Monday 11 January 2016

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 15th 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.