Where did the left go?

Is it wrong to say you agree with Donald Trump or Nigel Farage? I instinctively hate both of them but have found that occasionally I find myself guiltily nodding in agreement with them. It’s usually on the bits where they appeal to the common man, of which I am a proud member. I know they are bullshitters and don’t mean any of it but I’m not smug enough to believe that I’m immune to their carrier cries to populism.

2016 has been a strange year for politics. Everything I’ve long thought has been challenged and as the year closes, I thought it would be opportune to look into the dark recesses of my heart and try to figure out what I actually believe in.

My political awakening happened when I was ten. I spent that long hot summer in England, staying at my aunt’s house. She was a landlady who owned several rundown Victorian tenement blocks in the city centre that mainly housed Irish labourers. One Tuesday morning she brought me into town to buy me my first watch. Needless to say, I set out that morning with a gay heart. The sun blazed brightly in the sky, the sweet shops contained exotic delights that weren’t available in my Irish home town and I was gripping the hand of my kindly aunt who was about to endow me with a present.

An hour later, I was a bitter and confused child who had learned that the world was a cruel and unfair place where the poor were kept in their place.

My aunt had stopped off on the way to the shops to collect some late rents from her unfortunate tenants. This involved entering some of the hovels she passed off as attractive residential properties.  I can still remember the smell. It was a pungent mixture of sweat and urine with an overtone of mould. My aunt was targeting the tenants who worked the night shift. There were two to three beds in each room and many of the beds were double booked. The stained grey sheets would still be warm when the night worker arrived home and the day shift labourer had left for the day.

She woke a number of these men and whispered threats of eviction while searching the pockets of the trousers which were draped across the only chair in the room.

It had a profound effect on me and I guess in hindsight was my first realisation that the world is split between those with capital and those in desperate need of a roof over their head.

When I was twelve, I wrote my first essay in secondary school. We were allowed to choose our own topic and I decided to write about the middle east crisis and the nasty treatment that Israel was imposing on its Palestinian neighbours. My English teacher didn’t appreciate the sentiment and that was the first challenge I received from the great unwashed, otherwise known as the right wing.

Later on in secondary school, I wrote a couple of pieces for the school magazine on the subject of American Imperialism in Central America and the differences between Socialism and Communism. My new English teacher was more benign but still left a patronising comment on my work “He has no heart who is not a Socialist at twenty and no head who is still one at thirty”.

I remember voting for the Labour Party not long after my thirtieth birthday and thinking “Fuck You”, although that language might have just proven him right and that I had no head.

I then spent a year of my late teens in what turned out to be a Trotskyist party with secret links to the what was then the Soviet Union.

I went on of course to become an Accountant and have spent most of my time working for dollar chasing, corrupt American Banks who would impoverish an entire continent while sipping cocktails in a posh New York restaurant. But I just saw it as a job and tried to do no evil. I was even once part of a shadowy group called “Accountants for a Labour Victory” which campaigned, unsuccessfully, for Neil Kinnock in the UK.

As the years have passed by, I’ve tended to vote for left wing parties wherever I’ve lived and engaged a lot of friends in pointless debates on the merits of internationalism or the corrupting influence of parish pump politics.

But the events of the past year have shaken my core beliefs. My heart wept when I saw the plight of Syrian refugees and I instinctively felt like I was privileged to live comfortably in the West while many in the world need safe refuge because of the actions of the West. But the Brexit vote and the election of Trump made me realise that immigration is a double-edged sword. While it gives refuge to those who need it, it is also used by greedy Capitalists to drive down wages and trample over the few rights that the working class still have.

I have struggled with this paradox and it seems I’m not alone. The left is adrift and rudderless in almost every developed country as it struggles to come up with a saleable message in this post global meltdown world. And of course, Trump and Farage charged straight into the vacuum that this created like riders on the four horses of the apocalypse. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more despairing. For most of my life, I’ve lived under right wing governments wrapped in an arrogant comfort blanket on the left. Secure in the knowledge that we had the code to the secret to human happiness if only the foolish electorate would come to their senses.

And now we have lost that code. The old politics of trade unionism, community solidarity and the drive for equality are lost in a fog of globalisation, jihad and austerity. We live in strange and troubling times, but it’s also Christmas and hope comes with a January flower.

Down and Out on Queen Street

The blue and white Police tape was stretched between two lampposts on Queen Street, causing the early morning commuters to step into the road as they passed. Most of them slowed to sneak a peek behind the heavy green tarpaulin erected there where Policemen in full body white overalls were busily marking out bloodspots and placing samples carefully into plastic bags and test tubes.

Billy’s body had been removed four hours earlier. It had lain there under a woollen blanket since it was discovered by a staff member from Dunkin Donuts who was locking up for the night when he made a ghastly discovery in the shop’s doorway.

Dunkin Donuts was closed for the day out of respect and the inability of customers to get past the forensics team to their front door. The McDonald’s next door, being McDonalds, was open, having used free hamburgers as a tool to negotiate that the Police tape got moved two metres to the right and that their door was unimpeded.

Fifteen police officers and three paramedics worked on Billy’s body from the time it was discovered to the time they wrapped up and removed the tape and tarpaulin. Donuts were back on the menu when the evening commuters were walking back down Queen Street.

So Billy got far more attention from the public service after he died than he had ever received when he was alive. Billy was homeless. Originally from Samoa, he had come to New Zealand to work in a meat packing plant in South Auckland that closed when its owners realised that they could do the same thing for half the cost elsewhere. Inability to pay rent had pushed him onto the streets and then a growing addiction to methamphetamines had driven him further into the dark underbelly of Auckland’s homeless sub culture.

Queen Street is the financial centre of Auckland and also hosts shops selling Hermes’s handbags for $8,000 and Swiss watches that cost so much that you would need a Swiss bank account to fund them. In the daytime it heaves with pedestrians walking six abreast along its broad footpath. Office workers mingle with students, tourists and shoppers and the colours and faces of the whole world can be found there.

But at night, when the shoppers and office workers have gone home, a different group descends upon the street, clutching tattered old sleeping bags and dog eared blankets. They all seem to have their own allotted doorway where they try to find shelter from the rain and wind that charges up Queen Street like a cavalry battalion on its way to war.

Homelessness is a global phenomenon of course, but I have never seen it in the quantity or state of destitution as you witness in Auckland.

It jars of course against the traditional view of New Zealand. This country likes to describe the place as “Godzone” in the same way as Australian’s describe their homeland as “The Lucky Country” and Ireland thinks of itself as “a little piece of heaven that fell out of the sky.” None of these are entirely accurate of course, unless a lucky country describes finding yourself in a vast land full of bounteous mineral deposits and squandering the resulting benefits. Godzone and a little piece of heaven suggest that God actually exists and is careless about his real estate and doesn’t mind having his name shared with a laser tag venue.

The advertising associated with Godzone focusses on mountains and rivers, comely maidens doing tribal dances and the All Blacks. It never includes a photo of Queen Street at 1am. It’s the country most Kiwis would prefer not to think about. The dark world that comes out at night when they are tucked in bed dreaming of sheep.

By the following morning, the street was back to normal. Stressed office workers grabbed overpriced coffee on their way to team meetings. Tourists huddled around a map on every corner. And bleary eyed Chinese gamblers stumbled into the daylight from the windowless casino at Skycity as they made their way to the Hermes shop to spend their winnings.

Amongst them you could find Billy’s friends, emerging from doorways and dark alleys with their worldly belongings on their back. Many of them had left flowers at the spot where Billy fell and some of them were gathered to swap rumours about his demise and tell tales of happier times. The Police were around and asking questions. But they weren’t really interested in answers. The case had already been filed under “Another homeless guy gets high and falls and bangs his head.”

I live near a large park that has a toilet block and a shower. Battered old camper vans and dented cars turn up each night and families sleep there. There are many more people in New Zealand who live in garages or garden sheds, pushed out of normal housing by unemployment or the high costs of rents and unavailability of social housing. But in many ways, they are lucky ones, clinging to at least a remnant of warmth and shelter. Billy and his friends are at the bottom of this social ladder and Auckland is a cold and wet city in winter and doorways don’t come with mattresses.

I don’t have all the answers of course and I’m not arrogant enough to roll up in a new country and tell them how to run their affairs. Many people will be sleeping on the streets of Dublin tonight for example and many people will be in on the streets of Auckland handing out sandwiches and hot soup. I won’t be and therefore I’m part of the problem. But it can’t be beyond the talents of the Irish or New Zealand governments to solve a problem that affects 1% of the population.

Billy sparked a little flurry of interest by falling and banging his head on a busy street. It’s just a shame that I and everyone else here didn’t show enough interest in him when he was alive.

 

Death and Taxes

I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who first coined the phrase that there are no certainties in life, except Death and Taxes. To be honest, I think he missed out on a couple. Jose Mourinho complaining about the referee after Man United loses is a certainty as is the fact that a man will never have the last word in an argument. Even when he thinks he had the last word, the truth is that he’s only had the first word in the next argument.

I mention Death and Taxes because it’s the name of the play I’m currently rehearsing. After a six year gap I’m taking to the stage again, to play a balding, fat, middle aged egomaniac. So I won’t even have to act.

But the title did get me thinking. Not about death, there is time enough for that later. No, I’ve been thinking about taxes and why nobody wants to pay them.  My first job was in a small Accountancy practice in Ireland. It became clear to me early on that most clients engaged us to minimise or avoid paying tax altogether. To my eternal shame, I watched various shady activities occur and said nothing. I would have been treated as a fool if I did as the culture in the office was clear. Tax was evil and anyone who could get away with not paying it was just being sensible.

This was and is a particular problem in Ireland. Taxes were originally introduced by the English and not paying them became a point of honour and a mark of rebellion. I also think that in a Catholic country, the portrayal of tax collectors in the bible doesn’t help. The upshot of course of the self-employed and farmers not paying their fair share is that tax rates have to go up to make up for the shortfall. And this encourages even more people to avoid tax.

I have to admit that I have bought into this group think over the years. Most of my career has been spent in the off shore Funds industry, which for all its regulation, is essentially a mechanism for rich people to hide their ill-gotten gains beyond the clutches of their local tax collectors. But we acted like Walt in Breaking Bad. He just made the Meth. What people chose to do with it was their business. We worked out how much money people made on their investments. Whether they chose to pay tax or not on this was none of our business.

I should also point out that while I was working in Edinburgh, I did so through my own limited company. While I didn’t do anything illegal, I did make good use of the liberal rules around expense claims and distributions.

But in general, I’m a tax compliant soul. I’ve paid taxes in a number of countries. Enough to buy the British a Chieftain tank. Enough to pay the generous pension of an Irish politician. Enough to buy a new Mercedes for the Grand Duke of Luxembourg and enough to buy all the razor wire for Australia’s off-shore detention centres. But I’ve also paid for lots of good things in those countries and that’s the point. We don’t get to choose what our tax is spent on. We just get to vote for the people who will spend it.

I’ve been unfortunate enough to meet people over the years who don’t share this view. They hold what I would charitably call right wing opinions, or if I was uncharitable, individualism bordering on fascism. These people believe in only the strong surviving. That those who can should pay for private hospitals and schools and look after old people within our own family structures. And tough luck if you can’t afford this.

Taxes and the distribution of resources that results are the price the well-off pay for an orderly society. You need to keep a lid on the furnace of resentment that is fanned by capitalism. The Scandinavian countries understand this best and they recognise that this leads to a better quality of life for everyone. Most western countries do just enough to keep in the lid on things. Occasionally, it bubbles over and the masses take to the streets in search of a fight with the police or to pinch a television from the local electrical store. 

And this brings me to Apple. Many people here in New Zealand are amazed that the Irish government is refusing to take the billions that Apple have been ordered to pay. They are also amazed that Ireland and Apple have gotten away with this scam for so long. The defence that both parties give is that it is legal. This may well be the case. It’s also legal for a sixty year old to marry a fourteen year old in some parts of Asia. It’s legal in America to execute a mentally retarded fifteen year old.

But none of these things are moral and ethical and I wonder why nobody has called out Apple or the other global companies on this issue. Apple sell their phones to people who can read because they have been educated by tax payer money. Their shops are protected by tax payer funded police and their intellectual property rights are protected by the laws and legal systems in countries that are paid for by tax payers.

We pay tax because we benefit from the larger settled society that this creates. Apple benefits from resources paid for by the taxes of others but chooses to look at their shoes when the collection plate comes their ways.

And that’s why I’ll be discarding all the Apple products I own. In truth, this amounts to a single nine year old IPod, which has amazed me in its longevity but makes me look like a luddite on the train. Henceforth I will listen to music and podcasts on my phone, just as soon as I’ve done some research on Samsung’s tax payments.

 

Kiwi Experience

I’m walking up Queen Street on a Tuesday morning in August. Winter has come to Auckland with a bang and the rain is sweeping in horizontally while a wind that found its energy in the Antarctic is finding its way into every gap in my clothing.

Winter came as a bit of a shock to me.  I had been seduced by the story that Auckland sits on the same latitude as Southern Spain. Then I remembered that no one in their right mind would visit that corner of the Iberian Peninsula in January.

I came to the junction with Shortland Street and noticed a gaggle of millennials huddling under a canopy from the rain. Their stylish clothing and backpacks marked them out as Europeans tourists and I wondered why they had chosen to visit New Zealand when the weather is at its foulest. Then I remembered that most of them will be on a ‘gap’ year. That period between University and the real world, when in return for mediocre grades, their parents hand over a wedge of cash and tell their offspring to go off and discover themselves.

 Most will be disappointed with the discovery, which will highlight their inability to drink as much as they thought they could and prove that they are just as unattractive to the opposite sex abroad as they are at home.

But for some, they will realise a joy of travel, of meeting new people and trying new things and that feeling will never leave them.

Logistically, this group probably worked all last summer on the fruit farms of Queensland, travelled around Australia in autumn and then pitched up in New Zealand as the winter winds start to pick up speed. They should have done it the other way round, of course. Come to New Zealand in autumn and then visit Northern Australia in winter, when the humidity has passed and the temperatures are in the high twenties.  But the young have to learn to make their own mistakes.

As I was passing them, a large green bus pulled up and the backpackers scurried forward and formed an orderly queue. “Kiwi Experience” was painted on the side and I was transported back more than twenty years to January 1996 when I first came to New Zealand and boarded that same bus. Well not the same one exactly. The company has obviously made a lot of money since then and invested it in a modern fleet. Back in my day they were driving buses that looked like they had been rescued from the Solomon Islands after the Japanese abandoned the place in 1945.

I started my adventure in Christchurch and spent a month travelling around the South Island. I arrived at the pickup point on a chilly Monday morning, clutching my pristine copy of “Lonely Planet’s Guide to New Zealand 1996”. I cast a wary eye over my fellow travellers. I had turned thirty that year and noticed that I was almost ten years older than anyone else, apart from the bus driver. I contented myself in the knowledge that at least I was paying for my own trip.

They were all carrying the same book but theirs were dog eared and well thumbed. Most had already travelled around the North Island and so while I was the oldest on the bus, I was also the least experienced in the mysteries of back packing.

I learned later that afternoon, when we pulled into a hostel in Kaikoura, that is recommended that you bring a sleeping bag when staying in shared accommodation. Luckily, Kaikoura had a number of shops geared for this sort of emergency. I purchased an overpriced bag and waltzed back to the hostel with the air of somebody who had researched sleeping bag options and had made a conscious decision to wait until visiting that shop in that town before buying one.

I went on to have one of the best months of my life and still have the scars to show for it. When the old green bus pulled back into Christchurch four weeks later, I said goodbye to the Germans, Danes and English people that had shared my journey. I kept a journal and the back page is full of messages from those fellow travellers. One message, from a German friend I shared a few drinks with, stands out.

“To the only man I know who thinks beer is more important than oxygen.”

That kind of summed up that whole trip.

It was on that trip that the first seed was planted. I came back to New Zealand many times since before finally achieving my dream of living here.

I gathered my scarf tighter as I passed by the group on Queen Street and made my way to work. I didn’t envy those backpackers. I didn’t pang to join them. Those bus trips are for younger people and even at thirty; I was already pushing the envelope. I admired them and wished them well and liked the thought that they would discover the majesty of New Zealand and would bore their friends back in Dresden or Leeds with endless photos of waterfalls and snow-capped mountains on their Facebook page.

Every generation gets to discover the world for themselves and to wrap themselves in that delusion that they are first to see that hidden beach or rare bird. These kids were no different to my fellow travellers back in 1996. Although I noticed that none of them were carrying a copy of “Lonely Planet’s Guide to New Zealand 2016”. No doubt that’s all online these days and they can find it all on their hand held electronic devices. I had a new CD Walkman with me on my travels in 1996 and thought I was surfing on the cutting edge of technology.

I wish them all safe travel and hope that they enjoy themselves as much as I did. I will always have my memories and the smug satisfaction that I started my trip in January and everywhere, even New Zealand, looks better in the sun.

 

Been looking for a job but they are hard to find.....

Back in August 1982, I sheepishly returned to my old school, whose doors I had vowed not to darken again when I finished my last exams two months earlier.

I had been planning to go to University without giving a second thought as to how I would fund it. My grant application was knocked back at the last minute and as jobs were as rare as Irish gold medals at the Olympics, I was forced to eat humble pie and seek out the help of my old careers guidance teacher.  He suggested that I speak to a local Accountancy firm that was looking for trainees. The rest as they say is history, or geography to be more precise, as the accountancy qualification I went on to attain has brought me all over the world.

This month I celebrated 34 years as a working man. I say celebrate but perhaps endured would be a more accurate verb. I’ve had good jobs and bad. Ones that paid more than the effort I put in and many that paid less than I deserved. I’ve had great bosses and terrible ones and worked with lots of fun people and more than my share of psychopaths. And ironically, sometimes the fun people and the psychopaths were the same person.

I’ve never really had to go looking for a job; they have usually come looking for me. I am lucky in that I’ve built up a network of friends and colleagues throughout the world who have helped me find work. New Zealand has been no exception. I have a friend who gave me the email address of the CEO of a Trustee Company. It took a few months but I eventually got a reply from the CEO and I’m now happily working away.

It took six months for me to find this job and in that time I met every agency in Auckland, applied for 72 roles, had 10 first round interviews, 3 second round interviews and 1 personality test. And in the end I got this job after a 10 minute chat with the boss over coffee.

I never like to speak ill of people or reduce an entire profession to a cultural stereotype, but the people who decide to become recruitment agents make estate agents and used car salesmen look like choirboys. And as we’ve also bought a house and a second hand car in the last six months, I’ve had experience of them too.  But I’ll leave that for another blog.

Most of the recruitment agents I met took great delight in telling me that I’d made a dumb decision to come here in the first place. They misunderstood my experience and ambitions and made commitments for future communication that the rarely lived up to. But the most irritating thing was the smug sense of self-importance that they displayed. It was bad enough being patronised by them but I also had to put up with their outrage when they discovered that I’d been whispering sweet nothings to another agency or had the cheek to approach a company directly. Hell hath no fury like a recruitment agent scorned. I wouldn’t mind so much if I was the only candidate that they were putting forward for a particular role. But of course, that chat up line they gave you about how you are perfect for a particular position is being repeated to others. It’s like having a girlfriend who cheats on you with all and sundry but goes ballistic if she finds a text on your phone that wasn’t addressed to her.

It’s ironic because recruitment agents in 2016 are about as obsolete as VHS players. These days, everything happens ‘On-line”. A company called Seek have the market pretty well sown up here, but Linkedin are muscling in on the business too. It means that it’s very easy to apply for a job and if your CV is already in the database, you could apply for 100 jobs on your phone before breakfast. And many people do. By being on the internet, you’re advertising to the whole world and as a result, a relatively low key job in Auckland will get 2,000 applications from people looking to move here from India or China.

Needless to say, nobody reads these 2,000 applications. The same technology that allows them to be delivered seamlessly, allows them to be deleted just as efficiently. The backend software reads your application looking for key words or compares your most recent role to the job advertised. It’s an algorithm designed to get rid of 98% of the applications immediately. Of course, they don’t want to appear callous, so the software allows you to set a time frame before the rejection emails are sent out. Local legend has it that a large Insurance company installed this software but forgot to set the time delay. So after carefully crafting a cover letter and agonising over the structure of your CV, you would load it into their system and get an email back two seconds later that started with the line “We have carefully considered your application but regret to say…..”

It took me a while to figure out the algorithm but when I did I started getting interviews. I would rage against the inequity of this system but the truth is that I employed similar tactics when I was recruiting. I was once trying to recruit a book keeper and received 400 hand-written applications. Knowing I wouldn’t have time to read them all, I discounted all those not written with a black pen.

And at least it is unlikely that on-line algorithms will have class or gender based filters built in, such as discounting candidates from rough suburbs or because they are female. Unfortunately, these filters were often unconsciously applied in the “good” old days when job applications were reviewed manually.

The job I have now is a contract role but I’m talking to them about a permanent position. If I get it, I’m tempted to stay here until I retire because I think I’d rather eat my arm off than meet another recruitment agent.

Apologies for my tardiness

Hello loyal readers.

I have been quiet lately. Mainly because I'm trying to write a novel and that's taking up my creative juices. But I have joined a writer's group which requires you to write 500 words on a given topic. I thought I'd share the two most recent pieces I've written. Enjoy.

St Patrick's Day

James hated when St Patrick’s Day fell on a Sunday. He had very few pleasures left in life and one of those was to call into the Irish Club in Mount Albert for a pint on his way home from mass. Most weeks, it would just be him and Mary the barmaid and she was clever enough to let him enjoy his beer in silence without frivolous conversation about holidays and the weather.

But if Ireland’s patron saint was celebrating his birthday on a Sunday, then the club would be packed from 8am with backpackers dressed as leprechauns and twelve year old girls with fake tans and gaudy Irish dancing dresses.

James would go along none the less.  It was better than staring at the walls and waiting for the evening TV to kick in. Mary smiled and waved hello as he entered and pointed to a chair in the far corner with a “reserved” sign in front. She brought him a pint and apologised about the noise. 

“It’s just one day a year James. We’ll be back to normal next week”.

The band were murdering a Van Morrison ballad but James did his best to ignore the racket. He flicked through the ‘Irish Echo’ that he had picked up on the way through and skimmed through stories from a country he had left fifty years earlier and could barely remember. 

A sweaty hand reached across the table towards him. “Happy St Patrick’s Day” its owner said. James stared at the hand and then upwards along the green rugby jersey dressed arm to the Guinness hat wearing head. It was young fresh faced kid, clearly just off the boat like thousands James had seen before. 

“Yeah, same to you” he said and then buried his head in the paper.

“So what part of the old country are you from?” the fresh faced kid asked.

James hated this. The pointless conversation that would lead invariably to him talking about Jenny and how her passing had left a hole in his life and left him dangling like a loose tread at the other side of the world.

“If you don’t mind, I’m reading the paper. You lot have it so easy compared to us who came out in the fifties. This is just a big holiday for you. There was no skype or email in my day son.”

He returned to the paper and pretended to be interested in a story about Ireland’s latest boy band.

“You really think it is easier now? I think it’s harder”, the fresh faced kid said as he leaned closer. Do you know what it feels like to see your family on Skype but not to be able to touch them?  To be able to read all your friend’s updates on Facebook and feel that you are so close but not quite there. To have your nephew raise his hand to the screen and yet not be able to hold it? But listen, can I get you a beer?”

James put his paper down. “That would be very nice. And when you’re at the bar, can you ask Mary to get the band to turn the sound down?”

Letter to my 17 Year old self 

Kia Ora,

You won’t know what that means and you’ll wish you had a hand held devise in your pocket with access to all the knowledge in the world. But that’s just science fiction, huh?

It’s good to see that you are still working on your poetry, even though you think it’s maudlin and self-indulgent. I know you are struggling to find words to rhyme with forlorn and rejected. Don’t worry. Those words will come, along with many other words similar to rejected, but that’s another story.

I picture you sitting at your bedroom window looking at the forest to the north. There is a light beyond those woods, my man and one day you will go there to see what makes it shine. But there is plenty of time for that.

I can hear your mother screaming at you to get your hair cut and I can see your rebel scowl of defiance. I hate to break it to you, son. But the most crushing disappointment you will face in your life is the day you wake up and realise that your Mother was nearly always right.

Anyway, you’ll be getting your first passport soon and that hair will follow you around for the next ten years like a Police mug shot. Imagine the 27 year old you and your first overseas business trip when your boss sees that hair in your passport? And don’t get me started on tattoos.

And when you get that photo taken try to find something sensible to wear. I know you tell your friends that the woollen, sleeveless, pattered vest you wear with that chaffed, collarless shirt is a fashion statement. If not for today, then at least for some future date.  Well, all I can say is that it’s been 34 years and I’m still waiting for that look to come into fashion.

I like that Che Guevara poster in your bedroom but you shouldn’t expend all your energy protesting at visiting American presidents. You may not believe me, but there are many worst American presidents to come and you will need some of that passion for the future.

I know you are sitting there with no money, having just been dumped by your first girlfriend and facing a tsunami of exams. But you will come to remember this as the best year of your life. When most things were still a possibility and not a disappointment, when mountains were there to be climbed and not avoided and where your default emotions were curiosity and wonder.

You liked Leonard Cohen even back then. Why don’t you slip one of his cassettes into your Walkman? Put on Tower of Song and you’ll hear a lyric that will no doubt dismiss with youthful bravado. But one day you will come to understand its meaning.   I ache in the places where I used to play. 

So play on, young man. Play on.

Welcome to New Zealand

I first came to New Zealand in December 1995 and stayed for four months. I wanted to move here permanently at the time but couldn’t get a work visa. It’s only taken me twenty years to rectify that issue. 

A lot has happened in my life in between and New Zealand has changed too. They have electric trains now for example. But one thing that hasn’t changed is my love for this country. It feels like I’ve finally come home.

We arrived late at night on 15^th December 2015, twenty years and three days since I first set foot on these fabled islands. I remember my arrival date in 1995 because it was the day before Ireland played Holland in a play-off match for Euro 96. In those pre internet days, it was hard to find out where the game was being shown. But the kindly gent I was staying with at the time made a few phone calls and before I could say Ole, Ole, I found myself at the counter of an Auckland pub at 9am on a Thursday morning, wearing shorts and a tee shirt and watching them shovel snow from the Anfield pitch on TV.

I don’t remember much about that morning (apart from the fact that Ireland lost) but I do recall the friendliness of everyone I met and the offer of a pint of Guinness and a full Irish breakfast for ten dollars.

Things have become much more expensive in the intervening twenty years, but the friendliness is the same. I met a lot of lovely Australians in my seven years there but I met plenty of abrupt and rude ones as well. There is an Aussie stereotype which could best be described as attempting to balance a number of chips on their shoulders.

Kiwis are much more relaxed about their place in the world. They don’t feel the need to prove that they are the best in the world at everything. New Zealanders pick a small number of activities such as Rugby, dairy farming and tourism and excel at them.

Arriving just before Christmas had an unintentional benefit. This country closes down for a month at this time of year, in the way that France closes in August. As a result, I’ve had to put off finding a job. This has forced me to have some down time which is something I’m not great at. I’ve been working for thirty three years and the only substantial breaks I’ve taken are the above mentioned 1995 excursion and the enforced three month break I took when I was made redundant in 2014. That one wasn’t particularly enjoyable as the stress of finding a new job, moving to Scotland and selling or giving away most of my possessions was pretty uncomfortable.

This time, as I wait for the recruitment agencies to return from holiday, I’ve been spending most of my time at the beach. My in-laws live in Pauanui, a sleepy little seaside town on the Coromandel peninsula. It was designed and built in the 1960s when all Kiwis wanted a summer home (known as Bach here) and is the sort of place that first year town planning students or SimCity aficionados would come up. The streets are not parallel, they curve in graceful arcs and houses are unique and built at odd angles to each other. It is clear that the original designers discouraged fences and it is normal to walk through somebodies back yard on your way to the beach.

I’ve been coming here for eight years now and I can some conformity starting to creep in. Originally the houses were owned by Waikato farmers who had cashed in on the various dairy booms of the last fifty years and retired to the coast. They all fulfilled that Kiwi dream of buying a boat and retiring to the seaside.

But over the years, the houses have been snapped up by Auckland doctors and lawyers as second homes. They seem far more interested in conformity and the fences are starting to go up. But they share a common obsession with their farmer predecessors. 

And that is a love of fishing. Every kiwi over a certain means owns a boat and this is the perfect time of year to get it out of the garage. Not all of them are proficient however and my father in law likes nothing better than sitting on the beach on a windy day, watching the city slickers try to make it over the bar that guards the opening to Pauanui harbour. On a windy day, only the brave make it and my father in law seems to take a sly pleasure in those that don’t.

But it hasn’t all been beer and skittles. We want to rent somewhere for a year and that is proving to be more difficult than expected. Auckland is going through a property bubble, not unlike the one in Ireland before the tiger crashed and burned. Property is hugely expensive so that pushes up rents and also the demand for rental property, from people who can’t afford to buy.

It doesn’t help that I don’t have a job yet. It’s hard to get an employer’s reference 

when you don’t have an employer. It’s also hard to get a tax number until you have a job offer and hard to get a job offer until you have a tax number.  But that’s just the sort of karfaesque nonsense that you get when you move to a new country. I’ll work it all out in the end.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy being back in shorts and tee shirts, eating BBQ food most nights and drinking white wine in the sun. Most of all though, I want my daughter to be happy. She has lots of cousins here, including some who are of a similar age. She appears to have already adapted to the outdoors lifestyle and has become an expert sand castle builder. She will grow up a Kiwi and I think that’s one of the best gifts a parent can give to their child.