Kiwi Experience

 Twenty-five years ago, this week, I dipped my toe over the equator and set foot in New Zealand for the first time. I’d spent three years in Luxembourg and was still smarting from the end of a relationship that caused that city to be filled with ghosts. I planned to move back to Ireland after a long time abroad to start my life again. But I had a mate in Christchurch and he convinced me to come south first and sample life in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

I can still remember that first drive down the coast from Picton to Christchurch. The Pacific Ocean licking the coast on my left-hand side while the Southern Alps rose majestically in the distance. It started an itch that I scratched several times before I finally talked my wife into moving here.

Many people assume I moved here because I have a Kiwi wife, but the truth is that I was the one who was keener to move here when the opportunity arose.

I crashed on my mate’s couch for a few weeks on that first trip. Spent my first ever Christmas away from my Irish family and then in January 1996 set off on my odyssey around the South Island. My chosen mode of transport was Kiwi Experience, a company that has been dragging backpackers around this fine country for years. At thirty, I was probably the oldest person on the bus. Most of my fellow travellers had just finished Uni and were trying to discover themselves before entering the working world. In most cases Dad had given them five grand to help with this search. They were generally posh and entitled and full of tales about finding beaches in Thailand that no European had ever seen before.

The older ones were working class like me. Nurses and teachers in their twenties who had saved up enough for the trip of a lifetime. I tended to bond with them more.  But my best mate on that trip was a German guy called Andreas. He wore a wide brimmed hat that made me think of Puddleglum from the Narnia chronicles in one of those wonderful moments that triggers happy memories from your childhood.

We had a few raucous nights on our way around the South Island and he left a poignant message in my diary “to my only friend who thinks beer is more important than oxygen.” That pretty much sums up that trip.

It’s also the fifth anniversary of our move to New Zealand. I’m now married with a nine-year-old daughter and the world has changed a lot in the interim. I used to pass the queue of back packers on Queen St waiting for the Kiwi Experience bus to pick them up at 9am. Most of them were as young as that crowd back in 1996, bleary eyed from a night on the Auckland tiles, or from a long-haul flight from God knows where. In the old days, we all had battered back packs. These days it’s all designer suitcases and high-end casual clothing. But their eyes were still full of the wonder that comes from breaking the umbilical cord from your family and travelling to the other side of the world.

There are no queues for the Kiwi Experience bus now of course. No cruise ships filled with American tourists in the harbour. No mini buses outside posh hotels dropping off Chinese Tourists.

New Zealand closed it’s borders back in March when the pandemic started roaring. Kiwi citizens and business people willing to endure two weeks in quarantine are put up in posh hotels, which has at least has kept that sector of the hospitality industry going. Kiwi Experience is trying to attract locals to take a tour around their own country but I don’t see any of their buses around and the back packer hostels are boarded.

As I walked up Queen St this morning and passed the bus stop where the big green bus used to stop, my mind was drawn to all the young people who weren’t there. The ones who had reached the stage of their life that my companions and I had reached back in 1996. All those memories of broken relationships that needed to be banished. All the years of hard work that needed to be rewarded with a long-haul holiday. All those friendships that needed to be celebrated with a common odyssey. I booked my trip in September 1995, convinced that only a trip to the other side of the world would banish the ghosts that haunted my mind. Many others would have made a similar plan at the end of 2019. They may have a thirst for adventure, a quest for discovery or a need for escape. Whatever their motivation, they would have stumbled into a travel agency and booked the trip of a lifetime.

And then Covid arrived and left them stuck in the circumstance they were trying to escape. For most of us, Covid is an inconvenience that keeps us tied to the location we planned to stay in anyway. Most of us weren’t planning to go anywhere, so not being able to go anywhere is no big deal.

But at any time, there will be a small percentage of people who need to escape. Who are curious about the light that shines beyond these woods and need to go and see what makes it shine.

I was one of those people in 1995. Lost within the world I lived in and desperate for change. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I’d been told to hold to put my life on hold for a year back then. Apart from anything else, my contract in Luxembourg was about to expire and I might have found myself there for a year without a job.

I feel sorry for those young people now. The world is a theme park and they are restricted to just one ride.

 

My Life as a Socialist

 On the 17^th July 1975, Apollo CSM -111 docked with Soyuz 7K-TM somewhere up in space. This was also the day I flew for the first time. I know this date because I was glued to the TV watching the space docking and my parents had to drag me out of the house to get to the airport.

My brother, sister and I had been packed off to my aunt in Reading for a month in an attempt to give my mother a bit of peace and quiet. My aunt had moved to England in the fifties and “did well” in an unspecified way. She lived in a rambling four-storey Victorian house on the better side of town and while she had five kids of her own, she had plenty of room for the three of us and lots of love to spare too.

 I was ten and it was my first-time outside Ireland. I was a shy kid and a bit of a loner at the time. I said I was getting nose bleeds sleeping on the fourth floor (in reality, I just didn’t like climbing all those stairs) and my aunt fashioned a bed for me in the laundry on the ground level.

After that I became her favourite. She took me into town shopping and bought me my first watch. Her kids were all a little older and had passed into that teenage mentality of finding their mother to be the most embarrassing person on the planet.

I filled a maternal gap and my daily outings expanded beyond shopping to the other activities that caused my Aunt to leave the house each day. That introduced me to the source of her wealth. It turned out that in the previous twenty years she accumulated properties, mainly Victorian houses like her own but in the less salubrious parts of Reading. She turned them into individual flats with shared kitchens and bathrooms and specialised in providing accommodation to west of Ireland building labourers and people on council subsidised housing.

Tuesday was rent day and she brought me along for company. Forty years later, I can still remember climbing the steps into that first tenement hovel. The smell addressed me first, a sickening cocktail of cigarette smoke, stale beer and human sweat. Emaciated figures were slumped across stain sheeted beds and when I asked why they were still in bed at 11am, my aunt calmly explained that they were day sleepers, fresh from a night shift building Britain’s motorways and had come back to a warm bed that housed a different navvy who had a day contract.

My aunt walked from floor to floor collecting rent, her voice taking a sinister tone when she was met with a request for credit.

I walked out of that house a Socialist.

I probably had a social awakening before then but that day is etched in my memory. My aunt, who I loved dearly, had become wealthy through the misery of others. People need to live somewhere of course, and landlords are a necessary part of this process. But they can still provide decent accommodation, care for their tenant’s welfare and not squeeze every last penny from those miserable souls.

I came back to Ireland a changed boy. I’d seen the big world and it sucked. A couple of years later I was in secondary school and wrote my first essay in English class on the ill-treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli Government. It didn’t go down well with my teacher. In my last year of school, I had an English teacher who was a well-known member of one of Irelands right-wing parties. He commented on an article I had written for the school magazine with that well-worn cliché, “He has no heart who is not a Socialist at twenty. He has no head who is still one at thirty.”

I only wish I had the presence of mind to go back to him with the opposite. “He has no head who is a right-winger at twenty and no heart if he is still one at thirty.”

I didn’t change at thirty and I’m still a fiery renegade at fifty five.  I have done well on a personal level from Capitalism. Acquired a nice house with a low mortgage, travelled the world, living and working in exotic places and working for the rapacious American banking industry got me the opportunity to eventually end up here in paradise. But I’m proud to say that I haven’t sold my soul. I have never knowingly underpaid somebody, never abused another to further my career and never earned income through somebody else’s misfortune. I have also voted for the most left-wing candidate available in every election I’ve taken part in.

One of the manifestations of this is my approach to rental properties. During the Celtic Tiger years, it was common to buy ten apartments from the plans in Bulgaria. Every man and his dog had a holiday home that they rented out for eleven months of the year. But I resisted. The memory of that tenement visit in 1975 is still raw.

Property is a sensitive issue in New Zealand. The rich own too much of it and the poor can’t afford to get on the ladder. Most people see it as a pension plan, which is pretty depressing because it pushes up prices and leads to a huge wealth disparity. One person’s pension plan is another person’s need for a warm dry home they can call their own.

I’m happy that we only own the house we live in. I don’t want to be part of that other world. The world that robbed me of innocence on that bright July day in 1975. That first plane ride was memorable though.  I’ve flown regularly since but not for a while now because of the “thing”. If my aunt is up in heaven, perhaps she could make up for screwing all those poor navvies by fixing Covid and letting me fly again.

England, what have you done to yourself?

 Back in the dimly lit days of the early 1980’s, I happened upon a quote from Kevin Marron, who at the time was editor of an Irish Sunday newspaper. He was discussing some friends of his who were English and said that “English people on their own or in small groups are the nicest people you will ever meet. It’s only when they are in large groups at Football matches or on ships on the way to the Falklands that they are a problem.”

I remembered this because it slipped smoothly into my world view at the time. I liked individual English people such as Alan Sunderland at Arsenal or various pop singers. My comedy heroes were on Spitting Image or Not the Nine O’Clock news and I had an unhealthy obsession with dead World War One poets. At the same time, I could tut tut at the antics of England Football fans or the actions of their Army in Northern Ireland.

But if truth be told, I had an inferiority complex when it came to our neighbours across the Irish Sea. I grew up watching their telly, reading their Sunday newspapers and devouring their literature. I remember in particular sitting up late to watch their election results and marvelling how they had a proper left/right split and could get their results out within two hours of the polls closing.

Everything England did seemed better than we could manage in Ireland. They had a professional football league, well funded and adventurous TV, an alternative comedy scene and a liberal attitude to sex, divorce and abortion. The England I watched on TV every night was a confident, modern and sophisticated democracy. A vibrant, multi-cultural nation with wonderful food and lots of money.

The country I lived in was poor and was controlled by a medley of corrupt politicians and conservative bishops. We had mass unemployment, pot-holed roads and the threat of eternal damnation if you even thought about sex, never mind partook in it.

When my opportunity came to leave Ireland, I didn’t let the door hit my arse on the way out. I arrived in London in February 1988 and it was like I had been re-born. I fell in love with Indian food, pizza and kebabs. I marvelled at the Underground system, night buses and the motorway network. I walked around the West End every weekend, dipping into book shops on Charring Cross Road, wolfing down dumplings in China Town and drinking in pubs in Covent Garden with new found friends from Australia and New Zealand. I spent five wonderful years there, gulping in the fresh air of opportunity.

Having watched and admired England from afar for so many years, I was nervous when I arrived in London. I was from a small town in Ireland, suddenly finding myself at the centre of the World. I quickly learned that I needn’t be afraid. The England I arrived in was welcoming to newcomers. They had a genuine interest in my background and found me funny. I made English friends then that I still have to this day.

In the years since, I have kept up my interest in England. I gravitate towards English media on-line, love the output from the BBC and make a point of visiting London whenever I’m in that neck of the world.

But something has changed since I left England in 1993. Ireland became a lot richer. One of the reasons we emigrants departed en mass in the eighties was because of the riches you could earn in England. Now, the average salary in Ireland is higher than the UK. Ireland has also become more liberal, abandoning the church and becoming the first country in the World to legalise Gay Marriage by referendum. The Irish Motorway system is the greatest legacy of the Celtic Tiger years and there is now a greater percentage of overseas born people in Ireland than there are in the UK.

I look on England now from New Zealand and I see a small minded, bigoted country, cutting its own nose off to spite its face. It is no longer a place welcoming to strangers, the far right stalk the land and dominate the government. And then, of course, there is Brexit. The English colonised much of the world, promoting English exceptionalism to the far flung corners of the globe. But they think having rules set in Brussels is an abomination.

In my lifetime, England has gone from a country that I looked up to and admired to one that I pity. When it comes to managing Covid, most countries make a choice between health and the ecomony, pretending that they care about both, while in practice leaning towards one or the other. England is unique in that they are worst in class for both health and economy.

They have also managed to elect a leader who makes Donald Trump look like a serious politician. And strangely enough, Boris Johnson is not even the biggest idiot in the British government. It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous. Brexit is heading towards a no deal scenario which will do more harm to Ireland than the Black and Tans.

I was last in London in July 2019. I noticed that the trains were decrepit, pound shops were more common than boutiques and the buildings looked like they had been rebuilt after the blitz in World War Two and not touched since. I still loved it but it’s not the city I remember from thirty years ago. The English flag flew on many lamp-posts, posters for right wing groups adorned the walls and a cynical undercurrent of racism could be felt on the streets. Brexit allowed the monsters who were always there to breathe in the open air. It makes me feel sad. Despite the history between Britain and Ireland, it’s a country I still have a lot of affection for.  But at least, I no longer have an inferiority complex.

Jack Charlton Tribute

It was late in the game and we were chasing a rare victory. The ball was punted into the corner and I went in pursuit, as fast as my chubby thighs could drag me. Sweat and condensation had combined around the edges of the Muirhevnamore indoor sports centre that cold November night in 1987 and while I had recently qualified as an Accountant, I wasn’t earning enough to afford decent trainers.

I slipped and twisted my left ankle to such an extent, that thirty three years later, I still feel it when the barometer falls or a stone in a road tilts my foot more than five degrees.

I was hauled off the court and driven home by my boss, who made up for the crap salary he paid me by telling me to take the next day off and to stay in bed resting my ankle. That next day was the 11^th November 1987, a day that will go down in Irish History, although few expected it at the time.

Ireland were in group 7 in the qualification process for Euro 1988. A promising campaign was petering out, as many others had since I started watching football in the early 70s. We had completed all our games but Bulgaria only needed a draw at home in their last match to finish ahead of us and take the only qualifying place. Their opponents that damp and dreary night in Sofia were Scotland, a team that were the definition of being less than the sum of their parts. They had nothing to play for apart from their pride, a commodity that seemed to be of low value, if the first eighty seven minutes of the game were anything to go by.

My dear old Dad had rigged the portable telly up in my bedroom and perched my stricken ankle atop a bed of pillows. RTE, the Irish state TV service, had secured rights to show the game in a fit of optimism that wasn’t shared by the general population. The match was meandering towards its expected conclusion and the Bulgarians looked happy enough to settle for a point. Then something happened that changed my life and the life of millions of Irish people around the world.

Scotland had shown no ambition and seemed to be in a hurry to get of town as quickly as possible, given that communist Sofia in 1987 must have made Glasgow look like Las Vegas. One of the Scots was ambling towards the side-line when he was needlessly hacked down. The ref played advantage and the violence of the tackle seemed to finally rouse the tartan dragon, as the ball broke to Gary McKay and he slammed it into the net.

What happened afterwards is probably the cause of my still occasionally aching ankle all these years later. I jumped up and ran into the living room to hug my Dad. We held onto each other while injury time was being played and wept when the final whistle blew. My Dad was 54 at the time and this was the first time he’d ever seen Ireland qualify for anything.

Seven months later, I was living and working in London. My mates were in Germany for the Euro 88 finals. I had tickets for the games but couldn’t get off work and so I watched them from behind a sofa in a mates flat. Two years later I was in Italy for Ireland’s debut at the World Cup. I look back now and those years were among the best of my life. I was heading out into the wide world at the same time that Ireland was playing itself onto the world stage.

Jack Charlton was the Irish Manager then and he captured the zeitgeist of a country bursting to be free. We danced in fountains, we strove to outdo each other in garish 1990s attire and we murdered “The Fields of Athenty” in pubs from Stuttgart to Seoul. It was a gift to be an Irish person during those wonder years. To stand tall among the nations of the World and to burst with pride. But I feel particularly blessed that I got to experience this during the years when I was most able to enjoy it. When I still had a sense of wonder for what the world might offer and had the appetite to go out and gobble it up.

I started a relationship just before the World Cup kicked off in 1990. That relationship fizzled out during the World Cup four years later. The team was getting older and more cynical by then and so was I.

Jack’s final game in charge was in December 1995. I watched that in a pub in Auckland on my second day ever in New Zealand. That was when I first came here and fell in love with the country, a love that led to move here when the opportunity arose in 2015. In many ways then, the Jack Charlton era book marked my life.

He died last week and those memories came flooding back. It seems I’m not the only one. There has been an outpouring of nostalgia and sympathy in the Irish media, often from people who weren’t even alive when Jack Charlton was in his pomp. He is being credited with kicking off the Celtic tiger, something that I guess will be passed on to Mary Robinson when she passes away.

But I’ll remember the packed pubs, the away trips and the fact that it is now thirty five years since England last defeated us in Football. There were many magical nights, my favourite being one at Wembley when my mate climbed the fence that separated us from the English fans and screamed “You’ll never beat the Irish” at what turned out to be the wheel chair enclosure.

I miss those lazy hazy days. We’ll never see the like again. Rest easy Jack. You made us realise that not everything needs to be shit.

 

Black Lives Matter

I was racking my brain to try and think of the first black person I ever met. I went on holiday to England when I was ten and there were certainly a lot of Caribbean’s living in the streets around my Aunt’s house. My brother also had a Nigerian friend in college who called down to our house once or twice and sparked off lots of ‘behind the curtain’ curiosity from our neighbours.

Then I remembered a story my Mother used to tell me about the moment of my birth. She loved regaling her five kids with tales about stitches in places sons didn’t want to think about and blood soaked sheets. In my case, the main point of the story was that Mam had paid for an expensive doctor who was supposed to be present at my delivery. But I popped out early and so the first person I saw in this wide old world was an African midwife as I dropped into her welcoming hands.

I wish I knew her name. I wrote to the hospital when I was 18 to ask for the details of my birth. I spent the first three weeks of my life there and wanted to find out what was wrong. It turned out to be pretty mediocre but what struck me was that it mentioned the white middle aged male Doctor who never showed up, but not the black midwife who did all the work.

I like to think that I’m pretty ‘woke’ in respect of Black Lives Matter. I’ve certainly tried to avoid racism and treat everyone equally. But I don’t pretend to be perfect.  When I was twenty two I left the mono culture of 1980s provincial Ireland and headed for the bright lights of London. I got a job with an Insurance Company on the outskirts of the City. There were 120 of us in the department, including twenty Accountants who held all the management positions. All twenty (including my then young self) were white males. There was a smattering of Asians among the general staff but only one black person. His name was Leroy and I became quite friendly with him. He HYe

 He had an easy going manner and a sense of fun that mirrored my own Irish personality. He was also a big hit with the ladies on our regular social outings and I clung to him then in the hope that I might gather some of the crumbs that fell from his table.

I have to say that I envied him in some ways. He was relaxed, cool and better dressed than anyone else on our floor. But I ended up sitting beside him at lunch one Friday, just after the annual promotions had been announced. He wasn’t his normal ebullient self and I made the mistake of asking what was up. I didn’t get up for another hour or so as Leroy downloaded centuries of racial oppression and how it stopped him from ever getting a promotion. I tried to be as empathetic as possible, but I’ll admit that inside my opinions were mixed. I was a young Irishman who grew up in a working class background and fought hard to qualify as an Accountant and to get to the position I held in work. I figured if he’d worked a bit harder he could have achieved the same.

If I was charitable, I could argue that I didn’t see his skin colour and thought he was just the same as me. But time has taught me that the world isn’t that straight forward. I faced a few hurdles growing up as a working class lad in 1980s Ireland. But it was still a world where an Accountancy office was willing to offer an apprenticeship to a seventeen year old from the poor part of town. And when I got my qualification and headed to London, my social background was unknown to those I met. I could hide my thick tongued accent if needed and even when I didn’t, a rough working class background held a certain cache in the burning embers of Thatcher’s reign.

Leroy couldn’t hide his colour and looking back now, there were lots of idiots promoted at that company, when he was stuck in the same role for years. He faced the challenge of being working class and black and that meant he had all my challenges and many more.

Class and classism has always been a burning issue within me. I used to think that if we could solve inequality and class discrimination, then racism and sexism would be automatically fixed too. But poor white people don’t get stopped and searched by the Police and don’t get their necks knelt on by the cops. Skin colour and sex are physical manifestations and can trigger responses on sight. Discrimination based on class usually starts with your address or the school you went to. A well-dressed working class person can often pass for middle class. It’s harder for a black person or a woman to hide their true selves. Not that they should have to anyway.

I have to accept then, that while I grew up with a sizable chip on my shoulder based on my social class, that truth is that I am now a middle aged white man with tremendous privilege. I have lived in five different countries and never once questioned my entitlement to live in any of them. I can go wherever I like at whatever time of night I like and not be accused of bringing harm on myself if anything happens to me. I’ve earned some of this privilege by studying and working hard, but I have to accept that I was born with much of it.

When I popped out of Mam into the welcoming arms of that African mid-wife I was a certified white male, born into a western European country. She had none of those benefits and that’s not right and needs to change.

Trapped in Paradise

The 747 banked to the left and made its approach to Auckland Airport. It was early morning and the Tasman Sea glistened like a steel guitar below. It was December 1995 and a few hours earlier I was deep in sleep when I crossed the equator for the first time.

The quarter acre sections with weatherboard houses and tin roofs were laid out before me and I could see cars and buses wriggle their way around the 52 volcanoes that pimple the city.

To be honest, I fell in love with the country before I even landed. I was 30 and I had been hanging out with Kiwis since I moved to London at the age of 22. London was a melting pot, full of all nationalities, but particularly ones from the older colonies. I met Canadians, Australians and lots of people from the Indian Sub-continent. But I look back now and I was always drawn towards New Zealanders. They seemed to have so much in common with the Irish. A feeling of being over shadowed by a bigger neighbour, a need to be cooler than the rest and a work hard, party harder attitude.

I moved to Luxembourg in 1993 and fell in with the Kiwi crowd there. That’s when I first saw a guy open a beer bottle with his eye socket and heard stories of this mystical land of snow-capped mountains and sun kissed beaches. A good mate of mine was from Christchurch and he invited me to his place for Christmas dinner. That was the start of a lifelong love affair that saw me visit here about five times before I talked my Kiwi born wife into moving here.

Now it seems I’m trapped here for the foreseeable future, whether I like it or not.

Covid 19 is a global pandemic and many people are in worse position than me, of course. 350,000 people are dead, for example. And if I was going to be trapped in any country, then New Zealand would be the obvious choice. It is the country I want to live in but it’s also the one that has handled this epidemic best. It’s not a competition of course, but I can now visit the pub and that’s the main measure of success in my mind.

Every time you see somebody mention New Zealand’s success in dealing with the virus, you’ll see lots of ‘below the line’ comments about how this is down to the remoteness of the place and the lack of population density. Those people obviously don’t know how many daily flights were coming in here from China, or how many people are crammed into shared homes in Auckland.

The real reason the country did well is because they closed the borders down early in the process and focussed on tracking down the contacts of any cases that were here. This worked but the obvious conclusion is that when New Zealand is happy that they have eliminated the virus, the borders can’t reopen until the rest of the world eliminates the virus or a vaccine is found. The vaccine won’t be ready for at least two years and if you look at the way some countries are dealing with things, it will be a long time before this malevolent infection is banished from the world.

There is talk about flights from here to Australia restarting in the near future. They also seem to be getting the virus under control and negotiations about a “double bubble” are taking place. This would come as a great relief to Kiwis who see Australia as their bolt hole if things aren’t going well here. It’s very similar to the relationship Irish people have with Britain. We slag it off constantly, but many of us have happy memories of living there.

I’d love to visit Australia too. I miss a lot of things about Melbourne and my sister lives in Sydney. So, if Australia was the only place I could visit for the next couple of years, I could find plenty to do. They might even open the Pacific Islands as they are also close to being virus free and New Zealand has a special relationship with Samoa and Tonga in particular. Thousands of their citizens live here and are desperate to visit relatives.

But I think it will be a long time before I get to visit Ireland or anywhere else in Europe soon. The Tories are making such a mess of things that you would swear they were in competition with the Americans for most kills. And if the Brits are still a mess, then Ireland will be collaterally damaged.

So, I’m guessing I will be stuck here in paradise for at least two years. That will be the longest time I have ever spent away from Ireland. It’s not as though I’m itching to go back, but knowing you can’t is tough to deal with.

Thankfully, while I’m stuck here I can enjoy being in what is called “Level 2”. Lockdown goes up to Level 4 (which we were in two weeks ago) when everything apart from Supermarkets and Pharmacies were shut. In Level 2, the schools have reopened, which is a huge relief as I was a complete failure as a home teacher. I can now go into the office or work from home as much as I like. Pubs and restaurants are open, at least if you’re willing to sign in and out. Traffic is not too bad if I want to drive to work and best off all, you can book a hotel 3 days before you leave, even when it’s a bank holiday weekend.

I’d happily stay in level 2 forever, although it is destroying the tourist industry. The government is encouraging us locals to fill the gap and hopefully that will give me the chance to see parts of this beautiful country that I haven’t seen before. That will have to do until the 747 is banking right again on its way out of Auckland.

The Mentality of the Sexes is Equal

“The Mentality of the Sexes is Equal” was the name of the last formal debate I ever took part in. That was back in the spring of 1982 and I still remember it because the result proved our debate coach wrong. He explained to us that no matter what the subject was, we could find an argument for or against it. And if we argued skilfully enough we’d win.

We were an all-boys school and had spent two years preparing our attack on the national debating finals in the only sport my school took seriously. We came up against an all-girls school in the regional finals, which we expected to be a small pit stop on our way to national glory.

I know I’m not an objective reporter on this issue, but I’m convinced that we smashed them that night. Unfortunately, we were arguing in favour of the motion and the debate was being judged by an all-male journey. They awarded victory to the girls and their explanation proved that not all arguments are winnable. Middle aged men can’t see beyond the prettiness of seventeen year old girls and the mentality of the sexes is certainly not equal.

But recent events would suggest that my old debating coach may have been right. Take Brexit, Trump or Corona Virus policy. You can take either side of these arguments with righteous passion. I joined Twitter recently because I got really annoyed by something I heard on a podcast and realised that the only way I could tell the guy how wrong he was, was to register for Twitter and tell him what I thought.

We ended up arguing about whether a certain body of water was a fjord or a drowned glaciated valley. That’s the sort of thing that becomes important to you when you’ve been stuck at home for 49 days, like I have been.

Both of us could find Wikipedia articles to back up our claim. And you can do that for pretty much every argument. At the moment twitter is all about Covid 19. It’s hard to find any comment that doesn’t reference it. Everyone now seems to be an expert on epidemiology and virology, words that people couldn’t pronounce, never mind spell three months ago.

You can see this most in comparing death rates or case numbers by country. New Zealand is generally held up as best in class when it comes to dealing with this disease. We went into lockdown earlier in the cycle than other countries, focussed on contact tracing and effectively closed our borders. But you’ll find lots of comment on line that put this down to New Zealand’s remoteness and lack of density. These people don’t seem to realise how many flights a day come into Auckland from China (or used to at least) and how densely packed many parts of Auckland are.

But I don’t engage in these arguments, because what’s the point? Very little in these virus times can be proven to be 100% right or wrong. Every country seems to have a different approach to dealing with Covid. I can have an opinion on which is best but it’s only an opinion. I can’t prove that the New Zealand approach is better than Australia for example. New Zealand has tighter controls, but maybe Australians are more compliant and more relaxed controls would come up with the same result.

But one thing that can be said with certainty is that none of these opinions have arisen in a vacuum. You talk about Covid 19 restrictions based on your personal likes, dislikes and biases. Many Trump fans in American are Libertarians who can think of nothing worse than a centralised government forcing them to stay at home. Brexit fans in the UK didn’t like being told what to do by an unseen and unaccountable government. In both these countries, you’ll see the greatest protests against the lockdowns and I reckon that if you drilled down far enough, you’ll find that Trump voters and Brexit voters make up most of these protests. I also think that climate change deniers make up a large part of this group too. The Venn Diagram between climate change deniers and Brexit and Trump fans is single circle.

I think this comes down to individualism versus collectivism. Some of us believe that we are part of a community; that we can only improve in life if we all improve. We are the ones who are happy to stay at home, to take the government’s advice on social distancing and to be good little compliant citizens. Unfortunately, we’re are also the ones who look snootily down our nose at our less compliant neighbours and write letters to the paper to inform on sun bathers and other people who looked like they were having too much fun.

Those who consider themselves as primarily individuals are less compliant. They see the shadow of totalitarianism over them. They seek out conspiracy at every turn. And if they are healthy they can’t see the sense in a full lockdown. We all know these people, the ones who will make no effort to swerve when they approach you on your daily walk. The ones who sneer at others wearing masks.

The easiest place to spot this is on Twitter. Collectivists will have similar people following them and get mostly positive responses. But the individualists are always waiting to pounce on a slip and bring up half researched facts to back up their case. The place you see this most is when people compare one countries approach to the virus to another’s. No two countries are the same, not just in terms of population, but also demographics and culture.

That doesn’t stop people having an opinion. I’m no different. I have my view on which country is doing better than others. But it’s only an opinion. But despite what I might think, I’ll keep giving it, because what else can we do when we’re all locked in our house with a laptop and nothing to do.

Rumours of my demise were greatly exaggerated

I used to think that Doctors were infallible. They could look into your mouth and tell you that you had strep throat. Tap your knee-cap with a hammer and diagnose rheumatism and most importantly give you a sick note when you need a day on the sofa under a duvet.

I learned recently that they are as fallible as the rest of us. I got a phone call twenty eight days ago to say that a routine scan had noticed something awry on my right lung. It’s four weeks since then and it’s been a rock and roll journey ever since. I’ve had scans, blood tests and a biopsy. Been diagnosed and then un-diagnosed with cancer. Told I might have a lung inflammation, then told I haven’t, then told I have it again.

But if you are going to be mis-diagnosed then it’s better to be told that you have cancer and then told that you don’t. It’s much better than the other way round. I was sent for a biopsy to see what type of cancer was swirling around my lungs. It brought me back to the dark days of 2010 when I was operated on, scanned and filled with chemotherapy drugs. In the midst of all that I remember how kindly you’re treated in the cancer system. The nurses and doctors in that system all seem to have a great sense of humour, which I suppose they need to have because of the work they do.

Despite their best efforts, biopsies are not fun. I had to lie on my stomach and stay perfectly still for twenty minutes while a needle was stuck into my back and sent on a journey through my rib cage and into my lung. They took four samples and the weirdest thing about the whole procedure is that I heard a loud snapping noise each time they did it, as though there was pair of fisherman shears deep within me that was cutting through bailing twine.

Three days later the specialist who had told me that I had cancer called me with good news. She said the biopsy wasn’t showing traces of it. The rest of the call was a bit of a blur to be honest. She mentioned something about getting the opinion of other radiologists. The most important message was that I should cancel the oncologist appointment I’d made.

What she didn’t do was apologise for the original diagnosis and the fact that it put me through two of the darkest weeks of my life. I’ve had cancer before of course and came through it. But that was testicular cancer, the one with the best survival rate. I convinced myself then that it would be the end of Cancer. You can cut out a whole testicle and be sure that you’ve got all the nasty stuff. With other cancers, you have to cut around the tumour and never be certain that you’ve caught everything.

When I got the news two weeks ago that I have a lung tumour, I was devastated. I’d gone from the cancer with the best chance of survival to one with the worst survival rate. In the ten years between the two cancers, I’d gotten married and had a daughter. The thought of telling an eight year that the big C had returned scared me, not least the fear that it would kill me and that she’d be left without a Dad.

It led to several sleepless nights and days filled with dark thoughts. All around me, the world was starting to get to grips with Covid 19. I hardly thought about the virus during those weeks while I lived within my own private hell. I think I handled it by trying to push as much of it out of my head as possible. It was probably not the smartest thing to do from a mental health perspective even if it did help me to get to sleep.

Now I feel like I’m not sure I have processed the fact that I had cancer to be able to process the fact that I don’t. My brain seems to be a month behind the real world.

That world, of course, is obsessed with the Corona Virus. I’m not sure if that has helped or hindered me over the past few weeks. I guess there is only room for so much anxiety inside your head at any time.

It now appears that I have Sarcoidosis, a word I didn’t even know until this week, even though it has been in my medical records since 2010. That’s a lung inflammation that seems to affect Irish people and Africans at a disproportionate level. Nobody knows why. But perhaps it explains why Jimmy Rabbit in the Commitments thought that the Irish were the blacks of Europe.

If you have Sarcoidosis, it can often sit in your lungs for years without you knowing. Expanding and contracting for reasons no one understands and occasionally making you cough or be short of breath. I’ve had both these symptoms over the years. My cough is so regular that I don’t even notice anymore. Others do and before the lockdown, I would often get strange looks in the supermarket when I’d cough in the dairy aisle and spark a Covid 19 panic.

I also get a little short of breath when I climb stairs. To be honest, I always put this down to being a fat bastard. But I’ve been working on getting fit over the last few years. I can do a 5km run and a 70km cycle. But a flight of stairs nearly kills me. So I guess I can put that down to the inflammation as well.

The doc told me not to worry about things. They will keep an eye on it and I might need a few more tests. But otherwise, I’ll clear cancer out of my head and fill it with worrying about Covid 19 like the rest of the world.

The lonely Mariner's return to the Big C

It started with a new and enthusiastic doctor who looked at my file and family history and immediately put me down as a walking heart attack. She signed me up for a scan that checks out the calcium levels on the old ticker.

I went along and got the test done, fully expecting a call two days later to tell me to give up beer and fried food. The call duly came and began with the dreaded sentence “Well the good news is…”

Turned out the good news was that my heart is healthy and the years of abuse I’ve given it have not caused the damage I expected. It was the sentence he followed up with that knocked me back. Although they were looking at my heart, the lungs are in the vicinity and the doctor noticed something nasty on the right one.

I thought I’d beaten cancer, but the truth is that when you think you’ve had the last word in an argument with this disease, you’ve actually just had the first word in the next discussion. Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. You get monitored for a decade afterwards. My tenure was due to end this September and I foolishly thought I could file this chapter away and get on with the rest of my life, only mentioning it when I wanted to court sympathy or when those Christmas conversations turn to “what was the best and worst of times in your life”.

Initially, the doctor thought it might be a latent infection. Coronavirus is the topic de jour at the moment and I was checked for all the symptoms of that. The irony is that I’ve never felt healthier. I had no pain, no swelling, no unexplained blood on the tissue, no hacking cough or other sign that something was amiss.

I was sent for a more detailed scan and that came back with confirmation that it was a tumour. I think I had anticipated this news. The day before my consultation I developed a stiffness in my right arm. It felt like I’d damaged a muscle and I could hardly sleep that night. When the tumour was confirmed the next day, the pain in my arm immediately disappeared. The mind truly works in mysterious ways.

The fact that I’ve been through this before helps. I know a lot of the terminology and I’m not setting off into the unknown. However, the fact that it has now come back indicates that it can come back again. Perhaps every ten years for the rest of my time on this mortal coil, I will be visited by the ghost of the Big C.

Things are different this time though. In 2010, I went to the doctor on a Monday afternoon and by Thursday morning I was on the operating table having my left nut removed.  It all happened in such a whirr I didn’t have time to think, or more importantly to worry about it. Things are moving more slowly this time. It’s two weeks since that first scary call and whatever it is that is squatting rent free on my right lung is still there with no date for when it is going to be evicted.

They had to do an MRI first to see if it was indeed a tumour, then a biopsy to see what type of Cancer it is. The oncologist called today to say that he’d see me in eight days’ time. I guess the thinking is that this thing has probably been in there for a while and it’s not going anywhere soon. Or maybe he’s just on holiday this week.

My doctor reckons that cancer treatment has come on a lot in the last ten years. I’m hoping this means that I just have to take one tablet with a glass of water and it will all go away. But I fear that I’m being optimistic. I think it will mean a lot more tests, surgery and then a course of Chemo or radiation that I will be told is specifically targeted at my genome sequence. One way or the other, it will be shit.

I always assumed that lung cancer was reserved for smokers, for those who puffed on Woodbines behind the bike sheds and progressed to a sixty a day habit. It seems this is not the case. I’ve never smoked a single cigarette in my life, having been put off them by my Mother who was a heavy inhaler and hated herself for it. It seems that your good old genes can also cause havoc in your cell structure. Half of cancers fall into this category, the rest into the “caused by lifestyle” ones. These are the smokers, the heavy drinkers and the ones whose diet causes issues in their stomach and gut.

My doctor explained that these people are filled with remorse when the cancer sentence is imposed on them. I expected her to say that this put me into the lucky group as I have now had two cancers that are caused by my genes and not my nihilistic lifestyle. Our group she said are filled with anger. Crying “why me” into an uncaring black night.

It’s strange for this to happen in what are uncertain times. The rest of the world is worried about Corona Virus while I sit here with my own concerns. The two will interact. I’ll probably need an operation at a time when hospital services are stretched to breaking. If I end up getting Chemotherapy, then my immune system will be shot and it’s not a good time to be like that when a virus is swooping around the world.

At times like this, you just have to hunker down, control the things you can control and try not to think about what everything else. It’s not easy but writing helps me to keep my mind off things. So, expect more random nonsense over the next few weeks.

Brexit. Is it done yet?

A couple years ago I was looking for new Podcasts as I was growing tired of the ones I’d been listening to for years.

I had noticed a trend similar to the bars in Bangkok. They lure you in with innocent promises before demanding money with menaces once you had made yourself comfortable. Advertisements started appearing with increasing regularity, pleas for voluntary donations that would shame charity muggers and teasing you with clips of what was available behind the paywall.

I found myself gravitating towards the comforting shores of the BBC. They maintain a public service principle that applies not only to the British people who pay the BBC licence fee but to those of us in their former colonies. That was how I stumbled upon Brexitcast.

As is obvious from the name, this is a Podcast about Brexit and given that it comes from the BBC it is pretty balanced. It has the rabidly pro Tory Laura Kuenssberg on one side, and the pro-European Katya Adler on the other. I lean towards Katya of course but I enjoy listening to Laura Kuenssberg because she balances up the echo chamber stuff I read in the Guardian and The Irish Times.

It means that although I live as far from the UK as possible, I’m as up to date on Brexit as a resident of Birmingham. I wonder sometimes why I’m so obsessed by it. Is it because I lived in the UK for seven years or because I grew up five kilometres from what has now become the land border between the United Kingdom and the European Community? Actually, I don’t think it’s either of these. I’m just a political nerd who loves watching a country destroy itself.

Brexit is the sort of thing that will be studied by Political Science students in years to come and their reactions will be like Economics students today who study the Dutch Tulip Mania in the 17^th Century. Amazement that people could ever be so stupid and yet strangely fascinated at the same time. It is patronising to tell the people who voted for Brexit that they are idiots. But I’d say the same about the people who voted for Trump or the ones who vote for right wing parties everywhere. And I do this safe in the knowledge that none of them will ever read this.

A British friend once told me that the biggest trick the Tories ever played was to convince the working class that they cared about them. I think Brexit trumps that. There are deep rooted problems in Britain but hardly any of them are caused by the European Union. Take immigration for example. If you scratch below the surface, those British people who don’t like immigrants are usually upset by brown people who come from ex British colonies and not Europeans. The ones who are upset by trade are annoyed because traditional manufacturing that powered the towns of Northern England has vanished. But it has moved to China and not the European Union.

Britain had a lot of problems in 2016. People used the EU referendum as a chance to protest against these issues. But none of them will be resolved by leaving. They are like a miserable teenager who yearned to leave home because they thought that their parents were the root cause of their misery. Only to find themselves in a rat infested squat with the dawning realisation that their spots and bad breadth were a bigger put off to the opposite sex than their Dad’s lame jokes and their Mother’s nagging.

They finally left the European Union on 31^st January 2020. Or at least, they moved into the next transitional stage. Leavers will boast that the sky has not fallen in, as though this was any measure of success. You could equally say that none of the promised land of independence has materialised yet. The truth is that Brexit will be a slow poison. The coal mines and steel works of Northern England will not reappear. There will be no queues of scruffy Englanders waiting to take fruit picking jobs at minimum wage.

Few things are predicable with certainty when it comes to the political and social future. But it’s hard to see how Brexit will turn out positively for the British, at least for the next twenty years or so. They may turn themselves into a Canada, bordering a huge trading empire but having a positive outlook to immigration and the World generally. But it’s more likely they will become like Singapore. Inward looking, hostile to its neighbours and a playground for the wealthy and a prison for the less well off.

I shouldn’t really care to be honest. I live in New Zealand after all. But Brexit will impact my friends and family in Ireland. That border I grew up beside is likely to become a centre of tension and hostility in the coming years.

And then there are my friends in Britain. An Irish journalist once said that the English are fine on an individual level. They only become problematic in groups, like at football matches or on ships on their way to the Falklands.

I tend to agree. Some of my best friends are English and all of them are Remainers. I really feel for them as they must think that they fell asleep on referendum night and then they woke up in a different country. It must be tough to look on half your fellow countrymen and realise that you’ve got nothing in common with them.

Brexitcast continues although they are rebranding it as Newscast as the public are sick and tired off the word Brexit, I’ll continue listening because I love the BBC and I’m a political junky. My next blog will be on New Zealand politics. Nothing as exciting as leaving the world’s largest trading block or inviting the Political wing of a terrorist group into government. But I’ll do my best to come up with something juicy.

Irish Politics for beginners

Last month I did something I swore I’d never do. I joined Facebook. I didn’t do it because I’m interested in fake news or having my personal information harvested and sold to some shady election fixing company. I did it because the drama group to whom I belong only post updates there. Group emails are too complicated it seems.

I felt dirty when I registered, as though I’d just handed over a small piece of my soul. Luckily, I had a spare and rarely used email account available, so I can separate the evil world of Facebook from my normal day to day life. It sits there in the background like an evil troll that I only see if I deliberately go looking for it.

I’m not on Twitter, Instagram or any other social media (apart from the sanitised arena of Linkedin). This is not through contempt for the modern world of communication. It’s more that I’m nervous that I’ll get drunk one night and post something that I’ll later come to regret when I’m famous. I’d hate to be receiving my Nobel Prize for Literature or Oscar for Best Screenplay, only to have the papers splash a headline the next day with my ill-advised comments on the Me-Too movement from five years previously.

Fortunately, this space is anonymous, so good luck tracking down these opinions when I’m accepting the Booker prize.

A friend at work here in New Zealand asked me to explain Irish politics. He’d read something in the Guardian and wanted to know how we ended up with parties with unpronounceable names that have swapped power for one hundred years.

I told him that Fine Gael, the current holders of the keys to power are descendants of the rich farmers who benefited from the distribution of land after the English absentee landlords were forced to give their estates back to the Irish in the late nineteenth century. They didn’t give it back to all the Irish though. Just like when the Soviet Union collapsed, those in the know got their hands on the good stuff first. Not surprisingly, these people are the most pro-British that you’ll find in Ireland which is not surprising considering they benefitted most from the British departure.

A typical big farmer would leave the land to his eldest son. If the second son was smart, he’d be sent to the seminary unless he realised that he was interested in girls before the bishop got his hands on him. Then he’d run off and join the British Civil service and end up in Delhi or some other God forsaken corner of the Empire.

If the second son was too thick to pass his Latin or Civil Service exams, he would join the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). That was the Police force that the British set up to control Ireland and particularly its property. There is a push in Ireland now to commemorate the RIC members who were killed in the Irish War of Independence. And guess what, it’s the Fine Gael party that’s pushing it. Blood it seems is thicker than water.

Those supporting the commemoration are pushing the line that every Irish person is descended from a RIC member. This is rubbish. Most of us are descended from tenant farmers and factory workers. The sort of people the RIC used to harass, not recruit from.

Fianna Fail (the other party with an unpronounceable name to Kiwis) are descendants of these tenant farmers and factory workers. They spent the 19^th century trying their best to cheat the British, so it’s no surprise that Fianna Fail politicians and supporters have problems with paying tax and respecting things like planning permission.

Sinn Fein are the other party I get asked about. They are the party no respectable Irish person would ever support because of their association with the IRA during the ‘Troubles’. If you look at the last one hundred years of Irish history, then you can see where Sinn Fine came from. Sixty per cent of the population accepted the Treaty that the British offered. This was mainly Fine Gael supporters and everyone else tired of years of War. The Civil War erupted shortly afterwards, leaving a stain on Ireland forever. When it finished, the vast majority of rebels buried their arms and became Fianna Fail. Those who still refused to surrender became Sinn Fein. The Irish People’s Front of Judea. They keep splitting of course as more and more of them join the mainstream. Eventually, it will be one man in a tree screaming about 800 years of oppression and holding onto Ireland’s last Armalite rifle.

And that leaves us with the Labour and Green party. These are the parties that most closely represent politics overseas, although the nature of Irish coalition governments is that these parties have traditionally been the junior members of government and sell their soul for a government car and a fancy office. They tend to get none of their policies put into practice but pay the price at the ballot box for all the failings of the right-wing parties they get into bed with.

Sinn Fein has never been in government in Ireland and plays on the virtue of never having made a mistake as a result. They have hoovered up all the left-wing votes in Ireland and decimated Labour and the Green Party. But that will all change when they eventually fall into the same trap and agree to prop up a Fianna Fail or Fine Gael in government. That will be the end of Sinn Fein. They know it but they’ll still decide to consume the golden apple. It is the destiny of all small parties in Ireland. They crave power and are ultimately destroyed by it.

My New Zealand friend looked baffled. New Zealand politics is a lot more straightforward. That is until you try to explain New Zealand First, the junior partner in the current three-party coalition government. But all that will be explained in the last part of my three-part rant on global politics. Next up is Brexit.