patchwork vertebrae November 30, 2004  

Ended up spending a lot of Sunday afternoon making despairing circles around Bury St Edmunds, heading for the Flying Fortress pub. Directions from the The AA turned out to misdirect us at a particular roundabout (first time that's happened, though - they're normally very reliable), so we ended up looping around and through Great Barton several times in increasing confusion and annoyance, before chancing upon the correct roundabout and spotting a sign for the pub. The confusion between the A143 and A134 (different, but right next to each other) didn't help either. The pub itself was quite nice, but probably - on balance - not worth the tremendous stuff-around to get there. Most interesting thing about it was the location. When I went there last (about 18 months ago), it was a matter of driving through a lot of sugar beet fields on a minor B-road and then hanging a right to this completely random pub. Now the slow sprawl of Bury (300,000 new homes in the Southeast, rememeber!) has caught up with it on one side, so it's slowly being swallowed by mindless, heartless, soulless newbuild housing estates.

I used my powers for evil the other day. It was curiously refreshing.

Today's theme: Coldcut's Christmas Break by, funnily enough, Coldcut. Courtesy of the cheeky cheapie issue of Coldcut's Greatest Hits - which would be better titled with the addition of ...While They Were Still Signed to BMG and Hadn't Gone Off and Formed Their Own Record Label Yet. It's basically an excuse for BMG, who presumably own the publishing rights, to reissue the various singles Coldcut produced during the late 80's and 90's. So nothing from the Ninja Tune era, but it's got good early period stuff. It's all very much of its time, and sounds a bit dated now, but Beats and Pieces holds up well, as does Find a Way (with excellent vocals by Queen Latifah). Good for a fiver from Fopp, anyway.

I reckon that after the recent electroclash revival of early '80s electronic music, we're due for a revival of late '80s hacienda-style house. You know you want to.

Also on the headphones: DJ Format's A Right Earful mix tape. Good conemporary leftfield hip-hop compilation, and notable for containing the only hip-hop namecheck for poutine that I've ever heard.

Not that I make a point of obsessively checking hip-hop lyrics for references to French-Canadian ethnic food, mind. For all I know, MC Solaar talks about poutine all the time.

Is it me, or is it ironic that I'm getting spam for Cialis 'soft tabs'. Surely that's the problem it's meant to fix, isn't it?

they hauled stonehenge from here November 26, 2004  

Completely serious about the "going home" thing. Basically, having our feet back on the ground in NZ made us realise how much we miss about home, and how we really want Rebecca to grow up as a New Zealander. Of course, the intention was always to move home at some point prior to Rebecca starting school (which would give us a return date of early 2009), but being home reminded us of so much that we'd forgotten. No blinkers, mind: we're quite aware that there are a number of downsides to living in NZ (isolation, weak dollar, claustrophobia inherent in having such a small population), but there's also a hell of a lot of upsides. We've had a lot of fun over here in the last six years, but it's time to go home. There's a lot of good things about living in the UK. But, y'know, there's quite a few negatives as well. And we just realised that, on balance, New Zealand has the edge. So we're returning home. Now all we have to do is convince all our friends to emigrate, and we're clover.

So we've decided to go home just after my 30th birthday (October 2005). Have a big birthday party, sober up, hop on plane. Job done. This also has the advantage of giving us the better part of a year to finally get around to doing all the stuff we've been meaning to do for a while. You know how when you're living somewhere, you never bother with the tourist stuff? Yeah, that. So we now know we've got 11 months to do the tourist stuff. It's like, we don't want to go cold turkey on the UK, so we're weaning ourselves off slowly. And I get to see the Preseli mountains. Woo hoo!

Finally got around to watching The Wicker Man last night. Excellent film, good reputation well deserved, creepy as all 'eck. Very '70s paranoia movie: great sense that everyone else is in on the joke, you're not, and it's going to be bad when you find out what the joke is. Reminded me in tone a lot of the Lovecraft novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, in the sense of small isolated town, something's clearly going on, but none of the locals will admit it. If you've not seen it, highly recommended.

Today's theme: The Fabulous Originals' It Ain't Fair, But It's Fun Pts 1 & 2. Red-hot 70s funk from the deep Midwest of America. High calorie, high octane, well on it.

needles the size of drainpipes, some of them November 24, 2004  

So, to recap:

• Bush has been re-elected.
• In the kerfuffle over hunting, the UK passed the Civil Contingencies Bill, which allows the government to override any act of Parliament in a time of "national emergency".
• Compulsory ID cards are about to be introduced.
• A driver who hit and killed a cyclist, then drove off, was fined £450.
• We're about to have the coldest winter in decades.

Sod it, we're moving home.

No, really. October 2005, just after my 30th birthday.

i'll give you everything you ever dreamed of button November 23, 2004  

I feel as though my legs have been filled with alka-seltzer. It's very disconcerting - a kind of fizzing ache that starts around mid-thigh and gets worse going down towards my feet. As far as symptoms go, it's bloody odd: uncomfortable and slightly painful, but in a really finely graduated manner. I certainly hope that this bloody ache goes away soon, it's really starting to annoy me. Still, since this thing started off with headaches, progressed to chest and back pains, and is now in my legs, I can only hope that by Thursday I'll just have a sore toe.

In the meantime, I'm walking around very gingerly, like an aging cowboy or particularly fresh-faced choirboy, because the soles of my feet ache. Feh!

It used to be that if you wanted to pick a New Zealander out of a room full of people, you just picked the one wearing a bone carving. Satirically known as the kiwi identity tag, these are a traditional piece of Maori art, carved from either bone or greenstone (pounamu, a.k.a. nephrite jade), traditionally given to people about to go for a journey to give them luck. Pretty much every New Zealander I've met overseas has one (or more) - most days, I wear one given to me by my Nana for Christmas 1992. Used to be that i fyou saw someone with one, you could be pretty sure that they were a Kiwi - and any given expat Kiwi was likely to have one.

These days, you just look for the person in the room who's wearing an Icebreaker top. Seriously, I don't know any expat NZers (or, indeed, many people back home) who don't own at least one of their garments. Merino wool is the absolute business, and we've really taken to it. So a tip to all you non-Kiwis out there - this stuff ain't cheap, but it's really worth it.

don't speak too soon November 19, 2004  

Turns out that that virus that I had the other day was just biding its time, and got its second wind shortly after my last post. Having managed to get to work on Monday and Tuesday, I spent most of Tuesday afternoon with the worst headache I've had for years - it felt like my head was in a vice. This meant that my normal sunny disposition took a back seat, and I was in an incredibly foul mood all afternoon. I finally staggered off home at 5:30 and basically collapsed. Two days in bed later, I'm feeling a bit better, though I'm still headachy and having cold sweats. I'm not sure what this bloody virus is, but it's certainly been keeping me busy.

On the plus side, I did get to hear someone use the phrase "fuck off" (as an example of something they've heard from their foster children) on a live phone-in to Radio 4 yesterday morning. Whoops, I guess they thought that they didn't need tape delay on that one.

at least there's no mucus November 16, 2004  

I had a slightly odd realisation the other day: I don't currently own a garment suitable for my lower half (that is, trousers and shorts) that doesn't have some kind of problem. I have two pairs of shorts and three pairs of trousers that I'd wear with regularity; all of them have popped seams, pockets half-ripped off, or holes worn through the material. My Mum once claimed that I was hard on kit; I'm beginning to think that she was right.

I've just spent a day and a half flat on my back with some odd virus. Saturday night, during an exceptionally pleasant visit from/dinner with Jared & Sharyn (aka the Old Skool Edinburgh Posse, as opposed to the New Skool Edinburgh Posse of Morgue and Cal), I acquired a throbbing headache and a deep-seated muscle ache across my entire body. This worsened on Sunday, so I spent most of the day in bed. Combined with Heather's ongoing cold (international travel, man, it shafts your immune system), we were both in bed and asleep by half eight. Now I'm just feeling moderately crap, but thanks to the wonder of paracetamol I'm out and moving.

I cleared off all the items from my "To Do" list today. I am happy. I am a simple man.

I'm making a list of things to do before I hit thirty (11 months and counting!). So far, I've got ten items, most of which could be accomplished with a reasonable driving holiday. It's kind of odd trying to figure out what you'd like to achieve in the next year, with a reasonable degree of realism (row across the Atlantic: out; get another tattoo: in). Fun though.

don't lick the doodlebugs November 13, 2004  

I'm in an odd mood. Hence, today's entry is brought to you by Short Attention Span Press. No paragraph longer than 80 words, promise!

I was in the locksmiths, getting a couple of spare keys cut. While the bloke was doing his thing, I had a look around. They were selling - alongside actual useful items such as safes, lockboxes, and hardened steel chain - dummy security cameras. £17.50 gets you pure deterrant factor - a mock camera with a blinking red LED. For deterring burglars insufficiently forward thinking to be wearing hooded tops and carrying a crowbar to smash the camera with!

Classic NZ moment: David Lange's 1985 address to the Oxford Union arguing that Nuclear Weapons are morally indefensible. One of the moments (and policies) in NZ's history of which I am proud. Well worth reading, both as a convincing argument and an example of excellent rhetoric.

Worryingness: how easy is it to get a perfectly legal web site killed by its ISP? Very, very easy indeed.

There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made out of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.

Jerome K Jerome

Dig it, daddio. Gotta get me some of that Brooks love for my road bike - the Topeak on it at the moment does funny things to meself after about 40 miles.

Community activism!

Our work local is a popular gig pub. The noticeboard has a number of want ads for band members. At lunch today, we saw a notice advertising for a "Drummer / percussionist / programmer". Bit of jazz skiffle, some bongos, and debugging your PERL script?

Interesting Guardian article about Pixar.

him and john wayne November 12, 2004  

For probably the best analysis of recent American politics, I highly recommend the insightful, yet sensitive web site fuckthesouth.com.

You won't regret it.

carrot and schtick November 10, 2004  

We got back into the UK on Saturday. It was an incredible change to be back here - while we'd been gone, daylight saving had stopped, and the autumnal weather meant that when we got out of the airport at 4:30pm on Saturday we walked out into a rainy, grey dusk. This was quite a shock to the system - but not half as much as the 2.5 hour drive back from Heathrow to Cambridge, in the pitch dark, pissing rain, on the M25/M11, with only four hours' sleep in the last day and a half. An interesting experience, but not one I'd like to repeat.

However, the miserable homecoming did throw into sharp relief what an excellent time we had while we were away. The trip as a whole was great; Malaysia (both ways) was a really good time, and it was fantastic to be back home in NZ for a bit.

For anyone contemplating international travel, I can highly recommend travelling with a cute, personable infant. Babies aren't just a skirt magnet (although we did get a lot of additional attention from the flight attendants), they are an invaluable aid to international travel. At both Heathrow and KL, the airlines opened a spare check-in desk for us. All customs and immigration officials we met smiled at Rebecca (who usually reciprocated) and stamped our passports with a happy mien. Hotel staff were friendlier than normal. We got on planes faster. It rocked.

And before you ask: yes, Rebecca does travel well. She didn't cry particularly on any of the planes (no more than she normally cries when she's hungry/damp etc), not even during take-off and landing. OK, a 13-hour flight is never going to be a picnic with a 7 month old baby, but it went surprisingly well, considering. Rebecca did a good line in going to sleep for protracted periods (3-4 hours at a time), which helped. She also did a very good line in not being too fussy about her food, and in coping well with jet lag. Style.

Malaysia was good fun. We had a day and a half on the way there, and a full day on the way back. We did the standard tourist stuff - walked around the Petronas Twin Towers (didn't go up them, but there's an excellent park by them), went up the Menara KL, went to the Bird Park, etc. One of the best points had to be on the first day on our way out - we were in the central city park as dusk fell. Heather had just taken Rebecca for a paddle in the (huge, funky) kiddies paddling pool, and we were having a mellow wander through the foliage. As the muezzin sounded the call to prayer from the local mosque, the bats started to come out and dart around us, flying and jinking through the air with grace and precision. Summer twilight with bats. Lovely.

New Zealand was excellent. We managed to spread ourselves quite thin, and ended up catching up with a good few people. Apologies to those we missed - 16 days isn't actually that much on the ground, especially when you end up spending four of them driving around the country. It was great to be back on the ground in the old country. Memorable highpoints include:

• Hooking up with the whanau in Auckland and meeting our wee niece Evelyn and nephew Joseph for the first time. They seemed pretty keen on Rebecca, too.
• Staying in Ohakune for Charlotte and Ben's wedding. Nice wee town, good bush walks (we did the Waitonga Falls walk with Rebecca in her backpack), excellent wedding (moving ceremony, joke about apostrophes, great food, booze didn't run out), and good cafes.
• Seeing old friends back in Wellington and Auckland. Boozing at a dodgy Irish pub (hey, they served pints of Monteiths), meeting Livia, having coffee/dinner with a wide assortment of friends, generally chilling.
• Seeing Wellington per se. It's interesting to realise how much I miss the city itself. It's genuinely a really nice place to be.
• Cafes! Thank god, proper cafes again! From Astoria in Wellington to Replete in Taupo, and everywhere bloody in between, it was great to be back in a land with decent cafes. England can't do a decent cafe, and it's hard to find a good pub (nb not bar) in NZ: swings and roundabouts. [addendum: I'm informed that Brighton has good cafes - I'll have to check and report back]

No bonus points for overly aggressive drivers (it's true: as a nation, we really are a pack of overly macho bad drivers), constant rainfall during various bits, and the growing strength of the NZ dollar. Yeah, sure, the exchange rate goes up just before we go home? Curse!

Main resolution from the trip home: it won't be 3 1/2 years before we go home next time.

Classic line from an internal email today: "We weren't aware that we needed working practices."

On the headphones: True by Trinity Roots and Hot Planet by Gahu. Respect.

whoops! November 02, 2004  

Sorry, transfer quota maxed out during our sojourn in NZ. Further details when we get back to the UK (ten minute login from Cat and Ben's home PC in Auckland). Executive summary: trip excellent, natives friendly.

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