You Take It With You When You Go

Yes yes, I know.

Forgot to set the alarm, pressure of work, something came up etc. I'm always striving to be more regular, but you know how it is. Not much of a blog that only gets updated every four months, and I look with envy at favourite blogs that are updated several times a week, or even a day ! Then again, what else are these people doing ? Favourites at present include www.drawn.ca and http://cynical-c.com/index.html Have a look some time (not now) and marvel at what blogs should be like.

In the meantime open a bottle, put the kettle on, hit the Delete button, or do whatever you do when you settle back to read the latest old chat from New Zealand, then read on...

Minutiae is what has pretty-well dominated our lives this past few months (with brief respites in the form of Carole's brother and family arriving for their NZ tour, and a visit from our good friend Sally from Nelson, who pruned and replanted the garden, fitted cedar blinds in the living room, put up pictures, talked sense and generally straightened the place out). The honeymoon period is over for us and the quest for income and social contact continue at a tortoise pace. I hadn't realised you couldn't build Rome in a day (or six months) and the osmosis of making new friends and contacts creeps at a petty pace. It's not to say we haven't made progress; the house renovations are nearly complete and we both have some gainful employment, the children are settled in school, we're finding our way around and my study is developing that 'lived-in' look that some of you would recognise if you saw it....

New Zealand is actively encouraging immigration at the moment. The tax base here is too small and we need more working population to spread the load of running the economy a little wider. At the same time there are strict controls on who can come in and what you can qualify to do when you get here. This is the problem Carole has had with her Early Childhood work. In New Zealand there is a specific qualification for this, called the Early Childhood Education certificate. Despite having seven years experience at the cutting edge of early childhood education in Scotland, and despite there being a desperate shortage of competent and qualified early childhood educators in New Zealand (the papers are full of ads for them), Carole finds herself defined as an unqualified 'auxiliary' in early childhood centres because her post-graduate teaching degree is not recognised by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and her seven years experience is discounted as irrelevant in the process of converting qualifications. It's been a frustrating and demoralising seven months of dealing with bureaucrats who seem to have travelled through a time vortex from the 1950s.

Ironically Carole has now been offered a job as a University lecturer, teaching ... the Early Childhood Education certificate !

The Pope died after several months of steady deterioration and obvious pain and frustration, and I was sad about it. I didn't actually know the Pope, by the way, but he was part of a familiar landscape and I guess the sadness is as much about the continual passing of my own life. He was appointed (anointed ?) Pope the year before I exported myself to the UK and he's been a constant fixture like the Queen is, and even Margaret Thatcher was for all those terrible years. Champagne flowed the day she resigned (where were you ?) but in March the news was full of the tears and prayers of Catholics and others saying farewell to John-Paul. Farewell, old man. We will not see your like again.

Death touched us a couple of months ago when a dear friend from Edinburgh mailed to tell me her little nephew had died in some pointless freak accident and I was deeply sad that I couldn't jump in the car and make the short trip from Peebles to offer hugs and bumbling support or make tea or something.

I continue to teach my little class of gifted children once a week, now in a school not far from here. The class is a quirky group of individuals, and the school is a busy friendly humourous place with lots going on and a good community atmosphere. This week we were working on Paper Engineering - a subject close to my heart as you know - and what I don't now know about polyhedral shapes, fractals, cutting and pasting, and relative strengths of cardboard just isn't worth knowing. Bridges next week, then stop-motion animation. Meanwhile our hall bookcases are filling up with origamic cut-outs, geodesic shapes and working models of things. Once again the internet provides.

Sara and Simon are busy next door as I type this, wrestling with the Incredibles computer game and periodically falling into disputes over the number of minutes each has been 'on'.

It's winter here, with night-time temperatures falling to three degrees last week but the days generally around fifteen. Apparently British immigrants often find the winters here colder at first because New Zealand houses seldom have central heating. In the winter it feels colder and damper inside the house, towels don't dry and windows get misted up. Our house is of relatively solid construction; wooden framed with a veneer of brick and tile, so it heats up quite well using oil-filled electric heaters that look a bit like central heating radiators, but on wheels. Houses here are generally made of wood, and covered with wooden weatherboards attached horizontally. When we first visited New Zealand together we flew into Wellington airport and Carole, looking out the window, commented that the landscape seemed to be covered in garden sheds. It does look like that when you're used to a built landscape fashioned from brick and stone. A sense of impermanence and fragility.

My other job (returning to me for another paragraph) takes me all around Auckland to offices and businesses where I train office staff in how to use software, install new stuff and troubleshoot installations that have gone wrong. It's proving to be most enjoyable and is giving me a cab-driver's knowledge of Auckland's streets (and thus opening yet another career path) as well as daily contact with a wide range of people. My other-other job teaching drama is developing through a weekly evening class (currently on stop-motion animation) and providing drama workshops to schools. It's a nice portfolio of jobs. Who knows where it will lead ?

There's a general election looming in New Zealand, probably in September, and the campaigning has already started. There are two major parties here; Labour and National, and a plethora of smaller parties ranging from the fairly significant New Zealand First party (unofficially known as the Winston Peters First party, after its charismatic leader) to the fairly insignificant ACT party, which is forecast to die out in the next election. The difference in New Zealand is that elections are decided using a proportional representation system rather than first-past-the-post, so the fairly significant minor parties (ie Mr Peters) often find themselves holding the balance of power. Winston is widely predicted to be the 'king-maker' in this next election, with the bestowing of his handful of seats deciding who is Government and who Opposition. National (read Conservative) and Labour (read Blairite in a dress, without the Bush factor) are level-pegging in the polls and it seems to be anyone's game, though I suspect there's a give-Labour-a-bloody-nose element to National's support (their leader, Don Brash, has as much charisma as Aussie PM John Howard). The spider in the corner is the newly formed Maori Party - the only overtly race-based party in New Zealand (unless Greens are a race) - which could well take a chunk of Labour's vote for itself and thus bring Brash in by the back door. To be honest I'm a bit puzzled by the whole thing and I need that guy with the ears to appear on TV and explain it all to me. Instead TV One has a heavy set man with a bizarre beard (what is it with political reporters ?) which distracts me too much to take him seriously.

An old old friend got in touch recently, having tracked me down through the OldFriends website here, and we chatted on the phone in much the same way as we used to when we were both 15. We were at secondary school together and shared one of those inexplicable (and, luckily, short-lived) interests in spotting and collecting serial numbers from modes of transport. Thankfully we encountered no trains on our daily trip to school (a lifetime's sentence could have begun) so we catalogued trolley buses. These electric buses were connected to the overhead power lines by means of two long sprung poles attached to the roof. They are graceful machines, moving with a mournful but purposeful groaning sound which rises and falls in pitch with the speed they travel. Occasionally the poles would spring off the overhead power lines with a loud electric crack, and often blue sparks, and the driver would grumpily stomp to the back end of the bus and manoeuvre the poles back on to the wires with pulley ropes.

Alastair (for that is his name) now runs a photography business in Wellington, remotely operating a camera which sits atop a long vertical pole attached to the back of his truck, taking 'aerial' photos of buildings, parks, schools or whatever else comes his way. It's a brilliant idea and I've considered taking it up myself, with Alastair's help. We're still talking about it (amongst other things) though there are considerable obstacles to it all.

The British and Irish Lions are here at the moment and rugby dominates the headlines. Along with the rugby team and its entourage has come several thousand supporters, and to coincide with this many New Zealand companies are mounting high-profile recruitment drives. As I mentioned earlier, New Zealand is keen to attract immigration into its small workforce, and history shows that - on average - 10% of the supporters accompanying visiting British sports teams return to New Zealand within a year to settle ! It's an extraordinary statistic and proves that nothing sells New Zealand as a place to live better than seeing the place, even for a brief holiday. IT companies are particularly prominent in the campaign as there's a huge shortage of IT professionals here. Things are promising for pharmacists too, apparently. Do you know any ?

Yes yes, Douglas, I hear you cry, this is all very well, but what music are you listening to at the moment ? OK. On my Musicmatch playlist at the moment is .. just booting it up .. won't take a minute .. ah, here it is: The Devlins, Mazzy Star, Joy Division, Oasis, The Monks of Silos, Blink 182. What does that say about me ? No idea.

Reading ? Smiley's People by John le Carre (a bit of an uphill walk, I have to say).

Films ? Best I saw recently were Mystic River and In My Father's Den.

We had a mid-winter break with family and friends this past weekend over at Manukau Heads, near Huia. This is on the West side of Auckland, leaving the city and driving through the hills and down a dirt track to a peninsula that sits at the mouth of the mighty Manukau Harbour, the larger of Auckland's two harbours. On one side of the beach is the harbour straits, and on the other side is the Tasman Sea. There’s an old lodge house there by the beach which they rent out to groups, with bedrooms, a big sitting/dining room with a snooker table and open fire, industrial strength kitchen and thoroughly modern shower block. It’s a short walk to the peninsula; a black sand beach strewn with tiny white ramshorn shells and wind-patterned with lighter brown sand. Along the beach is a series of caves opening into the cliff face. It’s a dramatic landscape, surrounded by jutting hills and a regenerating kauri forest. Living in a city now we seldom venture beyond its boundaries and it was reassuring to find we could be truly in the wilds only an hour from home.

The photos show you something of the landscape.

What's your news ?