Month: July 2016

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.

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).

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.