2 posts tagged “new zealand”
This one will be brief but I am drunk and it's late and I need something to do before the debate starts.
The other week there was a feature article in the guardian about the growing discontent regarding the BBC license fee.
You try and keep up to date with news, magazine programs and tips on how to buy cheap antiques on the continent when you don't even have a TV.
Exactly. Bam.
As far as I am concerned the BBC license has paid for itself already and I don't even own a TV! (Nor do I pay any form of non-VAT tax, but still...) If you disagree with me then you can frakk off to New Zealand where the people running TV strategy are, in fact, the apes from the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Note for this analogy to work the large obelisk in the first scene needs to metaphorically represent a television. See below.
Probably because it is.
When I moved to New Zealand almost five years ago I went through the whole process of throwing things out, giving them away, selling them (Ha! If you ever want to work out how well your life is going try and see what price you can get for the crap in it)... By the time I was through was was left of the first 22 years of my life could basically fit in a shoebox.
And now I am doing it all over again... This time for two people.
Familiarity shouldn't necessarily feel odd but this bout does. It feels like something more... something karmic. Let me explain why.
James leaves tomorrow to spend a week and a half in New York (for work). He's the one that does all our personal admin because, if you have met me, you know I am positively allergic to it. So rather than letting out a masculine shriek at the prospect of dealing with Her Majesty's bureaucracy I am choosing to look at it as a life lesson.
Karmic point one.
Karmic point two is being forced to make a value assessment on your entire existence. When I left Australia I was throwing out old report cards, photos of friends from when I was younger... Hell, I sure wasn't taking any of that with me. Out it goes!
Thing about it was... I didn't especially like the life I was leaving in Australia. I was definitely ready for a new one. But this life, my kiwi life... Well, I like it. Heck, I am even a bit proud of it.
But proud of it how much?
Enough to save those Lord of The Rings posters I got in Wellington the weekend that PJ won all those oscars and the town went crazy? They have extreme sentimental value to me... It was the first time I had gone on a 'kiwi' holiday on my own, having only been in the country for a couple of weeks.
Enough to save the memory blocks I made for James for Valentines Day and his birthday?
Or the seashell my mother brought back from Santiago at the end of the Camino Trail?
To your eyes the answers to this may be 'yes, if they mean something to you' but these are just the things my eyes landed on from where I am sitting right now. All these little things add up.
Clothes and homeware can be given to good will, furniture and computers can be sold... But it is probably one of the cruellest ironies that the things you least want to part with are the ones that are the most likely headed for landfill.
This 'odd' familiarity I feel I am taking as a lesson. The first time I moved countries, dare I say it, I may have been a little too rash with the disposing of mementos. That's why it feels like this time I get another chance to put a bit more thought into it.
The books, however, are coming with me. No matter what I am never starting my library from scratch again. Once bitten....
