Unemployed and wandering

I am unemployed.

Farewell, late afternoon work view.

And out of it, I got a card with a puppy on the front, some rosehip oil (as requested), a wee London travel guide, and a very large morning tea that lasted over lunch and through the afternoon. There was a very nice mildly entertaining speech from my boss, who has been among the best and most mildly entertaining managers I've ever had. The day felt oddly hollow though, and very long. It was good to get to sleep that night.

Now I'm doing things like looking up transport to the Singapore Zoo and best places to buy electronics, and book groups in London. I wondering what films they have on the plane, and what meals I'll get to choose from, and if I'll find a set of headphones I can't break. I'm backing up my music and files on yet another drive, and working out what music and podcasts to have on my mp3 player for the long flights.

My bag is packed and to requirements - 22 kgs, after removing all the books I had in there. We've put some shoe glue on the little flesh-wound tear the Australian bag handlers left on it last year.

The number of people who've responded negatively when I've mentioned moving to London has surprised me (I don't know why, I know what people are like). They haven't been malicious, just negative, in a nice small passing way that might make them feel a little more comfortable about their own lives.

Farewell, annoyingly small work kitchen
seating area.

"I'm moving to London!" I tell someone I know from University.

"Wow, that'll be expensive. Good luck finding a flat."

Or, at work:

"It'll be interesting, going from New Zealand where it's good to the UK. There's a whole group of people from the UK working in X team who've emigrated to New Zealand because there are just no jobs and the living conditions are just, you know, not good."

And although these people barely know me, and their opinion doesn't matter, it makes me really appreciate those people who have been positive just that much more.

"Oh, you'll love it in London," without a moment's hesitation or fragment of doubt. And, when I even begin to hint at doubt, a sincere, "You'll have no trouble finding a job." And even just a smile and, "Enjoy every moment of it." So thank you, you positive people, you've really made a difference, and I bet you weren't even trying.

So tonight is my last night sleeping in NZ. It's been cloudy and rainy today, but not so cold as I thought. I went for a walk in the suburbs, to a water tank right at the edge of farmland. Our hills have such distinctive shapes and shadows, with little gullies holding catchments of scrub, furrows and ridges of grass and fence lines, and old solitary pines on the horizon. I've been staying with my boyfriend's parents and being fed delicious meals. It has been most nice.

We don't fly out until tomorrow evening, which gives me enough time to realise I've forgotten something incredibly important and try to force into my bag.

I really, really hope my bag isn't lost or opened by evil luggage people in transit. Or ever, for that matter.

Time to go out wandering.

On Monday

On Monday there was snow.

My first memory of snow is at Ruapehu. I was still quite little - it may have been before I started school, though I'm not sure. It was me and my brothers and some of my cousins, and we were all wearing jumpers and woollen hats. My cousin threw a snowball at me. I was pretty upset. I think I cried. And he made another snowball and gave it to me, and told me to throw it at him.

It didn't really snow at home, growing up, not in the sunny (dry, droughty, sunburny) Hawke's Bay with an apostrophe because I'm not lazy with my apostrophes (one should not be lazy with such treasures of the art of language). I do remember it snowing once, and I walked with my brothers up the hill in my shorts, and came home with bright red thighs that could hardly feel anything.

On Monday it snowed unexpectedly. Even our scientifically-guided ever-accurate meteorologists did not predict it. I got up - my last morning for a little while in the place I grew up - and informed my mother it was snowing. It fell light at first, rather unimpressive. Snow doesn't really impress me. When it snowed in Wellington I was unimpressed. "Pah," I said, "this snow is a pale novelty for the small minded," and returned to my important volumes by Virgil and Homer. The hail storm the following day, I informed everyone who would listen, was by far more impressive than the pathetic drifts of powdered ice that floated weakly from the sky in a last ditch attempt to exist.

My cows in the snow.

But on Monday everything seemed to go black and white, which was oddly unsettling. It fell harder and lighter - how is that possible? You never get that with rain. It was little bits of cloud flaking off. It settled in a thick layer on the turkeys that were too stupid to move. My favourite cow licked some off the macrocarpas. 

But the best part was shortly after the snow stopped and the sun came out. There were colours again, even before the snow began to melt - which happened quickly. The snow made everything so bright. It just threw the sunlight everywhere.

Look at those trees - the big climbing-tree sycamore to the left, the eucalypt to the right, and a tree turning autumn in the middle. Across the road behind them, the poplars my grandfather planted just from cuttings, all losing their leaves now. And the thick springy hedge that I trim with blunting clippers and climbed on once, only to put my hand on a small paper wasp nest and get stung repetitively on my ring finger. It will be a while before I see them again, these trees, and that big hill covered in rocks and seashells from thousands of years ago.

This Saturday just gone, with the help of my father, two brothers, my boyfriend, and a sister-in-law, I packed up my belongings into a yellow trailer originally bought to transport expensive racing bicycles. I was forced to sit between driver and passenger as we dropped people off, and then it was just me and Dad and the middle sibling driving up to Home. I balanced on the edge of sleep but never made it down. I hadn't been to sleep before midnight for a week, which is a Serious Matter for me these days. I've been missing sleep. I've been thinking too much, and worrying, and wondering what the heck I'm doing even though I know. When we got to the farm, in the dark, it was raining. We parked the trailer underneath the new hay shed made for concerts and weddings.

And eventually I went to bed in the house I grew up in, and it was so very nice to go to sleep there.

There are less than six days until we leave the country.

When I'm in Singapore, I'm going to look for a new phone that has a better camera that will better focus on snowy landscapes in the sun.

We are also going to go to the zoo. Apparently there are no fences, only pits. I hope the pits between me and monkeys are very very wide and deep and filled with sharks that love monkeyflesh.

There's no time for us, Wellington

Apples on Brougham Street, on the way home from whipped cream.

There's no time for us, Wellington.
Well, actually, there are two weeks.

But today I went for a run jog, and it felt for a while like part of a slow, bittersweet, already nostalgic farewell. 

The Town Belt begins at the top of my street, just above my house. I went along the dirt tracks, through the pines, slowed at the view over the city and harbour then headed down the steps and down Oriental Parade. The sun was warm but it had only really just come out, and it was looking out from behind a layer of late autumn. And I was listening to this:

It's just a great song, from one of the best movies ever made. Make sure you listen to it right up to the end. Close your eyes for that bit. (Not if you're jogging, though - there are lots of people on Oriental Parade on a Sunday, and some of them walk in self-righteous, indignant gaggles).

A view of Oriental Parade

I stopped where the railing breaks to let you down onto the stones when the tide's low, while Freddy asked An oyster catcher glared at me and took off over the grey harbour, and I looked back towards the city which looked like it always does, but a little more poignant. I've lived here for six years now, and I know Oriental well. I hide on the beach with books, and stand on the ocean steps in the wind, and walk beside the water every day to work, even when it's raining.

Maybe it's not as dramatic as Connor watching his love age in a heart-wrenching montage, which perhaps looking back it came to seem to him in his lonely immortality. My jog certainly doesn't involve the same impress level of skill or athletic prowess required in a sword fight to the immortal death. But it was nice to apply a little bit of melodrama as I ran along the concrete, mouthing the words and confusing a poor old lady who thought I was talking to her.

I ran home. Then I went down to the bakery my end of Courtney Place and bought a cream-filled pancake (the cream donuts were gone) and sat by the mechanical spider camera in the sun while I ate it. It was pretty good.

A few more things I want to do

• Ride a red fox 'cross the moors
• Actually make it to a spot where they did filming for Highlander on Skye
• Visit the Devil's Causeway
• Scale the Sagrada Familia
• Have dumplings in Singapore
• Continue practising basic German so I can test it out in Germany
• Drink Earl Grey in a badger's sett (he is welcome to join me; otherwise, I'm happy to lock him in the cellar)

Undressing my room

Last weekend I took down my Dragon Age II poster.

I peeled the Lady of Shalott from my wall, rolled up an idyllic pastoral scene of animal apiarists and mammalian millers, unfastened a tearful graveyard-loiterer in a dark corset (she was probably crying because of her misformed left breast) from her resting place above my desk. You should see the resulting clump of blutak. It's big enough to hold the damaged light fitting in place.

This weekend I packed away my books. I made a list as I went (Box I: Hamlet, Dracula, The Bell Jar, etc; Box II: An Introduction to Jungian Psychology, and so on). I found a poetry collection my great aunt gave me for my 21st birthday, with a letter attached to the cover, noting some of the poems she knew well - poems her mother read to her and my grandfather at bedtime, her father's favourites, hers. I found books that were gifts from an assortment of friends over the years, and scattered their names throughout my diligent catalogue.

And then I started to take apart a tall and slender kitset shelf for easier transportation, and realised someone had affixed the back most firmly with nails - making the whole process of carrying it out to the hallway (tripping over several empty boxes on the way), laying it flat, and then unscrewing all screws a complete waste of time. Indeed, I had to rescrew some screws so the shelf would maintain a degree of structural integrity.

Eventually my room will be naked, but for now it's just a mess. I have too much stuff. How did I come to have so much stuff? Where does this stuff come from? How is the world so filled with stuff? And why do I keep things like mini play FlyBuys cards and lace-edge heart-shaped eye patches? I don't need them.

I'm going in three weeks. Three weeks. Then I'll be leaving for the other side of the world to live for two years. Meh. Even italics can't make it seem real.

Maybe the packing does, but just a tad - I've packed and unpacked so many times in the last few years. I don't really think it'll properly sink through my thick skull until I'm standing in an inordinately long queue at the Raffles Hotel in Changai Airport waiting for an overpriced Singapore Sling.

Pre-enactment: that moment you realise you're moving overseas (courtesy sumabeachlifestyle)

I thought I'd use the end of some of these blog entries to build a list of things I want to do while in the UK, and in Europe.

So, here's a start for you:

• Visit the Orkneys and the Shetlands
• Get a bagel and a hunk of mozzarella from Sainsburys, grill the former on the latter, and consume
• Meet Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
• High-five a puffin
• Do a whisky tour (somehow I failed to do that in 2013)
• Visit Tintagall and pull a knife from a clod of earth
• Buy some new socks and underpants (I kind of just need to do that regardless of where I am in the world)
• Visit Keats' grave in Italy