Tailspin

There’s nothing upbeat about how I’m feeling at the moment, and until life feels possible again it’s goodnight from me as far as this blog is concerned. (I might still report on my tennis matches if I’m in the mood.)

I got rid of the Camry on Friday. Turners gave me $300 for it, twice what I would have got if I’d scrapped it. I was just glad to offload it in such a hassle-free way. It had been part of my life for 5½ years and it’s a shame I couldn’t have made it last just a few more months. I swam at Oriental Bay that evening. When I lived in Auckland I went to the beach almost every weekend during the summer. Soon I might be a ten-hour drive from the sea.

I took the 6:45 flight to Christchurch on Saturday morning. My parents picked me up from the airport. They’re very good to me. We stopped at Ashburton where they had their usual farmers’ market, but to celebrate Bob Marley’s birthday (it might even have been Waitangi Day come to think of it) they also had stallholders of various nationalities: Samoan, Tongan, Filipino, American, Ukrainian… look, there’s a Romanian one! We were far too early to sample any sarmale, but I did talk to the Romanians running the stall, mostly in English admittedly. Unfortunately I’ve lost momentum in my attempt to learn Romanian. The woman was from Bacău and had lived in Ashburton since 2002; the bloke was from Sibiu. “We hope that tourism will take off in Romania. It’s a beautiful country but people don’t go there.” There are forty or fifty Romanian families in and around Ashburton; the Romanian rugby team stayed there during the 2011 World Cup. My parents then got all excited and decided that they’d go to Romania in May. They’re going to Italy for my cousin’s wedding (that’s the cousin I saw in Albany, NY last August) and will probably book a flight from Milan to Timișoara shortly after that. That morning was the highlight of my long weekend.

Sunday was a bit of a disappointment – I was hoping for better weather so we could go to the bay or go somewhere, anywhere, but we stayed at home. Then yesterday I drove my parents’ Honda the 470 km to Picton, from where I took the Bluebridge ferry. I didn’t get back till 11:30 last night. Back in October this would have been an amazing trip, what with more seals than I’d ever seen in my life just after Kaikoura, but now I have home waiting for me and that’s somewhere I want to be even less than when I arrived back from the US last September and almost burst into tears. I didn’t sleep much last night but I rarely do at the moment. This is partly due to my decision to change where I sleep. Having a flatmate has changed everything. Now I can’t appreciate anything or enjoy anything or concentrate on anything or take anything in and I’m no longer living, only existing and barely that. Things might improve. When I’ve got the downstairs room sorted I’ll have at least some space to myself.

We’ve got this damn restructure at work and it’s inevitably generating a lot of discussion but I’ve got my fingers in my ears, going la-la-la-la. I’m going on a 2½-day training course from the 18th to the 20th and will go down south the following weekend to (hopefully) see my brother and his girlfriend who are coming over from the UK for three weeks. If everything goes to plan I’ll start the actual teaching around 10th March.

I’m trying to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick. I keep reading and rereading the same few pages, not getting far past the introduction which is a news item about the death of the near-200-year-old turtle given to the King of Tonga by Captain Cook in 1777.