The North-Western European Archipelago

Yesterday I was called a Pom. I’ve been called worst things in my time. Being called early in the morning is my least favourite. But being called a Pom is up there. It means the speaker thinks you are English, or worse still knows you are Irish but lumps you in with the English anyway. Because to him, you’re all the same anyway.

Now as I’ve said before, I have nothing against the English. I think every house should have one. Particularly as a Butler. The English make very good Butlers. I’m just proud to be Irish and want people to recognise me as such.

This happens much more often in New Zealand than it ever did in Australia. I’m not sure why this is. Kiwis have a closer connection to the Mother country I guess and the European settlers here came primarily from the islands of Britain and Ireland, so perhaps it’s understandable that they see us as homogeneous mass.

I have a certain amount of sympathy. For the vast majority of the world, the geographical and political names are the same. New Zealanders come from the islands of New Zealand. Australians from the island of Australia. But some British people come from the island of Ireland.

So, I thought I’d present my idiots guide to the peoples and places of the North Western European archipelago.

The first trick for young learners is to distinguish between the Politics and Geography. “The British Isles” is a geographical term that includes the islands of Britain, Ireland and surrounding islands.

The United Kingdom is a political term and represents a country that can issue passports, raise taxes and spend every waking hour arguing about whether it should leave or partly stay in the European Union.

Ireland is both an island and a country but the country doesn’t encompass the whole island. But more of that later.

So, it’s clear that both the Irish and the British have some responsibility for confusing the world. But we’re not the only culprits. Macedonia is a small Balkan country but also a province in Greece. 

Citizens of the United States like to call themselves Americans, when the Americas run from Canada down to the tip of Chile.

Let’s start with geography. Ireland is the island on the western side of the archipelago that looks like a teddy bear driving a vintage car. To its right is the larger island called Britain which looks a predatory old man crouching over a teddy bear. Collectively (and from a geographic standpoint) this is known as the “British Isles”. It’s not clear where this name came from, although we can be pretty certain it didn’t start in Ireland. Use of the word British in this context is contentious. When you want to come up with a collective name for two things, it’s pretty lazy if you just use the name of the bigger of the two. Iberia is a better name than the Spanish Peninsula and the Scandinavians and Nordics are able to come up with collective names that don’t call out individual countries.

Understandably then, to the ordinary Kiwi it is logical to assume that if you come from the British Isles, you must be British. But being British is about identity, ethnicity and citizenship. The first two are difficult to define, but the third is clear. You are a British citizen if you come from the island of Britain or Northern Ireland, which is the six counties in the north east of the island of Ireland. So, those of us who come from the rest of the island of Ireland are not British.

We are of course Irish. We have Irish passports. We are a Republic, independent since 1922 and a stand alone member of the United Nations and European. However, to the casual observer if you come from the Island of island of Ireland you are Irish, when the north east piece is actually British.

So, not everyone in Ireland is Irish and not everyone in the British Isles is British. To complicate matters, we Irish call our country Ireland, which is three quarters of the island known as Ireland.

The British add to the confusion by having sub countries. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are regions but they get to play as separate countries in Football and other sports that originated in Britain. We Irish are not without guilt here too however. We play games like Rugby based on the geographical island of Ireland and not the political entity of Ireland which as I say makes up about three quarters of the Island.

There are many fans of this set up who think it should be extended to other sports such as Football. In fairness, the people who support this tend to be the ones who are disappointed that Ireland ever became independent of Britain in the first place. Outside of the “British Isles” every other country that plays international rugby or football is a stand-alone country with its own government. That’s why they can fly their national flag and play their national anthem, whereas the Irish Rugby team has to make these up so that they can pretend they are something they clearly are not.

As you can see, it’s a mess of geography, history and politics, which is a toxic mix. Ireland and Britain have been interconnected, often against their will for centuries. We Irish have a dark history of colonisation and conquest and the British are to blame. So names bring baggage and are rarely neutral. I’ve given up trying to explain that I haven’t just come back from the UK or that I should like warm beer because I’m a Brit. Life is too short and there are bigger questions to answer. I hope to address these in future blogs, now that I’ve so clearly articulated this one.

I’m just back from the North-western European archipelago. I spent some time in Ireland and the United Kingdom without leaving the island of Ireland.

Farewell Dad

Last Monday I woke up to a notification from the Irish Times to tell me that Limerick had just won the All-Ireland hurling championship.  My immediate instinct was to ring my Dad to discuss the final, as I have done every year since I left home 31 years ago.

Then I remembered that he wouldn’t answer because he passed away a month ago. That’s happened a lot these past few weeks. A thought pops into my head and like a sledgehammer I remember that he’s no longer with us.

Hurling was a huge part of his life. He was a proud Wexford man and brought me up on tales of Nicky Rackard’s exploits in the 1950s.  That was the golden era of Wexford Hurling and Dad was lucky enough to be in his 20’s when they won three titles in six years. He moved north to Dundalk where hurling was as rare as a Pope Francis t-shirt on the Shankill Road. So, when a hurling team was set up in my primary school, I was made the team captain on the basis of my Dad’s heritage. It certainly wasn’t on the basis of my talent.

After living abroad for eight years, I moved back to Ireland in 1996 which happened to be the year that Wexford won the All-Ireland for the first time in twenty-eight years. We went to the early rounds as a family. Mam, Dad, me and my sister Mary. Dad would make his famous cheese and coleslaw sandwiches and pack a few cans of Harp into a cool bag. We would enjoy these out of the boot of the car before the game as he had done forty years previously.

As Wexford got closer to the final, tickets became harder to source. Dad started calling in favours. He had lived in Dundalk for thirty six years by then and had more contacts than a Hollywood Agent. He somehow managed to source four tickets for every game up to the Final. But in the week before that game, he announced that he was only able to get two tickets for the big game. Wexford probably had the biggest support in Ireland and their opponents that day were Limerick. They were going through their own drought then, a drought that wouldn’t be quenched until last Sunday and they had a huge support too.

We agreed that Dad and myself would go to the game and that Mam and Mary would enjoy the picnic with us beforehand and then retire to a local hostelry. I donned my new Wexford jersey and we made our way to the old Nally Stand and as we climbed up the steps I could see a glint in his eye as though the ghosts of the 1950s were tipping their caps to him.

It was a tense game. Wexford had a man sent off in the first half but they hung on tenaciously to win a title that is still being sung about in the pubs in Dad’s home county.  When the final whistle went, I was reminded of all the tales he told me of games in the fifties when the fences would be scaled at the end and the crowd would pile onto the pitch. And so I dragged him down the steps towards the pitch against the tide of Limerick fans coming the other way. He complained bitterly that he was too old for such childish caper. But something told me that this might be my only opportunity to stand on the hallowed soil of Croke Park and led him on.

We climbed the last obstacle and suddenly found ourselves among thousands of delirious fans.  We couldn’t hear the speeches because, as I learned that day, the speakers at sporting grounds point back into the stands and not towards the field. But we did see Martin Storey lift the cup and the memory of all those childhood stories washed over me as I stood beside Dad in the September sunshine. We made our way out of the ground and back to the pub where we had left Mam and Mary. Dad was like a giddy child as he told them about our on field adventures. It seemed to be the highlight of his day.

Later that evening as we watched a replay on TV, Dad leaned across and whispered that he had actually been offered four tickets for the final. But he wanted to enjoy the game with me. The others weren’t real hurling fans. My Mother had a tendency to ask questions at crucial times of the game such as “who does the guy in black play for?”  

Dad was always there for me. He taught me how to ride a bike, he taught me how to enjoy a beer and how not to be seduced by it. He even taught me how to attract girls. “Let the hare sit” was his enigmatic advice to an over eager sixteen year old. It took me a while to appreciate that advice. You don’t catch a hare by chasing it. You catch it by staying still and to trigger the hare’s curiosity.  Then the hare will come to you.

I feel now that I have nobody left to teach me anything. Nobody to pick me up when I fall off my bike. Nobody to talk to about hurling.

He died as he lived, making as little fuss and causing as little hassle to others as possible. He slipped out of the world on the 24^th July. The same date that my Mother passed away eight years previously. He would have liked the symmetry of that and the fact that his coffin was placed on top of hers and not beside it. She was normally the kingpin in their relationship and he would find it hilarious that he will now be on top for the rest of time.

They say that hurling is the sport played in heaven. I hope so, because they have just received its greatest fan. I’ll miss you Dad. You were my hero.

News from the Beach

There are times when you find yourself lying on a beach with a good book and a cooling breeze drifting in from the sea that you can think that you are a million miles from the real world with its hustle and bustle and suffocating consumerism. The truth is that it is hiding on the other side of the sand dunes.

I was about to settle into a midday snooze when a text message summoned me to the other side of town with an urgent request to procure ice creams for three thirsty kids. I ambled slowly towards the car and with a very satisfying yawn set off for the shops.

I should point out that I find myself this year in Pauanui on the Coromandel Peninsula on the east coast of New Zealand. It is a beautiful spot, favoured by Auckland dentists and Waikato farmers who grew rich when the Chinese discovered milk. The houses go for millions and the vehicle of choice is anything capable of towing a large boat. It’s fair to say that you don’t get any riff raff and there is no edgy side of town where you can buy drugs or move into a squat.

It does have a small supermarket which is quiet and well run for 51 weeks of the year. At New Year, however, when the hordes decamp from the city to the beach, it takes on the appearance of Macys on 5^th Avenue on the morning of Black Friday.

I had clearly missed the memo that said that the world was about to end and that we should urgently stock up on bottled water and paraffin. I knew where the ice cream fridge was but it still took me twenty minutes to navigate the kids staring goggle eyed in the chocolate isle as though Christmas had never happened and old ladies with isle blocking trollies that contained a loaf of bread and a packet of pain killers.

After a Marco Polo-esque trek I made it to the ice cream fridge which miraculously had not been cleaned out by the hungry ants who were grabbing everything else as though their money was about to become worthless at midnight.

I found myself at the end of one of the queues for the tills and being a lazy sort and a believer that these things even themselves out in the end, I decided to join and spurn the opportunity to find a shorter or faster line.

How wrong I was.

Small supermarkets in New Zealand are like Spars or Centres in Ireland. They don’t just sell the staples of bread and milk, they act as an off-licence, dispenser of lottery tickets and probably undertaker and shipping agent as well.

The first thing I noticed was that I had joined the queue that also contained the lottery machine. Like most countries, New Zealand runs its national lottery on a Saturday night. This being Monday, there was a long line of mainly elderly patrons anxious to see if they had become millionaires, or multi-millionaires in most cases as most of them were rich already. The checkout girl was gamely trying to cater for these geriatric requests while scanning the purchases of other customers. She did this by feeding the tickets into a machine that read the numbers and issued a short yelp if a prize was forthcoming. The tickets of course had spent the new year crumbled in the bottom of shorts pockets and had to be carefully unwrapped before loading into the machine in a process that reminded me of those Iranians who put together the hastily shredded messages they found in the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

I stood watching this as the ice creams slowly melted in my hand but was comforted by the knowledge that I was now three places from the front. Alas, the person at the front wanted to buy a ticket for the following week’s lottery, no doubt figuring that getting in early is the key to success. This involved charging up two space age terminals that were clearly beyond the technical abilities of the girl on the till. She gamely pressed all the available buttons with no success. She rang a bell which was obviously designed to summon assistance and we stood there silently fuming while we awaited the manager. She turned up after an age and pressed one button on the machine and a ticket was duly issued.

It was then that I noticed that the guy in front of me was clearly the most popular person in Pauanui. Every 30 seconds or so he would be greeted with fulsome New Year wishes and a request if he would mind awfully if his friend could add a small item of shopping to his basket in order for the friend to avoid joining the back of the queue. He didn’t mind, but I did. He had gone from a simple bread and milk purchaser to having an overflowing basket.

It would be some time before he got to the front, because lordy me, the lady who had finally made it to the scanning phase had just realised that she had picked up full fat milk instead of skimmed. She set off on a mission to fight her way through the milling crowds while we twitched and tutted. The ice cream was now running slowly down my clenched hands.

 At last I’m at the front and thinking that I can at least save the chocolate coating on the melting desert. But it seems that the checkout girl, while being clueless in the operation of lottery machinery is the go to expert for everything else. One of the other check out girls pushed in front of me to ask if she could accept an Australian drivers licence as proof of age for the purchase of alcohol. The licence she held indicted that it’s owner was in her mid-forties, but you can never be too safe I suppose.

The kids at least enjoyed the ice creams, even if they did have the consistency of yogurt by the time they consumed them. Next year I’m going to buy a lottery ticket and if I win I’ll spend the money employing a little man who can do my shopping for me.  

Where did the left go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Down and Out on Queen Street

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Death and Taxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Kiwi Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That kind of summed up that whole trip.

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

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

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

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