New House, New Bread

So, if you remember, a little while ago we bought a house. A little while ago (about two weeks now), we moved in, and since then have been slowly sort of synchronising ourselves with it. For me, meshing with the new house has involved things like unpacking (of course), going for a run, making stock, baking bread, planting a lime tree and (eventually) blogging about it all. Feels good.

The bread in question is currently cooling on a rack in the kitchen, and despite being a bit of a funny shape I think it's ok. I was worried about how the starter would cope with being moved, but it seems to have managed. I think that sometimes I'm a bit overprotective of it. On the stock front, we managed to defrost the freezer a while ago (not on purpose) and so what better reason to make a full five litres of chickeny goodness? Beef stock this weekend coming, plus possibly some Spanish-accented pork rillettes if I can be arsed.

Work, then. Work is mental. I'm wondering if I've not bitten off a bit more than I can chew, as what started as a relatively simple website re-platforming has turned into the mother of all heaving, beastly complicated program of work, encompassing CRM, contact centre applications, claims management and a fair bit more besides. Add in to that a healthy dollop of intra-group politics and a business that's totally unaware of how to take control of the technology development process, and you have something of a challenge.

It's an enjoyable one though, and so far we seem to be making progress. I'm still confident we'll deliver something by the end of the year; I'm just not totally sure what. It'll be fun finding out though.

Feeling old

You know that saying about how when you notice how young policemen are these days, it's time to start feeling old? Well, I don't know about policemen, but the recent news of the passing of Keith Floyd has certainly made me stop and think.

Before wine, food was one of the first things I got really excited about for more than a month or two - an obsession that has stayed with me. Two things promoted this: Robert Carrier's phenomenal Robert Carrier's Cookbook, and Keith Floyd's book Floyd on Fish (plus the occasional TV appearance), both of which owned by my mother. I would pore over these books for hours, reading recipes over and over, imagining the meals I would cook, how I would plan the preparation, and the way I would serve them.

I loved Robert Carrier's tone, his slightly camp flamboyance tempered with a staunchly cheffy and classically-trained firmess and detail. Floyd though, I loved for his portrayal of the only sort of Englishness I'd been able to admire - the sort of enjoyable, cultured, slightly damaged and helpless charm, and above all the knowledge not only of how to have a jolly good time but how to prepare one for others. I remember promising my 13-year-old self that I too, on my 40th birthday, would crack my way through 40 fat oysters, just as Keith had. You watch - only 8 years to go.

So the passing of the second one (Carrier died in 2006) makes me realise that most of the people in the culinary world who I most admire are dead (these two along with MFK Fisher and Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin). This makes me feel old.

Added to this, the Kiwi and I are about to move into a house on Tuesday, a house which we, thanks to the munificence of a local bank, own. Although this is a truly terrifying thought, I'm excited enough about the prospect to make up for it - far from making me feel grown up, it makes me resent that cash paid out ever month for rent a bit less; now it's a mortgage payment it's actually going somewhere sensible for a change. Aged 32, it's about time.

And so, in honour of Mr Floyd, whom everyone I've ever cooked for should thank (or curse, depending on how well I did on that occasion), I'll be raising a glass this evening. He did a huge amount for food culture in the UK, but more importantly for me, he helped show me that a carefully-prepared meal, of good ingredients, can lift you out of your day-to-day life and into somewhere very special indeed.

Snow, hard work again, honeymoon

Our last holiday until our honeymoon has just happened, and as most of you will already know from emails, Facebook and Twitter, it was an incredible four days spent at Mount Ruapehu, snowboarding, eating, drinking, snowboarding, and generally not being at work. This last bit was good, as it's been a fairly intense three months (only three months!!) and I was beginning to fear a little bit of burnout approaching.

So, for those of you who're not in New Zealand, Mount Ruapehu is an active volcano in the North Island, about four and a half hours' drive from Auckland on a good day. We were boarding at Turoa, and staying in Ohakune, about 20 minutes' drive down the hill and a genuinely lovely little town. The mountain's profile might be recognisable to some as Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings - it's more covered in snowboarders in real life.

To save a bit of time, we headed to Hamilton on Wednesday night, to stay with the Kiwi's sister and other half, which shortened the morning's drive by an hour or so and provided a great lasagne courtesy of the younger Kiwi. Stupidly early on Thursday we headed south, and some time after breakfast we could spot the mountain in the distance. We were on the hill by mid-morning, my initial nerves about having forgotten how to do it long gone by the end of the first run. That said, it was only December we were in Whistler.

Thursday was good - Friday was better. The snow was some of the best I've seen in all my three snowboarding trips; as good as Whistler at its best. They'd had 10cm on the Wednesday, and the perfect balance of clear, sunny days, cool temperatures and cold nights ensured it stayed deep and soft until we left. Saturday was good, but busy - obviously word had spread and the world and his dog had made the trip to the mountain. Sunday we managed a good breakfast before making an unhurried journey back home through stunning scenery.

Work, which we temporarily escaped, is intense. I can't speak for the Kiwi, although I know she's mentally busy, but for my part the pace and strain are fantastic. I've just convinced the business to hire another member of staff to support me, which should help, and with another project workstream about to kick off I'll need it, I think. Development is moving slowly even so, which is a bit of a concern as I'm burning through my credibility with every extra dollar I spend without showing a result. Hopefully I've built up enough of it to last another six weeks or so.

As for the last point - we have booked our honeymoon finally. Torn between heading from a southern hemisphere summer to the UK in February, and going to a beach not far from here, we chose the latter. We're going to Aitutaki, a tiny island north of Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands. Following a long time without any time off, and a wedding to boot, I think a week spent on a beach doing as close to nothing as possible will be just the thing.

Blending in

HOW good is this? I've been meaning to mention it for a while, only just got round to it. A friend of mine makes wine in Marlborough under his label Fiasco, and we've become friends, like many people he and I know, mainly through Twitter. He and his wife blog fairly enthusiastically too, and they both have a fair amount of highly intelligent stuff to say, not only on the subject of winemaking, which they live and breathe, but on the marketing and distribution of wine too.

Now, Aaron (for that is his name) is full of excellent ideas. They spend precisely $0.00 on marketing, and yet he's properly out there, and it seems to be working for him. The man has an innate understanding of social interaction online, and whilst his work in this space is defiantly non-commercial in content, what he's managed to do is something most marketers can only dream of - he's built a genuine dialogue with his customer based on a mutual understanding, and based on a very good product indeed.

Anyway, Fiasco's most recent ruse involved the blending of their 09 Sauvignon Blanc. Only being a small vineyard, Fiasco don't have the latitude of some larger concerns of being able to blend from multiple vineyard sites. In order to get a bit of complexity into the wine, Aaron's used three different yeast strains to deliver three distinct wines from the same grapes from the same vineyard, a not uncommon practice.

We've been following the fermentation for some time, as the wines develop their own characteristics and Aaron's been video blogging like a crazy person. Literally.

So the plan he came up with a while back involved getting his online acquaintances to sign up for a blending experiment. Some time after signing up, three bottles arrived in the post, labelled A, B and C. The instructions were simple: try a couple of different percentage blends, note down your favourite, and email the results back to Fiasco. The average across all the results they get back will be the final blend. A genuinely user-generated thing - brilliant.

So not only did we get the chance to experience the blending process first-hand (it was amazing to see how three wines mixed together produced something so much better than any of them individually), we had a hand in creating a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that will be on the shelves of our nearby wine merchants in a few months' time.

What a brilliant thing to do.

Home Sweet Home

Although I've been a bit slack in terms of blogging recently, I'd hoped to be able to document the house-buying process as it unfolded, outlining the ups and downs, the excitement and disappointment etc etc etc. Unfortunately for the content of this blog, we've just bought one.

We've been going through open homes for a while now, traipsing through other peoples' houses several times a weekend, nosing through closets and tutting at wallpaper, diligently leaving our shoes at the door. Last weekend, we went to a few more, including one place in Point Chevalier which was a bit of a departure for us. Being naive foreigners (the Kiwi counts as a foreigner, having as much experience of housebuying in Auckland as I do), we'd been looking for one of the lovely old villas they have round here. Most of them have been done up to one standard or another, but in reality they're all 70+ years old and held together with plaster and old wallpaper paste in the main.

You can overlook all this to a degree, as most of them really are lovely houses. However, when you talk to someone who lives in one, words like draughty, cold, damp, money pit, mould and pleaseletmeliveinamodernhouse start to come out, so we thought we'd take a chance and look at a recently built place.

On Monday our offer was accepted:


It's a three-bedroomed free-standing place over two floors, with a little garden and a deck (just behind the fence on the left of the photo). The couple selling it are moving north of the harbour with their new baby, and have kept the place beautifully. Brilliantly, the HRV system they've installed keeps the house both warm and dry more or less all the time, something which I've come to see the value of during the cold, damp Auckland winter.

So there's one more stage of paperwork to get through, and with luck our offer will go unconditional on Monday. We'll be in by the end of September, having given the vendors a bit of time to find a new place of their own as we're in no desperate hurry to move. On that note, it's amazing to notice how much simpler and friendlier the New Zealand purchase process is than the English one. I say English advisedly, as I'm told that north of the border things are again simpler. There's no gazumping, no massive stress over completion and exchange dates. There are penalties levied if the agreed move-in date isn't kept to, and the party at fault is charged. The estate agent pretty much does the lot for you.

Your fiancée does a fair bit too, apparently. It's obviously hard work, as this (Saturday) morning she's looking very tired indeed and was quite incoherent when she got home this morning. Poor thing.

More on this as we get it. Today involves meeting a friend from the UK, who now lives in Melbourne, at the airport and pootling round Auckland for the rest of the day, which should be pleasant as it's beautifully sunny outside and the city will be sparkling and shining by the harbour. It might even be an opportunity to take the top down...

So how's it going?

So I've been blogging (rarely) about stuff that's going on here, but I'm not sure (and can't be bothered checking) that I've actually mentioned anything about how it's feeling. So I thought I should try. Now, a recent Myers-Briggs test showed that by quite a long shot, I'm 'Thinking' rather than 'Feeling', so this could be a bit of a challenge.

It's been just over six months since we arrived in New Zealand, and over seven since we left London. It really doesn't seem that long. In that time, we've moved all our possessions to the other side of the world, acquired cars, bank accounts, jobs, furniture, kitchen stuff, towels and stuff like that. We are now looking for a house to keep it all in.

Funnily enough, just when I think I'm getting round to be able to answer the question, people have stopped asking us if we've settled in ok. Settling in is a process, and I think we're definitely moving through it comfortably enough.

I rant a lot about things I don't like - this is just part of me. This means it can seem though, that I'm generally unhappy with my lot, but this isn't really the case. I could go on for hours about the superficial good things and not-so-good things about living here, but realistically they don't add up to more or less than anywhere else. Good pies / dodgy road rules. Positive working culture / stupidly expensive dairy produce. You know the sort of conversation - the sort of phatic communion* that forms 80% of human conversation. More, probably.

I am happy here. Happy-er than I was before we left, in many ways. I miss people very much, family, old friends, colleagues who've become close friends - lots of people. I miss meeting people on Sundays in the pub that you could get to without driving. But on the other hand, there's email, MSN, Skype, Twitter, Facebook - all helping those people seem a little less distant. The pub I can live without to an extent - and my bank balance thanks me for that.

I like having our own television. Watching it whilst sitting on our own sofa. Working with people who do what they say they'll do, and who're genuinely open to change. Leaving the office at a reasonable time and getting home to enjoy the rest of the day. I like that Auckland is such a beautiful city, and I like even more that no one here seems to realise that. I like that we have plans in place, that we know what we want out of our immediate lives and that we're taking steps to get there. That feels pretty good.

So yes - it's going well, on the whole. Very well.





* I've been looking for an opportunity to use this phrase for a while now. Score!

Vic Chesnutt, Kings Arms Tavern, 4 July 2009

Whilst working at Virgin Digital many years ago, my colleague Mark passed me an unmarked CD, and said 'play this - it's going to be massive'. The track started with a donk-donk-donk-donk that would become terribly familiar over the coming year as Gnarls Barkley's 'Crazy', a track which I still rather like despite having heard it over a gazillion times. It's a bit bittersweet actually, as I remember the conversation with our PR company the day after the track was released. Being the first digital-only single to be chart elegible (I think... something like that anyway) they were keen to make a big song and dance over our day one sales. Asked for the number, I said 'Thirty-two'. '32 thousand? Brilliant news, I'll get the release out'. 'No mate. Thirty-two.'

How depressing. The track went on to deliver about 31,000 digital sales in the UK that week, of which we did, um, about fifty.

Anyway, moving to the nub of this post, earlier this year, one half of Gnarls (Dangermouse) hooked up with Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, and David Lynch, on a project known as 'Dark Night of the Soul'. This was to be a bit of a masterpiece, with a 100-page booklet featuring Lynch's photography, numerous guest spots and Dangermouse's trademark unorthodox, brilliant production.

One dispute with the record label later, and the album was put out, minus the actual audio content. Contained within the box was a blank CD, with a bit of text exhorting the user to 'use the CD as they saw fit'. The subtext here, naturally, was that they'd leaked the content online and an enterprising fan could easily find it. I may have done. And it's a great album.

The final two tracks feature one Vic Chesnutt, about whom you can read more here, but suffice it to say that he's seen as a bit of a legend in some parts. As a songwriter he's intelligent, emotive and darkly humourous, as a performer that gallows humour comes across even more strongly. So when I noticed he was touring New Zealand and playing in Auckland this weekend I grabbed a pair of tickets.

So into the largely empty venue we walked at about quarter to nine. We got drinks, settled against a wall at the back (no seats in this place). A few more punters filtered in as the support cranked his way through a few fairly hackneyed tracks. A couple of people came in towards the end of his set - one in a wheelchair (Chesnutt is paraplegic, easy to spot...), one a short, older lady who looked a bit confused, wearing trademark 'crazy lady' clothes. She wandered around for a bit, conspicuous in the nearly-empty venue, and then got up on the stage. And picked up a guitar. And began some stretches.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Victoria Williams. A bit of a legend in her own right, apparently, and it's fair to say that for portions of her performance I was completely transfixed, and there was a definite musical brilliance going on there throughout. Shambolic, unselfconscious, at times fascinating, but her habit of stopping songs part-way through because she'd forgotten the rest, or constantly detuning and retuning, slipping the beat every few bars and forcing Vic (on drums) to stop and restart, got a bit much. 90 minutes of this though was a challenge, one which as it happens was too much for the Kiwi - she went home.

I'm still in two minds about this. I'd never heard of her prior to this gig, and I'm still not sure whether this was amazing or awful. I suspect it's a perfect mix of both. On the occasions where she found a bit of form and let rip, she was amazing. The initial shambling ineptitude was charming, but rapidly got tiresome.

After all this, Vic (with whom she's been friends for over 20 years, apparently) did his thing, getting an unbelievable sound out of his battered acoustic. He did play one of the Dangermouse tracks (Grim Augury, which stripped of its electronica was startlingly raw and bleak), and for the majority of the show played older stuff and audience requests. In such an intimate venue (which had filled a bit by now), his style came across fantastically; personal, human and warm whilst at the same time searingly emotional.

What really threw all this into perspective for me though was the car ride home. After nearly three hours of emotionally intelligent, personal, richly descriptive music performed in a variety of unique ways, the noise that vomited out of the car radio was just too much and had to be turned off. Overproduced, sterile, facile and sickeningly meaningless. Some genres make a virtue of this and that I applaud, but when it's glossy synthetics masquerading as indie pop I just can't take it.

So on reflection, I'm really glad I went. Challenging, yes. But so very, very good. Don't know if I could do it every week though. Fortunately in Auckland that's not much of a likelihood.