Monday 14 July 2014

Farewell and thanks for all the fish



All good things must come to an end. And so this will probably be my last blog post from Australia. 

I’ll be leaving these shores on July 12th, seven years and one week since I arrived. Being made redundant has forced us into making decisions that we’ve been thinking about but putting off for a long time. My wife and I have discussed leaving this country often in the last few years. Work was grinding both of us down and our two year old has cousins in Ireland and New Zealand, but none here.
So we kind of knew that Melbourne would not be our long term home. But that doesn’t make leaving here any easier. We’re heading to Edinburgh where I’ve secured a nice contract job for a year. After that we’re planning to settle down in New Zealand but as the last couple of months have shown me, you can’t take anything for granted.

Things were pretty hectic for the last few weeks. We sold our car and all our furniture to minimise our possessions in preparation for the move. We got one of those self help books that tell you that you should only have ten possessions and they should all be capable of fitting into carryon luggage on a plane.

This has been the hardest thing for me. I’ve moved country four times in my life and on each occasion I’ve bundled all my possessions into boxes and shipped them to my new home. When I came to Australia seven years ago, I filled six tea chests with my book, DVD and CD collections. Nothing was discarded, not even the “Now that’s what I call music 847” CD that came free with a Sunday newspaper. But we collect possessions for reasons that go beyond usefulness. I spent a year of my life alone in Luxembourg. Television was rubbish (although it might have been better if I could speak French or German) and there was no Internet to keep me amused.

So I spent a lot of time rearranging my CD collection. Sometimes by Artist name, sometimes by Album name or genre.  But more often than not I’d arrange them by emotional connection. The folk albums from my teenage years when a protest song would grab me with passion. The CDs I was given as gifts in the early days of relationships before bitterness made music melancholy. The angry industrial rock music I bought in my thirties as I reevaluated my early innocence.

This time we’ve decided to be more conservative and brutal so as to minimise the amount of stuff we’re taking with us, if for no other reason than we’ll have to move it again in twelve months’ time and it’s a lot more expensive to ship goods from Australia than it was to bring them here.

The CDs were the first things to go, lovingly collected since I got my first CD player in 1991. I have them all on my Ipod and to be honest can’t remember when I last played one. But I was sad to see them go none the less. I had to send them to the dump because finding a home for several hundred angst ridden country and western albums is not easy.

Next up was my DVD collection. At least this time I was able to save the disks and have them now in a single case. The covers and sleeve notes have also made their way to the dump. This also upset me however. They used to say that the definition of a working class person is that they had more DVDs on their bookshelf than books. But I think the advent of classic mini-series like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire”, not to mention all those Scandinavian noir programs, has led the middle class to accumulate collections that rival the 19th century leather bound classics that used to line book shelves.

However, I don’t want to appear as a complete bogan. I also had an extensive book collection that I’ve been building up since I was a teenager. I had these proudly displayed at home, mainly to impress visitors with my eclectic taste and intellectual prowess. I had to face the reality that I’ve rarely read a book twice. So these were all boxed up and sent to a charity. Hopefully somebody in Melbourne will get to enjoy all those books on the Irish Potato famine and Hurling.

In the last week we sold our furniture and car. I’ve never been much of a salesman but thankfully the Internet takes care of that.  You just have to take a picture of your stuff and to put it up on Ebay or similar sites and to let it do its thing. It’s fun and a little weird to watch people bidding on your bed but at least it gave us a little cash flow for the move.

So we squeezed down our possessions into four suitcases and a couple of tea chests that are following us by airfreight.

Thankfully the apartment we’ve found in Edinburgh is furnished because I couldn’t face spending time in Ikea.

So finally it was time to get on the plane and say goodbye with a heavy heart. Somehow I knew that I would feel this way until we’d crossed the equator and excitement about our new life would kick in. 

While I knew Melbourne would not be my final home, it is still a fantastic place to live, with fantastic restaurants, sport and public transport. But all good things must come to an end. I’ll certainly miss all the great friends I made but at least I’ll now be closer to all the old friends I had in Ireland and the UK. 

I am a restless soul and want to see as much of the world as possible and to immerse myself in different cultures. Scotland is next on the list. I’ll keep posting from there, hopefully more regularly than I have been.

There is a light beyond these woods, do you think that we should go there and see what makes it shine?