Engerland!

One of life’s little pleasures is to receive a message out of the blue from a long lost friend. This happened to me around Christmas 2001, when one of those old fashioned airmail envelopes arrived at my parents’ house. It was from a friend that I worked with in Luxembourg several years earlier who had found an old letter from me when she was moving house.

For younger readers, that’s how we used to communicate with each other in the 90’s. You might have somebody’s landline, but we were rarely home in those dance filled days, so the best way of getting a message to them was through an old fashioned letter in the post.

Anyway, we started using a new- fangled communication method called e-mail and even got to meet on one occasion. She was English and a devout Christian, so we spent most of our day together in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, mouthing sweet nothing’s to each other in the whispering gallery.

My memory is hazy, but I think I might have harboured romantic intentions, but obviously not strongly enough to do anything about them.

Our email exchanges continued up to the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea. Ireland and England both qualified for that competition and she mentioned in an exchange that she’d be cheering for Ireland in our match against Spain and said she presumed that I’d reciprocate when England were playing Denmark. I replied that 700 years of history prevented me from supporting England in any endeavour.

I was then subjected to what would now be called ‘ghosting’. I haven’t heard from her since.

I mention this because it highlights the sensitivities English people feel towards the lack of support from Ireland for their national football team.

There are some in Ireland who see this as our problem. That we have a national chip on our shoulder or that it shows common currency with the extremists who supported the IRA during the troubles. They argue that a modern, self-confident country wouldn’t feel the need to dislike their neighbours. The people who put forward this point can be found arguing for Ireland to re-join the Commonwealth and proudly display mugs with the image of Princess Diana on their mantle-pieces.  

I think this argument misunderstands the nature of sport. That it is all about liking one team and having a rivalry with another. It also misunderstands the nature of International sport. The key part of this word is “nation”. We fly flags, sing national anthems, kiss badges but then try to pretend that the events have nothing to do with the history of the countries involved.  

This is a particular problem with England. They have a colonial past and have left a trail of misery across Africa, Asia and Ireland. And in the old Empire countries that were populated by European settlement, they have made themselves unpopular by using the young of those countries as cannon fodder in their various wars. I’ve lived in Australia and New Zealand and they choose England as the country they would most like to see lose at sport, if only because the English patronised and humiliated them in the early days of the Empire.

There is an assumption that if you hold a sporting bias, then you must hate the people who support those teams. I support Louth in Gaelic Football, Wexford in Hurling, Carlton in AFL and Arsenal in English football. As a result, I dislike Meath, Kilkenny, Collingwood and Tottenham Hotspur. I know many people who support these teams and while I enjoy winding them up and they like winding me up, I don’t dislike them as people. Some of them are my best friends.

Only my English friends seem to have a problem with this sporting rivalry. It’s ironic, when they have no problem laughing at German losses.

I wonder what the reasons for this are? I sometimes think that English people have a soft spot for Ireland. That we are the young cousin, that despite a few rebellious years, are still fondly looked upon. They love our sense of humour, admire our music and flock to our pubs.  And maybe they can’t except when that beloved younger cousin laughs at your pitfalls.

But maybe it’s just that old fashioned lack of proportion that sometimes happens in sport. I mentioned that I’m a Wexford hurling fan. While we have an enmity towards Kilkenny, it’s not reciprocated. They have ten times as many titles as Wexford and as a result they see us an irritant and not a rival. Even more frustratingly, they’ll patronise Wexford fans on the few occasions we beat them. We’d much prefer it if they hated us.

England must feel the same towards us. We had a few good years in the 80s and 90s but they don’t really see us as a threat. We struggle to make tournament finals whereas they are always looking to win them.

This doesn’t happen in Rugby. Ireland are on a par with England, if not better, and as a result, no English fan expects support from Ireland.

I might be wrong of course. Maybe I do harbour some deep seated republican sympathies. I bristle at Ireland being included in the “British Isles” for example and particularly when people describe it as “just a geographical description”. I also get annoyed when commentators talk about The British Lions instead of their proper title of British and Irish Lions.

Rationally, I accept that I come from an island that has a long intertwined relationship with its neighbour. My surname, for example, has English roots. There is a lot at play. History, politics and the normal rivalries that come with sport. I try to take all this into account and to be as fair-minded as possible. But that didn’t stop me emitting a guttural roar and leaping out of my seat and punching the air when Harry Kane smashed that penalty over the bar against France. 

I measure out my life in World Cups - Part 3

I last updated my World Cup odyssey in 2010, when I was living in Australia and France were embarrassing themselves in South Africa (karma, huh?). I wrote two installments of this tale in that long Melbourne Winter and it’s time to update the story now. Twelve years and three world cups have come and gone.

2010 became Annus Horribulis. By the time I’d written the second part of this story, I’d already had a bike accident that broke an arm, an eye socket and my cycling confidence. My Mother died two weeks after the World Cup final that year. I can’t remember where I watched that game.  I’m guessing at home but the shadow of my Mother’s impending demise hung over it.  I flew back to Ireland to say goodbye to her then flew back again a week later for the funeral. Those were carbon-unfriendly times.

Later that year, I had a visit from the Big C and paid the ransom of my left testicle to get it to go away.

By the time the World Cup in 2014 rolled around another seismic event in my life was taking place. I was made redundant in April of that year and my departure from Australia was put in train. By the time of the final in July, we were in a hotel in Abu Dhabi on our way to Edinburgh. I watched the match at 1pm in the morning in the courtyard of the hotel. It was Ramadan and while Abu Dhabi is not a big drinking place at the best of times, during Ramadan it is like a Presbyterian wake.  They set up a ‘bar’ in the courtyard for which you had to pre-purchase tokens. I bought $50 worth of vouchers and that entitled me to four small cans of Seven Up. That was the strongest drink you could buy and made me realise that ‘bar’ has a different meaning in the Islamic world than where I grew up.

If nothing else, it convinced me that I would never attend a World Cup in the Middle East. Thankfully, with the controversy that is going on in Qatar right now, that is never likely to happen again in my lifetime.

2018 took place in Russia. Another country I have no intention of visiting. I was living in New Zealand at this stage, but cunningly booked a month-long visit to Ireland that allowed me to watch games in real-time, or at least at times of the day when drinking is socially acceptable. International sport is tailored for the European market. That means that games are usually on in the middle of the night or early morning here. That’s made me realise that I enjoy sport much more when I have a beer in my hand.

I watched the England v Croatia Semi-final with my Dad and we took guilty pleasure in England’s defeat. I was in Glenbeigh, County Kerry the following weekend when the final took place. It was a beautiful summer’s day, made better by the fact that I was in a pub.

Eight days later my Dad was dead. He passed away in the early hours of the 24^th July. Eight years to the day since my Mother’s death. My father was a very thoughtful man and I’m sure that he hung on past midnight so that we’d only have to pay for one anniversary mass each year that would cover both of them.

I’m now onto my 15^th world cup. Don’t remember the first one (thankfully, as England won). But I reckon I’ve watched all of the others, in six different countries.

This year, the games are in Qatar. I’m glad Ireland didn’t qualify. We’re rubbish at the moment and would only embarrass ourselves. But the thought of thousands of Irish fans unable to get a drink of beer is unimaginable. It also means we are not faced with the moral dilemma of playing in a tournament mired in corruption and played in a country that fails to respect gay people or migrant workers.

I read about this a lot in the woke European media that fill my newsfeed. It reeks of hypocrisy of course. Take England for example. As Irish people would know, they don’t have a proud record of treating their own migrant workers well. No professional footballer in England has felt comfortable enough to come out while still playing. This is because of the negative culture towards LBGT culture within British sport.

The underlying problem is that the whole world is not moving at the same pace when it comes to what we define as human rights. In fact, some of the world is moving backwards. America has recently allowed for abortion to be made illegal in many states. It also allows for armed militia to shut down gay bars.

Africa, Asia and South America are well behind Europe when it comes to liberalising reproductive and sexual rights. There seems to be an assumption that the World Cup should only be held in countries that match the social and moral structures of Western Europe. This is the same message that 19th-century colonialists gave. Only white men should be in government because they are the ones with the education and culture to manage the task.

It’s a great danger to say that we’re better than everyone else, that we exist on a higher plane. By all means campaign for changes around the world, but if we boycott countries we don’t like, then we’re at risk of excluding most of the world.

Anyway, I’m boycotting much of this world cup because the games are on in the middle of the night here. I will get up early to watch the final though. It’s a 4am start here. But I have to keep up the tradition of watching every final. I just hope that no seismic event in my life happens at the same time. There is a lot to be said for a quiet life.

  

Away with the Birds

 Regular readers of these missives will know that I don’t have a great fondness for animals. I like eating them of course and I’ve sometimes taken pleasure in watching them race each other. But caring for them as living sentient beings has always been beyond me. If truth be told, as I progress into grumpy middle age, I find that I’m not even fond of most humans.

So, the events of the last month have taken me by surprise. It started on a balmy Saturday night. Spring had uttered a chesty cough and finally woke after a long slumber. We’ve had the wettest winter in Auckland since records started, so when the sun finally returned, we broke out the deck chairs and encamped onto our deck.   

As I relaxed with a refreshing APA in hand, I noticed something on the back wall of our house. There, on a light fitting about three metres from the floor was a bird’s nest. It seemed to me that it had been constructed that day, but if truth be told, they might have been at it for months. It was an intricate design of interwoven twigs that seemed to conform to all the relevant building codes within the bird world.

The only thing it was missing was a resident. We wondered if it had been built and then abandoned after the birds realised how many cats live in our neighbourhood. But the next day, we heard some cheeping and found a fat, female blackbird perched majestically on top. I should point out that I know as much about ornithology as I do about nuclear physics.  My wife was the one who made the identification, including the important fact that female blackbirds are not actually black. They are brown.

She was wrong on one important matter though. She reckoned we were watching solo parenting. That blackbirds were like bawdy sailors, arriving into a different town each week, knocking up the ladies and then high-tailing it (if you’ll excuse the pun) whenever an egg appeared.

Some loud chirping the next day disproved this theory. Daddy blackbird (who is indeed black) had made a grand entrance and wanted to let everyone in the neighbourhood know of his arrival. It became clear that his visits were to allow his partner to temporarily leave the nest and seek out food. When this happened, he rarely came to the twiggy home itself. He would perch on a fence nearby, keeping a wary eye on the neighbourhood cats and presumably letting the other birds know to stay away. Once Mammy had returned with a full belly, he would leave without so much as a farewell cheep.

Things changed when the kids arrived. We noticed a couple of tiny, nervous beaks peeking out of the nest, arching their necks whenever Mam came back with food. At this point, Dad became a bit more hands-on. He stays with the nest now when Mam is out feeding and often arrives with a couple of tasty worms that he shares with the family.

What surprises me most is how interested I am in all this. Our neighbour’s cat came for a visit and I found him climbing on our garden furniture and making a beeline for the nest. I immediately grabbed a broom and raced outside with murderous intent. The cat got the message and high-tailed it back home. I then rearranged the furniture to make access more difficult.

My wife and I now regularly check on the birds. She has started leaving out food for them which they studiously ignore. These are strong, independent hunters, well able to feed themselves from the bounty in our garden. My daughter is less enamoured. She is a cat lover and hates the way we portray them as potential chick killers. This has caused a rift in the house based on which side of nature you want to prevail. Cats are not native to New Zealand and they kill millions of local birds each year. Most native New Zealand birds evolved to be ground dwellers and never expected a moggy to arrive on a boat from England and trap them in their greedy paws.

My daughter, who is far too smart for her age, has pointed out that blackbirds are also not native. Somebody in the 19^th century thought it would be a great wheeze to bring all sorts of fauna to New Zealand. Why they wanted to bring blackbirds is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they snuck onto one of the early ships.

I don’t know the long journey their ancestors took, but I’m glad that this couple of birds made it to my deck. It’s wonderful to watch them interact, take care of their offspring and to bring new life into our lives. I should also acknowledge that as pets go, they are very low maintenance. They don’t need feeding or watering, don’t leave hairs all over furniture and you don’t have to carry a small plastic bag to pick up their pooh.

But of course, they are not pets. They carry on as though we don’t exist. Somehow, they know we are not a threat and that the cats are. We just happen to be the people who live in the house they have chosen to stay at this year. When the chicks are old enough, they’ll fly the coop and the parents will move on to their summer homes. If they survive the cat apocalypse, there is every chance they’ll be back next spring to start the process off again.

And so the wheel of life keeps turning. My job now is to see those chicks off into the new life. I’ll keep shoeing the cat away and keep an eye out for that first nervous step out of the nest. Apparently, this is a high-risk time. If that first flutter of wings doesn’t work, then they’ll fall three metres to their death. I can’t even contemplate that thought. But I’ll keep you updated. 

London in the Rare Old Times

 Like many things from my early years, Dan Air no longer exists. It was sold for a pound in 1992 to British Airways and disappeared from the public imagination.

In the eighties, however, it represented an early incarnation of budget travel, albeit with a whiff of danger thrown in. Eleven crashes in the previous twenty years had earned it the nickname “Dan Dare”. This included an incident when a plane landed at the wrong airfield when approaching Belfast Aldergrove airport.

That was where I boarded a Dan Air flight for the first and only time. I paid the princely sum of 39 pounds for a one way flight to Gatwick in February 1988. I was leaving my hometown of Dundalk for the bright lights of London. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I would end up spending 22 of the next 34 years abroad.

London became my home for five years. It would have been longer but my girlfriend at the time had itchy feet and wanted to move abroad. A year later, I discovered that her itchy feet weren’t confined to where she lived.  

But London still holds a special spot in my heart. I lived there during the formative years of my mid-twenties when the world was a sun-drenched garden waiting to be explored. I was innocent and curious. Full of energy and ready to throw myself into everything that the metropolis had to offer.

Ireland in 1988 was a mono-cultural wasteland in permanent recession. In that year, ninety thousand other young people made the same decision as me and got out. Many went to New York or Boston, some to the regional cities of Britain. But most, like me, went to London. There are probably only five other cities in the world that could compare for opportunity and excitement and for us, London was only an hour away on a rickety Dan Air de Havilland Comet.

I had first visited London as a ten-year-old and remember being amazed by the colours, smells and sounds. It was as though I lived in a damp caravan with a black and white TV while a drug-fuelled disco raved nearby. I came back as a nineteen-year-old for my brother’s 21^st. I remember walking around Soho and Covent Garden and being mesmerized by the anonymity and freedom that London allowed. I can’t remember when I choose to move there, but I’m sure the seed was sown that weekend.

I arrived on a Tuesday, played my first ever organised game of adult football on the Saturday and then had my first ever Indian Curry (a Chicken Korma, which at the time was the spiciest thing I’d eaten).  I had my choice of jobs and picked the one with the best canteen, as cooking wasn’t a skill I had brought from the old country.

Ireland has a complex relationship with its nearest neighbour. Eight hundred years of invasion, rape and pillage will do that to a friendship. We like to see them lose in sport and even the Eurovision Song Contest and we get indignant if they claim one of our sport stars or writers as their own. But we follow their club football teams, love their music and watch their TV. We are also obsessed with their culture and history. I’d wager that a higher percentage of Irish people could name Henry 8^th’s wives or the top British generals of World War Two than could their Anglo counterparts.

I loved every minute of those five years and I have visited London many times since. But I’m glad I don’t live there now.

It’s with a feeling of sadness that I look at what Britain and particularly England has become. In hindsight, the signs were there in 1988. Thatcher was in her ninth year of power. She had gutted the mining and manufacturing industries in the North and promoted a Financial Services industry in the South. As a result, London boomed and I surfed that wave like a kid in a sweet shop. I did well out of Thatcher’s policies and earned enough to keep me in beer and curries, with plenty left over for travel and nice cars.

I was too self-indulgent to realise that while we were partying down south, the rest of England was in terminal decline. I saw it occasionally. My Mother visited once. We took her to Chinatown to show off the fantastic food options. She came out with a memorable line when we’d finished our meal of noodles and dumplings. She asked my friend if he liked it ‘or would he prefer his dinner’.  

 She asked me to drive her to Leeds later that week, so she could visit her sister. As we left the outskirts of London, we drove under a bridge where somebody had painted “It’s Hell up North”. They weren’t wrong. I also visited a company outside Manchester for work and was left with the impression that my hometown in Ireland was more cultured and eclectic.

Those decisions by Thatcher have now caught up with the English. The population outside London are now revolting. The Tories bought them off for a few years by blaming everything on foreigners and immigrants. But that lie is now been exposed.

England is now at a crossroads. History tells us that when steam has left the kettle, it is not possible to force it back in. All you can do is direct the course of travel. It could go left, as peasant revolts have done in the past. The labour movement could harness it and drive towards a socialist revolution.

Or it could go right. And unfortunately, that looks like where it is headed. Towards populism, fascism and violence toward anyone who doesn’t belong to the narrow band of heterosexual Englishness.   

This makes me incredibly sad. A country I admire greatly has gone to the dogs and worse still, they might win the World Cup and next year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

 

Dr Dolittle

 My first visitor was a frog. A large green one with a suspicious set of eyes and a lazy stride. At first I thought it might be a modern day woke Prince, who thought nothing of approaching a middle aged man in pursuit of a kiss. The frog certainly didn’t look very kissable to me. He had an oily coat and spindly legs that propelled him up my driveway to my open garage door.

He probably would have marched inside, if I hadn’t turned around at the crucial moment and stopped him in his tracks. We stared at each other like characters in a Sergio Leone movie, and when he showed no signs of retreating, I picked up a nearby broom and marched towards him. The threat was enough and he scuttled back to the drain from which he came. He is still there, five months after I first met him. He seems to have not moved in that time, standing on a pipe below the drain cover, like a lonely sentinel, perhaps waiting for a spoiled princess to arrive.

I’ve been sitting in my garage, with the door open, for most of the last seven months. The country was closed down on August 17^th last when Delta poked its head over the parapet and first entered New Zealand. We got that under control just before Christmas and then went on holiday. By the time we got back, Omicron had pushed Delta out of the way and was sweeping through the country.

At this stage, Jacinda threw her notes in the air and said “I told you to wear a bloody mask, do what you f-ing like”. My company interpreted this as come in to the office once a week.

As a result, I’ve manned this lonely station in my garage for more than seven months now. My wife goes into work, my daughter goes to school, so for most of the day it’s just me and whatever member of the animal kingdom stumbles up the driveway.

Pukekos are a regular visitor. They are a variety of swamp hen and are numerous in our neighbourhood. We live near a large pond and they nest there. Occasionally they wander up our street in search of feijoas (a fruit unloved by most humans I know, but devoured by our avian friends). They seem unafraid of humans and immensely curious. The broom has to come out often when they are around.

Cats stroll nonchalantly past most days without deigning to look inside. The exception is the pug faced mozzy from two doors down. He regularly tries to sneak in and curl up on the old sofa that rests against the back wall. He’s clearly unaware that I see cats as the hand-tool of the devil. I don’t even bother with the broom for him. He normally gets the sharp end of my toe.

This annoys my daughter greatly as she adores cats, dogs, and every other domestic creature. I haven’t the heart to tell her that not only do I dislike all animals, I’m not even fond of most humans.

The local pond is also home to a wide variety of ducks. Four of them paid me a visit some time ago. They were a long way from home, but looked like they were out for an afternoon stroll.  They waddled up to door, had a quick look inside and then flicked their beaks contemptuously towards me and wandered off.

On hot days, skinks like to sun their slimy backs on the bare concrete of the driveway. They are tiny lizards that live in Auckland gardens. They rarely come into the garage and usually slink back in the undergrowth if they catch me looking at them.

A large heron flew down last week and perched on the lamppost across the street and peered over his long crooked beak like a judge pontificating on a lenghty and boring court case. One of the street cats stationed himself at the bottom of the lamppost and salivated as he surveyed the large bounty above him. Then a crashing disappointment descended on the poor moggy, when a couple of abortive attempts at climbing the lamppost proved that it was impossible.

The heron watched all this with barely concealed contempt and then flapped his majestic wings and took off into the afternoon sky.

He was back on ground level the next day, having confirmed that no cats were around. He marched up the street, stopping at each house individually as though he was accessing how well each of us was maintaining our properties.

You’ll note that I haven’t mentioned dogs. There are plenty in this neighbourhood but they are kept under lock and key and only brought out for supervised walks. It’s not like my youth when mongrel dogs would wander round all day, intimidating timid little boys like me.

There is a debate raging across the world on whether the pandemic will lead to working from home being the norm, rather than the exception. I think what’s missing from these conversations is the social aspect of work. Whenever I’m in the office, a good part of my day is spent chatting to colleagues. Even when its work related, you spend some time before and after meetings catching up on weekend sport or the new best place to buy coffee. You don’t tend to do this on Zoom calls.

I’ve been working in offices now for almost forty years. That adds up to a huge amount of social interactions. I’ve met some of my best friends through work, mainly by discovering that they shared my enthusiasm for beer after work on Fridays.

You miss all that at home. It’s hard to have a social interaction with somebody you’ve never met. I’ll be happy to get back into the office for a few days a week at least. In the meantime, I’ll have to do my best Dr Dolittle impression and keep my interactions limited to the Animal Kingdom.

 

 

A Postcard from Pauanui

Body surfing is a skill that Kiwis learn at an early age. You need a surf beach, of which there are thousands spread around the coastline of New Zealand. Then you wade out to about waist deep and watch the incoming waves like Keanu Reeves in Point Break.

When you spot a “good one”, you turn and face the beach and move to where you think the wave will break. Then you dive headfirst into the water and assume the body shape of an eel. If you time it right, the wave will carry you the whole way to the shoreline and gracefully deposit you on the sand. If you time it badly, the wave will either smack you on the head like you are an errant school child, or it will pick you up like an old sheet in a tumble dryer and smack you un-ceremonially on the sea floor. In between these two events, you will summersault with the grace of a drunken hippo. But luckily this all happens within the wave and nobody will see it.

The additional problem with this manoeuvre is that you end some distance from the shore. You’ll, first of all, get sucked out to sea by the undertow of the wave that just humiliated you. As you struggle to your feet, the next wave, which is invariably bigger and stronger than the one before, will smash into you with the ferocity of an All Black who has just been mocked for knocking the ball on.

I took up body surfing at the age of 43, much too late in life if I was ever going to achieve Olympic level standards. In truth, I’ve only practised once or twice a year since. I’m less a novice and more an occasional dabbler. As a result, my timing is terrible and I end up losing my dignity and quite often my shorts on a regular basis.  

Occasionally, I catch a sweet one and the rush of adrenaline as you glide through the water is magnificent. In the same way that a weekend golfer will sometimes catch a drive nicely and convince himself that he is Tiger Woods, when I’m successful in the water, I like to think I’ve finally mastered it. The truth is that the sea likes playing with you. I’ve never managed more than one nice run in all my visits to the beach. Maybe, I should learn from this and step out of the sea and grab my towel whenever I’ve managed to time a wave right. But I never do.

I’ve managed to practice a lot this summer. In the absence of foreign travel, we are keen to see as much of New Zealand this holiday season as we did last year. We started with a week in Pauanui. That’s a sandy spit on the west coast of the Coromandel peninsula, dotted with multi-million-dollar beach properties. It’s the favourite retirement destination for Waikato dairy farmers, who made their fortune servicing the Chinese demand for milk powder. 

Everyone owns a fishing boat with a powerful outboard motor and they pull these down to the wharf each morning using the 1950’s Massey Ferguson tractor that they rescued from the farm when they retired. They have seamlessly replaced milking Friesians with coaxing Snapper out of the sea.

My father-in-law is one of these retired farmers and kindly opens his door to us each Christmas. We stayed for a week this time. Enjoying the beach and the slow bicycle race pace of life.

It is a town of roughly 1,000 souls. At Christmas that swells to about 20,000 as the kids and grandkids of the retired residents descend on the place, tempted by the allure of free accommodation and their parents home cooking.

As a result, at this time of year, it’s difficult to get to the Supermarket or to the small number of cafes in the town centre. Covid passport rules added to the complexity. Those of us who live in Auckland have just come out of four months of lockdown when we couldn’t leave the city. This was relaxed just before Christmas and it feels as though the whole city has decamped to the beach.

Thankfully, most of the kids headed home after New Year and the village went back to its traditional pace of life. I say traditional, but in fact, this place hardly existed 50 years ago. It was a sandy spit of land at the end of a long dirt road. A visionary developer with an eye for a quick buck saw the potential.

The spit had a surf beach on one side facing the Pacific Ocean. On the other, it had a calm harbour beach, safe for kids and rubbish swimmers like me.

He started building in an unconventional style. There were to be no fences and sociability was encouraged. He also built a grass runway to attract the burgeoning rich from Auckland who wanted to splash out their wealth on light aircraft.

Many of the original residents have passed away now and the houses have been passed on to their kids and grandkids. This has made the place livelier but has also increased the number of fences. It seems that our generation is not as sociable as the last.

It’s a town that will always be special to me as it’s the place I got married in ten years ago. It has everything you need with one exception. For some reason, there are no pubs in town. There are cafes you can get a drink in, but no traditional drinking establishment. Maybe I should open one.  I think you could make a good living running a pub there. There are still a lot of retirees living there and from what I can see, they all like a tipple.

But until then, I’ll have to find my thrills in the ocean. Watching the sun rise from the Pacific, and catching that big one that serenades you back to the beach.