One adult, two kids and just three hours to assemble
The Chef’s Salad and the salad chefs
No turkey here
The family and the neighbours lunching
Cap from Maryland, USA: US$40
Daughter’s RipCurl shades: NZ$20
Shirt from Rarotonga, Cook Islands: NZ$35
Chef’s apron from London, UK: £20
Feelings of happiness and contentment: Priceless
In the last 36 hours, the combined technical clout of NZ’s satellite TV company and national telecoms provider has converted our rural hideaway into a fully connected digital homestead. After nearly four months of expensive cellphone calls and 3G wireless data connections, we now have expensive digital satellite TV and ADSL!
This means is that, when I’m not glued to the European cinema channel eating turkey sandwiches or watching All American supermarket cart racing whilst grilling steak and prawns on the barbie, there’s a good chance that I’ll start writing here a little more regularly again.
[UPDATE] I have either just fried my AirPlus wifi router or it’s power supply, so wifi access for my iBook will have to wait until tomorrow. All I have to do is work out which of the children’s presents to return to the store for a refund to pay for a new router.
More to follow…
The last ten days have passed in a blur of activity and, by securing
a work permit and finding a house to rent whilst we find one to buy,
we have now cleared the last two major obstacles in the first phase
of our move to New Zealand. Just over a week ago, after four days
and 1500 kilometres of house hunting, we have found a great house to
rent in a rural township, 35 kilometres north west of Auckland.
After several days of viewing disappointing and nondescript suburban
properties, we knew that we would find it hard to live in a home that
was wedged in amongst others. Having spent too many years in a small
apartment listening to every neighbourly noise, such places were not
what we had envisaged when we decided to move halfway round the
world. Firm in our resolve to find a place where the kids would have
space to run amok, a community where we could enjoy life and make
friends and yet within commuting distance of my new job, we searched on.
Having been told that rural rentals are rarer than hen’s teeth, we
continued north to a place called Kumeu[1] and popped into a real
estate agent to enquire anyway. It just so happened that one such
‘hen’s tooth’ was back on the market that morning and the description
captured our interest. As the agent couldn’t contact the outgoing
tenant, we drove out of the town and up the hill to view the property
from the road. Whilst the neighbouring Tuscan style villa, nestling
amongst the vineyards on the other side of the road had the edge in
terms of setting, the large house opposite, set back from the road
and with a large garden and patio to the rear was certainly in line
with what we were looking for.
Later that afternoon, we were able to have a look around the house
and it seemed to offer most of what we needed and wanted plus a few
other things like a sunken mosaic bath and a dressing room for the
lady of the house! Although it was a little over the budget we’d
set, we both knew that it was the best place we’d seen all week and
that the township was just the type of place we could see ourselves
settling in. Subsequent enquiries showed that the house was well
placed for access to good schools, local amenities, farm shop and a
reasonable 30 minutes from my office. We have since signed on the
dotted line, paid our bonds and deposits and will hopefully move in
at some point during the coming week.
With six humans, four cats, eighteen bags and cases, two bikes and
numerous boxes of stuff to move up country, not to mention my
upcoming daily commute, it was obvious that even our eight seat
family car would be woefully inadequate. Having driven a long 600
kilometres back to Foxton on Sunday and spent Monday running around
trying to work out what we needed to do first, we headed to
Palmerston North on Tuesday to look for the second car and trailer
we’d need to move north. During a quick lunch break, we got a call
to say that a package was awaiting collection at Palmerston North
Airport’s Courier Post depot. When I drove over to collect it, I
found it contained a letter from NZ Immigration and my passport,
inside which I found my brand new two year work permit. I was
stunned; partly because it had been processed and returned to me in
under two days but also because, after a good few years’ research and
planning and a large leap into the unknown without any guarantees, we
were now in New Zealand, with a home to move to, a job to start and
the permit that holds the key to our future.
I’ll admit to being a little overcome for a moment or two as it all
sunk in and I felt a wave of relief pass over me. It was only then
that I realised just quite how much pressure I had put myself under
to keep focused on getting the job and permit we need to stay in New
Zealand, occasionally at the expense of my family’s feelings, if the
truth be told. I think that it was then that I appreciated just what
we are in the process of accomplishing as a family: for all the
relocation programmes on television, comparatively cheap air travel
and desire for different lives, uprooting a family of six from an
established life in one country and moving them to another far away
is something that is hard to quantify and appreciate until you
experience it for yourself. After sharing the good news with SWMBO
and our dear friends Peter and Rae, we celebrated by buying a second
hand car and returning home to cook a family meal of chicken piri
piri. During this, SWMBO and I drank a toast proposed by our
daughters with a white wine charmingly called ‘Cat Pee On A
Gooseberry Bush’. With a spooky twist of synchronicity, upon reading
the label, we discovered that the wine (which helps raise money for
the SPCA, in case you were wondering) is produced in the valley that
we shall be moving to. Be it fate, destiny, the prayers of friends
or sheer coincidence, it made us smile.
After many calls to shippers and Customs, it seems likely that next
week we will finally be reunited with the shipping container with all
our worldly goods in it next week after living out of 18 cases and
bags for three months. This being the case, we now have just two
days to get ourselves packed (of course, we have bought more stuff
since we arrived) and ready to leave at 0600hrs on Tuesday. It’ll be
an eight to nine hour journey as a convoy to our new place, with
SWMBO driving one car with half the kids and her cats whilst I’ll
take the remainder in mine, along with a load of boxes and bags in
our newly purchased trailer. Having bought the truck secondhand, we
splashed out on a trailer because every Kiwi family seems to own a
four wheel drive ‘ute’ and a galvanised trailer with which they haul
their sheep, cattle, white goods, hunting dogs, old mattresses,
building materials and mother-in-laws, depending on the task at
hand. As we drove back from the vehicle testing station, I turned to
SWMBO and asked her how it was that our lives had come to resemble a
Country & Western lyric – just a man, his gal, his truck ‘n’ his
trailer, driving into the setting sun. We thought it was funny but
you had to be there, I guess.
Joking aside, there’s hardly a day goes by when we don’t pinch
ourselves to check that it isn’t all a dream. In just the last ten
weeks, we have abandoned the Northern autumn, snorkelled in the
Pacific, paddled the Tasman, made new friends, hiked the mountains,
been interviewed many times, swum with dolphins, joined schools,
attended clubs, seen Venus and Mars in the same night sky, drunk
lovely wines and fretted over papers and formalities. Whilst we have
had the odd blue moment and it is very early days yet, each day seems
to confirm the rightness of our decision – days where the girls can
cycle to school with minimal risk, days where one’s word is still
enough to close a deal and days where the local pastor lets folk use
his open wifi connection for free because he’s paid for it anyway.
Leaving the friendly folk of Foxton and Horowhenua in the week to
come, we can only hope that we find their like amongst our new
neighbours in Kumeu.
[1] http://www.kumeudistrict.co.nz/
“Oh…Dear…Lord…”
My neighbour, whose fingers were clamped deeply and firmly into the headrest in front of him, was clearly not enjoying the flight and spent a good deal of it in the ‘brace’ position recommended on the card in the pocket in front of him. To be fair, a small propeller-driven commuter aircraft flying up New Zealand’s west coast is not necessarily where one would choose to be when springtime Westerlies are blowing in across the Tasman from Australia. Riveting though the in-flight magazine was, it was no match for the drama unfolding in the cabin during the one hour flight from Palmerston North to Auckland. After complimentary coffee and tea had decorated enough laps and the hostess had fallen over twice, the cabin crew gave up serving the in-flight breakfast snack and passed amongst the passengers with rosaries, lucky heather and next-of-kin forms. Massive air pockets sent the plane lurching earthwards, leaving me an inch above the seat straining against my belt, until our descent was arrested by vigourous updrafts that pushed me down into the padding like a large invisible hand. Combined with the gale howling the other side of the small Plexiglass window, these roller-coaster moments made for an interesting trip and the relief of being back on the ground was evident on the faces of my fellow passengers as we filed across the apron to the terminal building.
I had flown to Auckland for an interview with the deputy HR director of a large national organisation. The interview had come about as a result of a ‘float’ by one of the recruiters I am using. A float, I discovered, is recruiter jargon for pitching a candidate to a prospective employer without a particular role in mind. Whilst this might sound a bit hit and miss, New Zealand’s present economic climate, low rate of unemployment – most employable people are gainfully employed – and static population mean that even the best of positions might only receive two or three applications. This being the case, employers are keen to meet with a promising candidate in the hope that they can match them to existing or upcoming roles in their organisations. In this case, the float was a good one, not only from from my point of view but that of the HR director and operations manager I interviewed with as well. The organisation seems to offer what I’m looking for and, I’m reliably informed, their feedback regarding me was unusually positive, with a specific commitment to try and find a role within the organisation that I could formally apply for.
Suitably cheered by the positive response, I returned from Auckland only to find that I shall have to fly back again next week, for a pre-interview with another recruiter concerning a position with a utility company. Should this gives the impression that job hunting in NZ is simply a matter of jetting about meeting people, then let me set the record straight. Far away from our old lives and networks, I have found it hard to establish an effective daily job hunting routine and securing two interviews in two weeks belies the routine slog that brought them about. Given that we have no landline telephone and therefore no fixed internet access at the beach house, establishing some sort of routine has become essential to making any progress in my job hunting. Usually, this routine involves checking the career sections in the New Zealand Herald and the Dominion Post (Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays), highlighting suitable roles and creating a tracking file for each role or recruiter. In these files, I record all the ad details, emails, phone conversations and meetings regarding each role. Given that, as of today, I am actively working with seven recruiters on six separate applications, not to mention other agencies I am registered with or jobs I’m applying for direct, I need to be comfortable with my system and confident I am on top of all that I need to do each day. As someone used to having at least 2Mb broadband access, fixed line telephone and a home office space to work with, trying to work without such things has been more of a challenge than I had bargained for.
My iBook and my new Nokia 6680 are both Bluetooth-capable and this means, in theory at least, that I can get online and work anywhere I can get a decent phone signal and faster 3G access in the major cities. In practise, things are a little more difficult and this has proven to be the most frustrating aspect of life here for me so far. GPRS, that is to say a fast data connection via my cellphone, is pretty costly here and means a pre-pay phone like the one SWMBO is using is out of the question, so I chose the 3G phone hoping to benefit from a faster service on a cheaper account tariff. Without an established credit history, signing up for a mobile account without a credit limit has been a trial and, whilst I have applied for an open account cleared by direct debit each month, I have yet to hear whether or not this has been approved. In the meantime, I have discovered that there is nothing more infuriating than preparing a bunch of emails and attachments, only to have the connection drop halfway through sending your mails because you have reached your credit limit. I have four other options available; using the internet terminals at the local township library 5 kms away or the main library 20 kms away or driving 40kms to Palmerston North to use an internet cafe or the pay-as-you-go wifi access at one of the coffee houses. Of these, the wifi option is preferable as I can access all my own documents on the iBook without the hassle of having to transferring them.
This uncertain state of affairs has driven me to distraction and, to my shame, have caused more than a few periods of turbulence and dark clouds around the house. Difficulties and frustrations are magnified by the fact that, as a family, we are removed from familiar surroundings, estranged from friends and colleagues and in each other’s company twenty four hours a day. The kids have relished their time away from school and, in the absence of their usual TV programmes, have played together a lot more. The simple fact that they can now occupy three bedrooms, as opposed to the solitary room they shared in the UK, has helped to reduce sibling rivalries and tensions significantly but their noisy and boisterous games don’t make for the conducive work-like atmosphere. Likewise, having a boring Dad who is always asking for quiet and moaning about the noise can cramp the style of four energetic youngsters. The lack of a desk or office space means that I must either perch on the end of the dining room table or retire to an easy chair in the corner of the living room to work, using my iPod to blot out the mayhem and chaos that goes on around me. Occasionally, I retreat to the bedroom downstairs to concentrate or make a call, in the fervent hope that the person I’m calling can’t hear the fratricidal goings-on upstairs. Unused to spending so much time in each other’s company, spousal relations have been strained too. Be it a disagreement about whether we should get a second car (without a car, you’re pretty well stranded in rural NZ) or a misunderstanding about something that was said back in the UK, every conversation is a potential flash point. Without the routines and support structures we are used to, both of us are aware and afraid of getting into arguments that we can’t resolve easily, fearful of long silences at the dinner table and, despite the very necessary electric blankets, cold shoulders at bedtime. After the storm has passed, tentative peace talks usually identify the causal factor of any dispute fairly quickly and, with both parties agreeing a mutually acceptable solution, hostilities dissolve and the house takes on a cordial atmosphere once again.
Storms of the meteorological kind have also played a significant part in our lives over the last two weeks. The view from our living room window is made up of just three elements; sand dunes, sky and sea. Like coast dwellers since time began, we often find ourselves transfixed by the view. Here, a world away from the crowded view of our London flat, we marvel at the cloud formations that announce the arrival of another weather front and crashing breakers that deposit the Tasman Sea at our back door. Just today, I found myself struck by the fact that, at an elemental level, there is no physical barrier between the cold angry water that foams over the dark volcanic sand here and the warm, reef-protected lagoon off Rarotonga where we snorkelled amongst pipe fish and coral just a few weeks back. That said, as Captains Cook and Tasman and the other pakeha who explored and mapped New Zealand discovered, the coastal water here are influenced by the winds and waves of the Pacific and Tasman, not to mention the frigid waters of the Antartic and, as such, are prone to impressive storms around each equinox.
Conscious that the preceding paragraphs read like the moans of a ‘whinging Pom’ (see joke below), let me reassure you that we love being here and are thoroughly enjoying ourselves. How can one complain about a country where one can buy five double-scoop ice cream cones for $5 (£1.97) or a five minute errand takes an hour and a half because every one wants to chat and find out why you’re here? In our admittedly limited experience so far, we have found almost all Kiwis to be generous with both their time and resources. For instance, the local pastor, having learned of my lack of connectivity when the family attended church last weekend, immediately tracked me down and offered me the use of his Airport Extreme wireless broadband connection any time I needed it. This has meant that, in the last week, I have been able to work from his dining room table or, when I have just needed to send the odd mail, simply pull up outside his house, log onto his home network and hit the ‘send’ button in my mail application. We have received solid house buying advice from a waitress that tallied with similar advice from friends and a chance word in a $2 shop led to the loan of a cat basket when we needed to collect the cats from the cattery.
Despite our uncertain immigration status, the principals of both the local primary school and the local college have both been happy to enrol the three eldest girls, citing the need for them to get settled and make new friends as being more important than funding and paper work, at least for the time being. Both schools are made up of bright, airy single storey buildings laid out across large spacious campuses. Here, large playing fields with an abundance of climbing frames, play equipment and open air swimming pools with sun canopies are the norm even for the smallest schools. The classrooms are filled with artwork and project material that draws equally from both the Maori and Pakeha (European settler) cultures, alongside a multitude of All Blacks posters, which stand as testament to the strong national pride here as well as the fierce opposition the local teams dealt the British Lions in June. The general ethos in the schools seems to be one of work hard, play hard but have fun doing both. Come tomorrow morning, we will see if this is borne out as the eldest girls will start their New Zealand school careers, a little nervous of what to expect but excited too. Although the littlest has been attending an Early Years Unit at a London primary school since she was three, children here do not attend school until their fifth birthday so we’re hoping to sign her up at the local kindergarten in the meantime, so she can make friends and SWMBO can have a few hours to herself each weekday.
The landscape here is simply wonderful and we are truly lucky to be able to view the vast expanse of the ocean from one side of the house and the low mountains of the Tararua State Forest Park from the other. Any car journey affords great views of the hills across the rolling farms, wide flood plains and thick swathes of fir. The wide views and distant horizons have enabled us to see the complete arc of the most vivid rainbows we have ever seen. At night, without the light pollution that blights so many places these days, the sky is crammed with stars and, just over a week ago, we saw a shooting star streak across the sky, mirrored in the ocean below. The southern spring is slowly giving way to summer and the fields are filled with young lambs, calves and foals, all grazing on the rich grass of riverine meadows of Horowhenua, the region where we currently live.
Our nearest large town is Levin and it looks like many others here, based as it is around a main street that sits astride a State Highway. On each side, the highway is bounded by covered walkways and canopies outside the shops and stores. Interspersed with these are entrance to small shopping malls that run perpendicular to the road and often lead to large parking lots at the rear. More often than not, these are surrounded by the larger chain stores and supermarkets. The fact that these large stores are away from the main street helps to preserve not only the feel of an older high street but means that the smaller independent store have more than a fighting chance in grabbing their share of passing trade. At either end of the main street, the shops gradually give way to the larger commercial premises of car dealerships, builders merchants and other service industry outlets. The town boasts a great adventure park where the kids went wild yesterday until rain stopped play, a small aquatic centre where we swam today and a thriving cinema that shows world cinema releases alongside blockbusters.
Closer to home, Foxton is a small town built around a Main Street that is one block back from but parallel to State Highway 1. As the first settlement of the Manawatu, Foxton had aspirations to become the regional hub but, unlike most towns in the region, was not founded on a farming community. Founded by a Presbyterian missionary in 1848, the town only began to thrive when a flax mill was opened twenty years later, processing flax harvested from the surrounding swamps. The town eventually grew to support fifty mills and a thriving river port but Foxton’s growth was also it’s undoing. A wooden tramway (later railway) was built to connect it to the new settlement of Palmerston North, which lay 40kms inland. However, a depressed economy and the diversion of the railways to serve business interests elsewhere sealed Foxton’s fate, with it’s gradual decline ironically balanced by Palmerston North’s growth into a thriving university city. Today, a carpet factory, providing local jobs but itself under threat, is all that remains of this manufacturing heritage and the town is now reliant on tourism and crafts for it’s main incomes.
To the seaward side of Foxton lies Foxton Beach, where we are living in a house kindly lent to us by friends. The township is comprised mostly of homes belonging to retirees and beach houses (‘baches’), interwoven with the odd holiday motel and motor camp (caravan park). Intriguingly, I was told in conspiratorial tones by a local that a lot of single parents on low incomes move here, though quite what I was to make of that I am not sure. This little community sits in the mouth of the Manawatu estuary with a sailing club and slipway nestled alongside a bird sanctuary. Apart from the usual dairy (corner shop) and petrol station, commerce in the township also includes a second hand store that is never open, Mr Grumpy’s fish and chip shop and a small bar and eatery called Simply Balmy. All this is overseen and protected by a volunteer fire service who are summoned by what sounds like a nuclear attack siren, an enormous lifeguard station on the beach and a police station that is smaller than our living room. Whilst it is highly unlikely that I will find work locally or that we will settle here long term, it is a delightful area full of wonderful little towns and lovely people. Our time here so far has proven to be a marvellous antidote of to our many years of city living and a superb introduction to the country we hope to make our home.
Kiwi joke: How can you tell if an aeroplane at the airport is carrying Poms? The whining carries on after the engines are turned off!
Six people, twenty two pieces of luggage, three international flights over twelve thousand miles, seven hotel and resort rooms, four yellow cabs, one Hollywood premier and a swim in a waterfall – the last three weeks have been like no other in my life. Whilst I set out with the intention of posting my thoughts, impressions and feeling as we travelled, the simple practicalities of taking notes whilst in transit, finding time to write them up and securing decent internet access have conspired to extinguish the little incentive I had left at the end of each day. Moreover, I was conscious that I wanted my emigration experience to be a participative, family one, not that of a stand-alone observer watching from the outside, dutifully taking notes. So, rather than a day-by-day account of the ‘what I did on my holidays’ genre, which would undoubtedly turn out to be the written equivalent of viewing someone else’s holiday slides, what you have below is a collection of notes typed at various points along the way.
—
Staring at my own reflection in the toilet of a Air New Zealand 747, thousands of feet high over Hudson Bay, it still hasn’t sunk in. The redundancy has happened, our home and car are sold and our belongings together with our pets have been shipped to the other side of the world. The tearful goodbyes and leaving parties must surely count for something, as must the swapping of email addresses and promises to keep in touch, but I feel strangely hollow right now. The ever-increasing whirlwind that we have been through seems to have numbed me to a point where I cant quite put my finger on what I am meant to be feeling right now. I feel tired but that can be put down to the cumulative effects of recent weeks activities – the last days of commuting, the packing and re-packing, the phone calls and the visits, the arguments and the funny moments. I feel restless after too many nights when my mind wouldnt stop churning things which then gave way to last few nights of fitful rest on a friends floor until, with the arrival of this morning, there are, as the youngest would say, no more ‘sleeps’ to be slept. Most of all I feel impatient, no make that keen; keen for us to be done with all the planning, all the preparations and be on our way.
—
After two days in Los Angeles, we’re finally at gate 27 at LAX waiting to be called for our flight to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. The blinkered and zenophobic attitudes that are now part and parcel of airport transits in the US are enough to leave a bad taste in the mouth of any ‘alien’. Such Homeland Security hoop-jumping would be enough on it’s own but the local check-in agent here was keen not to be outdone. Despite Air New Zeland allowing us to check 12 bags and a child’s car seat in London, ‘Hello, My name is Raoul, how can I screw up your day?’ had other ideas. He of the name badge, nylon blazer and Supa-Size attitude insisted that we may only check 12 with his airline, regardless of any previous arrangement in London, for ‘security reasons’. Quite how a Mothercare fabric and polystyrene car seat poses a threat to the Free World is unclear but Raoul was unmoved by our logic. Unmoved that is, until we removed the smallest case, reducing the pile to the required twelve pieces, stating that we’d take it as carry-on luggage instead. With his frozen smile changing to a death mask, Raoul insisted on measuring it in the hope that it will be too big or over-weight but eventually. We tried not to smile as he begrudgingly accepted the cases & car seat to tag and send on their way.
—
Or so we thought. With the grinding inevitability that follows all Pyhric victories, Raoul has the last laugh. We arrive in Rarotonga in the early hours of the morning to find that we are short one piece of luggage – the car seat. Of course, it turns up later, after a day or so, just long enough to make sure we know who is really in charge. I should have known better than to piss Raoul off. I knew a military logistics guy who, upon being abused by a condescending officer heading for UK from the Falkland Islands, redirected the officer’s personal effects to a camp in Canada where they were snowed in until the spring thaw the following year.
—
I like many things about America and have a good few friends across the US but, make no mistake, there has been a definite increase in their very special brand of self-assured, swaggering arrogance and cosy insularity since 9/11. In recent months, when mentioning to a US-based colleague that we were emigrating from the UK, they would invariably ask ‘Which state are you heading for?’, as if the United States was the only option worthy of consideration. Strangely, there are a fair number of superficial similarities between the US and New Zealand: the grid-based street layouts; the canopied shopping strips of the small towns along the State Highways; the dollar sign and old Chevrolet pickup trucks are all reminiscent of small town America. However, within minutes of our landing in New Zealand, our progress through the arrivals hall at Auckland airport only served to highlight the difference in attitude towards visitors and the cultural mindset in general. Where immigration at LAX offered one queue for non-US passport holders and 8 channels for returning citizens, Auckland offered an equal number of channels and, for those like us with young children, a separate fast-track channel. Even with six passports and visas to be reviewed, scanned, processed and stamped, we were politely dealt with and on our way inside 15 mins. In a world that is increasingly wary of those who seek to leave their birth nation to seek a new life in another country, it speaks volumes that the NZ immigration officer actually smiled and wished me good luck in finding the job I need to secure the longer-term visas we need to remain in New Zealand.
—
There have been surprisingly few tears and tantrums thus far. We have had the usual arguments and moods but, as yet, no major explosions of emotions over leaving the UK for the unknown of our present life in New Zealand. Climbing wearily onto the plane for the middle of the three legs, the youngest was heard to say that she wanted to ‘go home’. Having been awake for the 12 hours preceding a 12 hour flight, it seemed that her idea of home was wherever she could lay down and sleep, which she promptly did for most of the flight.
—
With the snickety-snick of the hire car’s handbrake, we finally stopped travelling five days ago. For now, our home is a friend’s beach house, set at the end of a road amongst the wind blown sand dunes of New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. From the windows and the deck outside, we can watch large grey rolling waves, driven by the Westerlies crossing the Tasman Sea from Australia, break on the wide and wild expanse of sand that stretches for miles in each direction. The small township in which we are staying boasts a small bar, a smaller police hut, a fish and chip shop, a diary (corner shop), a service station, two schools, two churches, two bible camps, several hotels and camp sites, a sailing club and collections of small individual homes strung along quiet streets. Backtracking five kilometres back east brings us to the nearest small town which is pretty much the same but only larger by dint of the fact that it sits astride the State Highway, itself a simple two lane road with occasional passing places. Once the home to a thriving flax industry that is now reduced to one carpet factory, Foxton proclaims itself to be ‘Hometown, NZ’ on its sign and quite rightly, for it appears to be the quintessential small town with just enough of the necessary infrastructure intact to function and serve local folks immediate needs. Twenty kilometres south, Levin is a good example of the best of both worlds, the old fashioned canopied stores lining the main street and adjacent side streets interspersed with small malls and arcades of shops. Car lots and service industry outlets cluster at either end of the main street, just before the points where the speed limit signs allow the through traveller to accelerate back onto the rural highway. Tucked away behind the facades of the main street and down the side turnings, the chain supermarkets jostle with the small office buildings of the local professionals. This seems to be the pattern across a significant proportion of NZ with folks seemingly prize local services and streets fronted by family-owned stores, ahead of chain stores and out-of-town retail parks. Quite how long this state of affairs will last I’m not sure. With the weekend paper carrying a big feature story about the techniques supermarkets use to part shoppers from their cash, it would seem that the Kiwis may soon be subjected to the rampant all-conquering commercialism of the 24/7 megastore culture so prevalent in the Northern Hemisphere.
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It has only taken a few days to drive home (pun intended) the fact that New Zealand is a car-driving, road transport-orientated country. We are covering distances that we’d rarely need to in the UK just to get to the places we need to be in order to get our new lives set up. The nearest internet access, for we have no phone line at the house, is 20kms away in a public library but limited to simple read/write activities. For the high speed, high bandwidth access I need for sending CVs, downloading tax documents and handling any volume of email, it’s a 2 hour, 100km trip to the nearest wifi hotspot (in a Starbucks coffee shop of course) in Palmerston North. Already our London-raised kids are becoming hardened to the fact that if you want anything more than the local store offers, it means at least a twenty minute car ride. Given that the location of our first proper home in NZ will be pretty much dictated by where I can secure employment, I suspect that there are a few prayers being said for Dad getting a job in the heart of one of the cities and a home in the suburbs. Having said that, none of us have really begun to adjust yet. That we are here for the foreseeable future and not heading home after a holiday is slowly becoming clear and I am sure that each of us will have moments when we might wish otherwise. I came close today when the umpteenth attempt to get a rudimentary dail-up connection via my cellphone at the beach house failed, the lack of my familiar broadband connection to the rest of the world only emphasising the enormity of the decision we made in coming here. A couple of hours and a few words of prayer by SWMBO later, I managed to get connected, albeit at an excrutiatingly slow speed and the dark moment passed. Tomorrow sees that beginning of another week and the continuing tasks of setting up home and getting employment, though if the first week is anything to go by, we’re in for more cultural adjustments and frustrations mixed with new acquaintances and humourous goings-on.
This time next month, we will either be sleeping fitfully or watching cable TV in hotel rooms somewhere in Los Angeles, en route to the Cook Islands and ultimately our new life in New Zealand. Actually, as things stand at present, it is far from certain that we’ll have even got that far on our journey by then. Currently, we find ourselves in one of those Catch-22 situations where everything hinges on everything else and no-one involved seems particularly bothered about the outcome. Therein lies the naked truth of the matter: this is our family choice, not the removal company’s; this is our life-changing decision, not the immigration service’s; this is our leap-in-the-dark, not the estate agent’s. The place we find ourselves in is one of our own choosing and of our own making. We have wished all the chaos and confusion, all the bickering and spousal frustration, all the endless sibling disagreements on ourselves. As I type, we are awaiting news from our prospective buyer’s solicitor as to the date when we might reasonably expect to exchange contracts and move out. This is an improvement on last week, when we discovered that the same person had not only gone on holiday but had done so mistakenly believing that we had chosen not to go ahead with the sale of our flat. In turn, this has meant that we have had to delay the two-day pack and load session by the movers who will ship our belongings to New Zealand. As a consequence of this, there is a very good chance that our provisionally booked flights and connections will now have to be rescheduled, assuming that we can find six seats on the same flights and the same routes we had planned but later in the week.
Sitting in the sun-dappled garden of our friend’s house yesterday, I listened, as if to someone else, as we once again explained why we have chosen to leave all we know and love to move to the other side of the world without any guarantee that we will still want, let alone be able, to stay there. An outside observer might have caught an exchanged look between our friends or heard a slight hollowness in the oft-repeated phrases we trotted out yet, with redundancy just weeks away and a home far too small for a family of six, it still feels like exactly the right thing to do. As I cycled through London’s Hyde Park on the way to work one morning last week, a persistently vague thought began to crystallise and come into focus. As with almost everything in our lives, soon this journey will no longer be part of my daily routine and, although it will be replaced with journeys and activities as yet unknown, there are only a handful of such journeys in London left before me. In recent weeks, I have often find myself thinking “This’ll be the last time I do this” or “I wish I had time to do that before we go”, not so much with sadness as curiosity, as if I’d not expected to feel this way which, if I’m honest, is the truth. I had not expected to feel so attached to places, so bound to people, so linked to things around me.
Is this then an integral part of many an emigrant’s experience, a longing for things not yet lost, a mourning for an old life not yet finished? For me, it is not unlike the feelings I experienced when I knew a friend was losing his battle against cancer; bereft, disbelieving, empty and with so much to say yet unable to find the right words in the short time left. Now, almost a year after his death, I still keep his name and number on my mobile phone, as if I can still just call and talk to him. So, with the time for our departure coming up fast, perhaps I am seeking the emigrant’s equivalent of my friend’s telephone number, a talisman of my old life that I can carry into my new one. For me, with this thought comes a pleasing connection to a small act of kindness by a Kiwi friend a couple of years ago. She was travelling home to see her family before emigrating with her partner from the UK to Canada. Amongst her leaving gifts and good luck cards, I placed a small envelope which contained a small, faded yellow and green friendship bracelet which had recently worn through and finally snapped. This I had worn since the day my daughter made it and tied it around my wrist so, whilst I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, I was unsure of what to do with it. My friend’s departure provided inspiration and so, in the accompanying note, I asked that she bury the bracelet somewhere in New Zealand to act as a ‘magnet’ which, if the attraction was strong enough, would draw us there. I’m not normally given to such gestures or talk of destiny and usually find such sentiment mawkish in others. However, there’s no denying that I find myself more than tempted to believe that that small tattered bracelet, made with a daughter’s love and worn with a father’s pride, beckons our family southwards and will do so until we answer the call. It seems that we simply have to take this step to continue our journey as a family, no matter where it takes us.
In the week since I have returned home, I have woken in the night more than a few times, bidden by my bodyclock to be doing something other than sleep. The first few seconds of wakefulness have been typified by uncomprehending confusion for, no matter how familiar the surroundings of my bedroom might appear in the minutes that follow, my first thought is a conviction that I am in an airport hotel somewhere in New Zealand. My next thoughts are that I don’t know where the toilet is and, more worryingly, I’m in bed with a woman. In the agonising seconds that follow, one half of my befuddled brain tries to work out where the toilet is whilst the other half desperately ponders on how I am going to explain the woman in bed to SWMBO. After what can be no more than ten or more seconds, there comes the slow and blessed realisation that I am actually in my own bedroom and the sleeping form next to me is in fact the wife and not some Kiwi supermodel who would stop at nothing to prevent my return to the UK.
Having never travelled to the other side of the world and back before, I have no idea whether this sort of behaviour is normal after long haul flights or in fact I’m undergoing some sort of forty-something mental meltdown. After a week, I am seemingly back to normal and confident that the three-in-a-bed activities of the last week are behind me. That said, the disturbed sleep and disorientation has served to emphasise two things to me; just how far away New Zealand is and, somewhat surprisingly, how quickly my consciousness adapted to the solitary existence of such a road trip. Although the phrase is a little over-worn, ‘alone not lonely’ would be a fair way of describing my time in New Zealand for, whilst there were periods of lonliness in which I missed SWMBO and the kids, I was very fortunate to meet some wonderful people. These people ranged from bus drivers and waiters to the siblings and parents of folks I know and, without exception, each and everyone of them enhanced my trip. So, in the fervent hope that I will avoid gushing like a starlet at the Oscars, I would like to mention a few of those who helped make my visit the experience it was.
Linda, Gideon, Susie, David and Amy for their hospitality, friendship and good humour. There are not many busy families who will alter their plans in minutes to welcome a jetlagged semi-stranger so warmly – and then invite him back twice more. If ever there were a family who embody what we envisage for ourselves, we need look no further.
Rita and Steve for their generosity of time and advice. Steve gave up a whole day to give me a whirlwind tour of Auckland’s suburbs and amenities, introducing me to the culinary delights of pies and fresh Kiwi produce then fitting in a quick swim in the Pacific before joining Rita for a wonderful dinner and an evening of great conversation.
Di and Paul for taking me to my first English theme pub to watch my first Super 12 game…and then taking me to an Irish theme pub after Ireland beat England in the Six Nations.
Rae and Peter who made the diversion to Palmerston North so worthwhile, offering me the biggest lunch of the trip and a marvellous drive through the Manawatu-Wanganui countryside – not to mention Rae’s waist-expanding cream tea picnic!
Brenda (to whom I can now put a face after years of swapping emails on a mailing list), who knows a great place for organic coffee and muffins and kindly invited me for Friday afternoon drinks with the open source geeks at Catalyst, with whom I talked computing, politics and semantics whilst playing table tennis with a bat in one hand and a beer in the other before joining Brenda for a late supper with her partner Callum.
Tammy and Mike who took a few hours away from launching their Move2NZ migrant website to show me the delights of Christchurch, Governor’s Bay and Rapaki and provide me with a wealth of advice that only experienced migrants would know.
I spoke to a great many people who, in their professional capacities, provided me with advice concerning immigration, employment and relocation. Although it is my intention to write on the more practical aspects of our emigration experience elsewhere, I would like to especially mention Isobel, Gwenda and the team at SearchWorks who, being great folks to deal with, even lent me a desk and phone when Princes Charles’ visit threatened to make me homeless in Wellington. Honourable mentions are also due to Phil at Candle, Nathalie at Momentum, Shelley at OCG, Brenda at WestPac, Gillian at Drake, James at Comspek and Bruce, Sara, Tracey and Patrick at Duncan & Ryan.
In closing, I would like to point out that the supermodel featured at the beginning of this piece is, of course, an attention-grabbing literary device and nothing else. Really.
my lo-fi ears are listening to Broken Stones/Paul Weller