Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Welcome, listeners of Four Seas One Family.

Tuesday, February 9th, 2016

If you have landed here after listening to the 4S1F25 Jon Dunning: Consciously Contribute episode of James Thomas’ podcast, welcome!

Tucked away in posts on this blog, you will find many more stories about our emigration experience – leaving London, finding work, settling on the other side of the world – most of them under the ‘Emigrating’ category.

Dad's Diary from New Zealand Pocket Radio

If you’re looking for ‘Dad’s Diary, my first podcast series, head over to the New Zealand Pocket Radio website, where you’ll find ten episodes on family, ranging from adopting kittens to being involved in the London terrorist bombings of 2005.

Thanks for dropping by.

Another look at another life

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Flicking through my emails this morning, I came across one alerting me to a comment on my last post from my fellow blogger Ian McKenzie saying:

‘You have definitely come a long way from that flat, “a mere drunken banker’s stagger from Canary Wharf.” It looks great.’

The words struck a chord and, searching back, I was stunned to learn that Ian was quoting from a post I wrote back in 2004 entitled ‘A step towards another life’. I wrote back to Ian to say how touched I am that he continues to read and staggered he could recall a post that I wrote eight years ago. Rereading that post brought me up short, for I had forgotten how deeply embedded the wish for what we know have was within me back then. 

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Canary Wharf from Mudchute Farm

We live in London, a mere drunken banker’s stagger from Canary Wharf and the new financial heart of London. We are lucky enough to have a ground floor flat with a small south-facing garden… As a child, I grew up in a home where in the back garden, my Dad grew a fair proportion of the vegetables we ate. Although this was done partly by choice, it also helped to supplement the far from stellar incomes of a self-employed engineer and nurse… Although I don’t remember playing a very active part in the actual market gardening, I do remember being captivated by John Seymour’s seminal book, The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency. Seymour’s plain economic yet evocative prose made the backbreaking and often thankless life of a smallholder seem simple, achievable but most of all, enviable. 

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Limehouse Link tunnel – part of my 50 mile daily commute in London

I have long held the desire to have a less frenetic and immediate life, hoping instead to ‘downshift’, as it is now called. Recently, SWMBO and I have discussed a variety of ways in which we can bring this about – ultimately, to find a way in which can spend far less time in traditional work environment – nine to five, stressful work, long commute, little family time – enabling us to spend more time together working in, around and maybe from the home. Over the years and months, various bouts of online research and reading have brought us to the point where we are now seriously looking at a number of ways in which we can make this idea a reality, whether at home or abroad.

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Leaving London for New Zealand

Although I am by nature a serendipitous optimist, I am no wearer of rose tinted specs and I am realistic enough to know that a corporate salary will be a necessary evil for a while yet if we are to affect such a change.

Eight years later, we have moved 18,000 kms to the other side of the world, I have traded a corporate salary for a public servant’s payslip and the family have swapped a small inner city flat in London for a house on four acres of land in rural New Zealand.

Our lives have changed in extraordinary ways: we have challenged our own notions of who we are, slowly and steadily reversed circumstances we once thought would crush us, visited places of stunning beauty and met wonderful people some of whom have become our closest friends. 

In doing so, we have confounded those who confidently predicted failure, shed a good deal of the baggage of our past, trusted the leading we felt and committed to an unknown future with a determination we never knew we had. Though there was I time when I would have scoffed at the thought, we are certain we were called to live here and that we are meant to be where we are for however long He will have us here. God has truly blessed and humbled us – we strive to hold it all with open hands so we may share that blessing with others.

The full post from 2004 – thank you Ian for reminding me I wrote it!

Update Four: Life on the smallholding

Friday, August 24th, 2012

I haven’t written much here lately so what follows is a rough visual timeline (one picture for every 2½ days) of some of the things we have been up to.

1. Standing outside the garage wondering about which little patch of chaos to tackle next.

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2. Joining the dog on the couch in the garage with a cup of tea, knowing the chaos can wait.

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3. Worrying that I’ll never mow the steep back garden without injuring myself.

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4. Spending a chilly early evening zeroing my new pest neutraliser.

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5. Collecting firewood, stacking firewood, chopping kindling and bagging kindling.

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6. Popping over to the neighbours for a few hours messing around in Jeeps.

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7. Fixing windows for the tenants.

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8. Buying SWMBO the nice shiny red sports car she’s always wanted.

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9. Flying to Sydney and back  in 24hrs for 1 sleep, 2 meals, 3 meetings, 6 taxi rides & an interrogation at Customs at 3 a.m.

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10. Learning from my mate Johnny how to dig post holes, widen a gateway and string No.8 wire.

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11. Chuckling at doing a little light gardening Kiwi-style i.e. with a big blue tractor.

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12. Wondering (repeatedly in this very rainy winter) if our access road will flood.

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13. Taking a family time out to help our eldest move out to a house with new friends.

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14. Collecting  and stacking more firewood, chopping and bagging more kindling.

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15. Working with my youngest to build a new, wider gate for the new, wider gateway.

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16. Sharing the satisfaction of a job well done – and a gate that fits!

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17. Remembering to go to the day job that (mostly) pays the bills.

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18. Admiring the decorating prowess of SWMBO (and assembling some furniture).

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19. Rescuing a sadly fatally traumatised birds from the woodburner flue. 

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20. Sampling a taste of the old country.

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21. Relishing a homemade egg and bacon muffin containing our first home laid egg.

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22. Assisting Johnny move his flood-bound flock to greener, drier pastures.

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23. Knocking myself out in the basement and bleeding a lot.

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24.  Making time with SWMBO to continue running our youth group – like when dissecting pigs’ eyes!

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25. Prepping the rentals for letting.

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26. Re-enacting ‘Fahrenheit 451′ with the kids’  old school work.

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27. Researching local history and finding that valley floods (No. 12) are par for the course.

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28. Retiring old power tools and buying their replacements.

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29. Buying a car – and then selling it again (long story).

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30. And revelling in the daily beauty of views, skies and rainbows (more of which soon).

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Update Two: The Animals

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

One of the attractions of moving to a smallholding is being able to keep animals. While we have no desire – and are far too lazy – to be self-sufficient, we are keen to build up our husbandry skills, get involved in the local farming community and know a bit more about the provenance of our meat & eggs.

Oddly enough, it was ‘Harriet’ the hedgehog who greeted us on our first morning on the smallholding.  When she wasn’t bustling her way around the back garden, she’d retire to the large, over-grown rosemary bush where, I suspect, she continues to live. 

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Meanwhile, we prepared to bring our first livestock home and, as SWMBO has wanted to keep chickens since forever, this entailed building up a chicken coop we bought online. After Maisie and I had completed that job, I fenced off a portion of the home paddock to provide an enclosed run for the much-mooted chickens.

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A week or so later, the local A&P (agricultural and pastoral) society’s showgrounds hosted the annual Auckland Poultry Show and we went along to have a look-see.  I have to say that I wasn’t aware that so many people were so passionate about breeding, raising and showing poultry and game birds and we were staggered by the variety of fowl on show.

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Beyond the showing cages, we found a sale room full of poultry for purchase and spent an hour or so wandering up and down the aisles, nodding sagely and trying to look like we knew what we were looking for.

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Though we had already made tentative arrangements to start with some chicks later in the spring, we were keen to do all we could to build up our bird husbandry skills and we left the show with three mature laying birds and a scrawny-looking Silkie rooster packed into the back of the car.

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Since then, the chooks have settled in well and starting to lay the occasional egg, with yesterday seeing the height of production thus far when Wendy returned from chook duties with three clutched in her hand.

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We are blessed to have our good friend Johnny and his family as neighbours.  Johnny has lived on his farm all his life and his willingness to share his knowledge and help us in a 101 way has blown us away.  Whether it has been a cooked meal on the day we moved in, the ‘permanent loan’ of a chainsaw or hours of hard labour to get a job done, Johnny and his family have never once been anything other than a blessing.

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A couple of weekends back, we climbed aboard a stock trailer behind Johnny’s farm bike (quad) and headed up to the top of his farm to watch him work with his two dogs.  Each day, he and the dogs split off the ewes with newborn lambs from the flock and move them to fresher pasture so as to provide richer feed for the lactating ewes.
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Therefore, it was perhaps inevitable that I return home one evening to find, rather than the usual dog greeting me at the door, an orphaned lamb being fed in the kitchen. Poppy, as she has been named, was abandoned by her Mum (possibly as she was lame in one of her rear legs) and Johnny brought her over for us to bottle-feed and wean.
 
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Three weeks on, Poppy is doing great.  The lameness seems to have been caused by septic arthritis.  After refreshing my subcutaneous injection skills (acquired through legitimate purposes, I assure you), I gave her a shot of antibiotics and the leg has now improved to the point where the lamb is now skipping and gambolling about quite happily.  Johnny also helped me ring her tail to dock it and I got another chance to practice my hypodermic technique with a tetanus shot.
 
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Our existing pets (two cats who came with us from the UK seven years ago, a deaf white cat we were gifted and our Jack Russell/Maltese cross, Abbie) had little trouble adjusting to the smallholding.  For Abbie, the acres of space to explore, the masses of cow pasture mud to roll in and the new livestock to befriend are heaven-sent.  Like Abbie, Olive the deaf cat has become chums with the lamb, sees the smallholding as her very own safari park and has spent hours honing her skink-hunting prowess, dragging many a carcass into the house for proud inspection. As for the other two cats, if there’s a patch of sun on a couch or a recently vacated warm bed, that’s where you’ll find them.
 

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Update One: The Move

Monday, August 20th, 2012

After a five and a half month hiatus, here’s the first in a number of update posts that will hopefully go someway to explaining why blogging took a back seat for a while.

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The short story is this: we moved.  

The longer story is that, after 6 years, we have shifted from our first Kiwi home, a timber house on a quarter acre section on the edge of a township to our new place, a brick home with granny flat and separate cottage on 4 acres set in rural farmland.

First came the dreaded packing…

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…and more packing…

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..until it seemed like we’d never be finished with the never-ending boxes and brown tape.

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The big day arrived and with it heaps of friends to help us and the movers get our stuff shifted to the new place.  After a day of hard labour and laughs – not to mention a frustrating and expensive wait for keys – we managed to get everything from the old house to the new place, just in time for me to snap the last of the day disappearing over the coastal forest and into the Tasman.

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Valentine Dilemma

Monday, February 13th, 2012

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xkcd on the money, once again.

 

Dying and Flying

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

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In between work and family life, I have had a week of introspection and consideration, spending time considering my priorities in the year ahead. This has meant evaluating, shifting and, in some cases, discarding the big rocks in my world.

Funny then that I should could across a link to Inspiration and Chai, the blog of Australian palliative nurse and singer, Bronnie Ware.  In her most widely quoted post, Regrets of the Dying, she relates the five most common wishes she has heard expressed by those she has cared for in their last days.

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Bronnie offers her comments and perspectives in the full post here.

I reckon that I managed to clock up a little of Nos. 1, 2 and 5 earlier today when Maisie and I headed over to the local domain to fly kites. As well as the new kite I bought for Maisie when we were at the beach a few weeks back, we also flew a Worlds Apart Air Sport 170 CX, a couple of Pocket Parafoils (see above) and a homemade dustbin liner and dowel sled kite.

This we did to the backdrop  of cries of ‘Howzat!’ from the cricket club and the inevitable Westie dad teaching his very young offspring how to annoy others and break local byelaws by riding a mini-motorbike with stabilisers.  My mild but silent annoyance at the kid riding across our kite lines at one point changed to horror when, despite the mad shouting of his father, the tiny kid missed the brake and rode headlong into his mum and a younger sibling in a pushchair.

While I wouldn’t want to be unkind, the kid made a half-decent attempt at getting himself, mum and sibling a Darwin Award.

Christlikeness or correct theology?

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Again, I find myself I appreciating guest blogger Scott Miller’s open and frank sharing about his faith on Tony Jones blog. He articulates much that I can empathise with in a clear and simple manner.

If I could talk to my 17-year-old self, I would say that I still believe that God is at work in my life, but maybe not in the same way that a 17-year-old understands. I would tell him that I still experience the authority of scripture, but I don’t find that authority in the words of scripture, but in the Event to whom scripture testifies. And I would say that I have not substituted human reason for revelation, but realize that I can only understand the revelation in human, fallible, finite ways, and that it is a mistake to think that anyone’s theology is every entirely adequate to express the revelation of the Infinite.

But above all, I would tell my gnostic-leaning 17-year-old self, it’s more important to be a true follower of Christ and actually act in Christlike ways than it is to have what you think is the correct theology. Ideas matter, but real, living human beings matter more. Don’t forget Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 13:1-3:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love I gain nothing.

via Theoblogy

God hates all the same people you do

Sunday, January 29th, 2012

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“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do”.

– Ann Lamott, quoting her priest friend Tom, in ‘Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life‘.

Reading this a few moments ago pulled me up short; a more succinct reality-check statement would be hard to conceive.  I always appreciate Ann Lamott’s writing; when I read her stuff, it’s like I’m listening to a sister who has seen a lot more and done a lot more than me – and cares enough to share the lessons.

Seeing her quoted always makes me sit up and pay more attention as she invariably polarises folk and provokes debate.  In this case, the quote appeared in a open letter about LGBT and faith issues at play in the current US political race, itself quoted in Scott Miller’s guest post on Donald Miller’s blog.

And In News Elsewhere…

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

…two things that caught my eye.

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I am slowly working through the shorts films that make up Ed’s Story.  Ed Dobson is a pastor who is recording his reflections on living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease.  These include gentle yet enlightening insights on hope, healing and forgiveness and more besides.

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For all those who have found their IT knowledge called upon by family and friends at some time or another, Mike Lacher’s story will ring bells and tickle funny bones.