jumping off the Tobin Bridge when I get there, I don’t know. Maybe some of them do. Maybe it’s Sophie, Tom and George who keep them strategically ploughing on.

I was digressing a bit in the last paragraph. It was really great to meet up with this guy. He’s an extremely kind, intelligent bloke, but not unlike me, he’s struggled with depression and getting and keeping jobs. He lives with his parents. He hasn’t told them that he’s toying with the idea of living in a van and travelling. I told him about my trip. I said it has had a permanent impact on my life. I then told him about my idea to teach English in Eastern Europe. I got very excited about both America and my new idea for a job. “Hungary! Bulgaria! Romania! I’ve done all these train trips and I can do more train trips! And I might, just might, actually do something I’m good at.” “Wow, that’s awesome, man,” he said. I spent eight days in Boston and three in New York (if you don’t count the tennis which really exists in its own little city). Most normal people would prefer the opposite, but what I did worked for me. Find what works for you, rather than seeing what works for everyone else and pretending it’ll somehow work for you, and life will be six times better.