Was This Me?

The Oven Saga, Pt 2

2010-04-30T23:20:00.002+01:00

It's in! The beast was fitted by a nice Yorkshire chap a couple of days ago, who's done a pretty good job of it. It turns out that our kitchen wall isn't quite straight, so there's a tiny alteration to the rangehood that needs doing, and I need to plaster over the holes left by the old rangehood, but otherwise we're there.

Before and after pics:

Looks a bit ornery, doesn't it? This is what we're working with now:

5 burners of gas-fueled fury, plus a rangehood that coped perfectly with me searing a massive steak last night, and a double-width electric fan oven that will be crisping up a lamb wellington for this evening.

It's all been worth it.

The Oven Saga

2010-04-18T08:25:00.004+01:00

I mentioned in the last post about getting a new oven installed, and I feel that for the sake of my karma I should come clean about what that whole story actually contains.

My wife (My Wife!) and I have been talking for a while about replacing the crappy four-burner electric stove that came with the house. Fortunately, it's a standalone oven / cooker, which as it isn't built into the work surfaces would be comparatively simple to replace. However, as I mentioned below, we're keen to move to gas hobs rather than the awful electric ones we have.

So a few weeks ago, we were out for coffee and a few basic errands (I was buying pants, if you must know), and whilst the Kiwi was in a girl shop doing girl things, I wandered a few doors down to where a local appliance store was having the final weekend of a closing down sale. It was like appliance deal heaven in there, and I looked further in and found a five-burner gas / electric oven for around $2,000 off, which was intriguing. I pulled the Kiwi in and pointed this out. A sales assistant materialised, and offered a number of compelling things - free delivery, interest free credit, that sort of thing.

So we bought it. Despite the following:

We have no mains gas at our house
The five-burner stove is somewhat wider than our four-burner one, and thus slightly wider than the gap our cupboards allow
The addition of a differently-sized oven will require a differently-sized rangehood, and thus a new hole in the wall in a slightly different place

Carpe diem, and all that. So once the thing was safely ensconced in our downstairs spare bedroom, we set about getting quotes to have it installed. Fortunately, we found out that the current rangehood, whilst slightly offset for the new oven, was actually within compliance codes and wouldn't have to be replaced right away. This is good as they're expensive, and I imagined that cutting a new hole in our expensive cedar external wall and filling the old one in would also be somewhat costly.

So we found a gasfitter who'll pipe bottled gas in from outside, remove one of the kitchen cupboards, install the oven and put some cheap glaze over the back wall for not a reasonable sum.

Thing is, that cheap glaze was proving a bit of a challenge. The thinking behind doing it cheaply was that we're probably going to get the rest of the kitchen done sooner or later so we didn't want to put anything too permanent in. However, it's probably not going to be this year, so it does need to look reasonable. This prompted us to look at a nice steel splashback this weekend whilst we were looking at how cheap the cheap wall glaze actually was (the answer was 'very'). We decided on one, and I diligently measured it to ensure it would fit under our existing rangehood - remember we'd decided not to replace the current one.

We had my car with us at the time (two seater roadster), so we headed home to pick up the Kiwi's car (estate (sorry 'sport') wagon) and to measure up. I took the bigger car, returned, and bought the splashback. Job done.

This evening, the Kiwi asked 'did you measure the rangehood in the end?'. Cue small moment of discomfort from your author. I had not, having been distracted by a toasted sandwich on our return home.

As it turns out, the splashback we have bought is about 15cm too tall for the current rangehood, which means that not only will we have to buy a new one in order to get our oven installed, we'll have to have it fitted, which is no small task.

I suspect that our gasfitter finds this all highly amusing. As does my wife.

... and we're back

2010-04-18T07:08:00.006+01:00

I'm not sure why I've not been at the blog lately, have been struggling with an explanation for a while now. I could say I've been too busy, but that would be a lie really, and I suppose I could say something about being happy, which I am, but none of that would seem like a genuine reason for apparently having nothing to say. Truth is, there's been numerous times over the past six months or so where I've thought 'I should blog about that', but the thought of going through the process of rekindling this blog kind of put me off. I like continuity, you see, and feel I'd need to fill in the gaps between then and now before writing anything new.

But I'm not going to. Otherwise I'd never get around to starting again. Surely through the likes of Twitter, Facebook and the rumour mill (or because you've visited recently), you know about the kitten and the wedding and all of that, so no need to post about any of that, and what a weight off my shoulders is that?

So here we are, happily married and settling into a cosy Sunday evening in our house, with a chilled weekend (involving a visit to the zoo!) behind us and a productive week of good things ahead of us. At the moment we're furiously saving to have a new oven installed, one with gas hobs, so entertainment has to be of the 'free' or 'extraordinarily cheap' varieties for a while. It'll be worth it to have some degree of control over what I'm cooking, plus we received a number of excellent cooking vessels as wedding gifts and I'm keen not to screw them up on those horrible electrical elements.

It's been a good weekend for food, even with our crappy oven. As the weather here's turning cooler, my thoughts have turned to comfort food (although it's still around 20C at the moment), and so on Friday evening I made tartiflette, that amazing French Alpine concoction of potato, bacon, onion, white wine and cheese. It was phenomenal, even with raclette substituted in place of the traditional reblochon - the latter being entirely unavailable in Auckland and the Kapiti Cheese Co making a great raclette.

I'm slowly getting my head around the food here. It helps that we live close to the Westmere Butcher, one of (if not THE) best butchers in Auckland. The Auckland Fish Market is also just a small detour from my journey home from work, so that helps too. The Kapiti shop is across the road from my office building, and I'm beginning to build a list of places that usually have what I'm looking for.

Funnily enough, that list is potentially not what you'd expect. Self-styled 'speciality' food stores like Sabato and Nosh tend to fail me every single time, with shelves groaning under the weight of super-priced olive oils and comedically useless condiments, but not a single hard to find ingredient in there I couldn't have bought in Tesco in the UK. They seem to exist solely for fabulously wealthy people to spend a whole heap of cash whilst not buying any actual food. What bugs me the most is the cynical pricing, basically an attraction in itself to a certain type of customer. I'm still deciding whether or not to continue this rant over on Eating Auckland.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that stuff is good. We're headed back to the UK for a visit over next Christmas, and the knowledge that that's there helps a lot from day to day. The days straight after the wedding were weird, with no 'big thing' on the horizon involving seeing friends from the UK, but Christmas has taken its place. Here's looking forwards to that...

New House, New Bread

2009-10-05T09:04:00.003+01:00

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

2009-09-16T08:06:00.003+01:00

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

2009-08-25T09:57:00.003+01:00

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

2009-08-03T11:24:00.004+01:00

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

2009-07-24T23:53:00.003+01:00

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?

2009-07-06T09:21:00.004+01:00

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

2009-07-05T05:11:00.003+01:00

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.

About the bread

2009-06-29T10:27:00.004+01:00

It's been a bad few weeks for bread. For some reason the last three weekends have produced really dodgy loaves, weirdly rubbery and a bit moist, heavy on the bottom and ridiculously over-aerated at the top. Not nice at all - one particularly bad one wasn't even good enough for toast.

So, remedial action. I'd noticed that the dough, which is normally quite loose in this recipe, had been getting more and more liquid, up to the point where it was really more of a batter, and was behaving a bit like crumpet batter at that. So towards the end of last week, I woke my starter up, poured off some of the goopy liquid that was collecting on the top, and fed it with a much more flour-heavy feed than usual. One more chunky feed later and the weekend's baking could start. Again, I added a bit more flour than the recipe demanded.

The most important thing I did was to use the right amount of starter in the initial rise. I'd been using double the amount, which was probably the root of my problems.

The result? We're back in the game. A great, fluffy, flavoursome loaf this time, this one almost too good for toast. It did get a bit lively during the second prove, as the following will show:

The dough was pretty powerful - aggressive, one might almost say. Rumours of my starter's demise are greatly exaggerated :)

How is it nearly JULY already?

2009-06-29T10:07:00.003+01:00

I promise this won't be a monthly thing - constantly harping on about the way time seems to be speeding up, when all along we know it's all part of the theory of relativity; the each passing month and year being, relatively speaking, a smaller part of the whole thing.

Anyway, things do seem to be going rather quickly. Like when, during a meeting with a mortgage advisor (another story...) this evening I said I'd been working for four weeks. The Kiwi corrected me with the actual story - six. Six weeks of brain-melting, mind-bending getting my head around not only the wacky world of insurance but a rather labyrinthine group of companies to boot. It's a weird one - a massive mental challenge in understanding stuff, but comparatively little in the way of stuff to, like, do. Still, I'm keeping myself busy by making outlandish promises and then struggling to keep up with them, usual story.

In other news, we have a dining room table! This is a bigger deal than it perhaps sounds, but I'll not go into the detail. Trust me, it's changed our lives. Eating sitting at a table still feels like a bit of a luxury. That, and being able to go places without cadging a lift off the Kiwi or ruining yet another pair of shoes. The car is turning out to be a lot of fun, something to look forward to at the end of the day. It's in the garage at the moment having its wheel alignment done, which I'm hoping will correct a little niggle it's been having lately where the power steering gets a bit twitchy.

Here's a thing for all of you back in the land of sensible driving: the New Zealanders are well known for their love of adrenalin sports, being the No.1 place in the world for life-threatening leisure pursuits. This extends to driving, apparently, with a road rule (A RULE!) which says that if you're turning right into a road, and an oncoming car is turning left into the same road, the oncoming car has to give way. They sort of slow down and tuck their car into the kerb, whilst you wait to see if they actually are stopping or not, and they keep moving because they don't know whether you're going to turn ahead of them or not, and then you both step on it at the same time and narrowly avoid a collision with either the car in question or one of the many which get bored of waiting and swerve around you both. This rule appears to be designed to make even the simplest manoevre something which gets the heart pumping and the adrenalin flowing. I'm not keen on it, as you might have guessed.

Other than that, not a lot's been going on. We work, we cook, we sleep. And it's brilliant.

How is it JUNE already?

2009-06-07T04:06:00.005+01:00

Seriously, I turn around for five minutes and half the year's gone - is this what getting old's all about? A gentle nudge from my sister reminded me yesterday that I'd not actually posted anything in quite some time, let alone anything that wasn't about baking, so here we are - another post which might not be all about breadmaking.

Work has been taking up an indecent amount of my time lately, as I seem to remember it doing back in 2008, and on the whole things seem to be going well. The pace is somewhat slower than I'm used to, so on the one hand I can seem reasonably dynamic without too much effort, and on the other the stress levels probably aren't as high. The Kiwi, on the other hand, seems to spend her entire day moving at 100kph, so we're in slightly different zones for an hour or so once we get home.

What I'm doing at the moment isn't really for discussion this openly, but suffice it to say we're making some very definite plans to move forward, taking overall company strategy and working out ways to implement it in some hopefully market-changing ways. If my plans come together, all should become clear. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I bought a car today - my first one ever (aged 31). Living either in Manchester or London, both places with pretty good public transport networks, I've never really needed a car more than four or five times a year, so renting has always been good enough. However, living in Auckland, not having a car basically means you either remain confined to a walking distance around your house (during which you will get rained on), or put yourself at the mercy of public transport, which effectively means you will probably get where you want to go, but probably not before the moon has gone once around the earth.

So, and I know precisely who's going to take the piss at this point, I bought this:

Quite simply, I have always wanted a sports car. On the shopping list for me were the following:

Engine in the back
Two seats
Roof that comes off

... and this little Toyota ticks all those boxes (even if it is technically mid-engined) and fits neatly into my price bracket. Whilst it's only a 1.8L, it weighs about as much as a matchbox and thus manages to be quite, um, quick, whilst the proportions make it superbly balanced. I drove four of them yesterday and any lingering doubt that I was doing the right thing went right out of the window. So, provided it passes its AA inspection next week, it will be mine before the weekend.

It has a frankly hilarious storage ability, about enough room for an overnight bag and a pork pie, but that's part of its charm, I reckon. Anyway, it's my first car. Forgive me for getting a bit gushy about it.

On the bread front (and I couldn't write a post without it), I've been baking every weekend, with the exception of the one we went away for recently (to Mount Maunganui, by the seaside). The bread's getting steadily better, with the flavour deepening and mellowing, and the texture getting more relaxed and open. I have two loaves proving right now in fact, basking in the glow of our electric heater along with the Kiwi. It's cold here at the moment, cold and sunny, and our electric heater, oil-filled heater and dehumidifier have been working overtime. Can't wait to see our power bill for this month...

Second sourdough batch

2009-05-17T04:48:00.003+01:00

Before I begin, let me put your mind at ease - although I do intend to bake a couple of sourdough loaves every weekend, I'm not going to blog about each of them in turn. I thought I'd mention this week's as we're still in the early days of the process and the first one of this batch turned out a little odd.

I bought a new loaf tin this week, so I can bake two at once, instead of having to spend literally the whole weekend with something either baking or proving. This one's actually a little slimmer than the other, so it's producing a taller loaf. I've noticed that the base of this loaf turned out completely solid for about a centimetre up, which I'm putting down to there being too much dough in the tin - it would've risen past the top during the second prove if there hadn't been a teatowel covering it. I'm thinking that the weight of the dough on top flattened out the base a bit during this prove, possibly - the top was also unusually flat, so it didn't seem to rise much in the oven.

The texture on the whole is still looking good; getting more open still, and still nicely elastic. I'm a bit concerned about what seems to be a slightly moist, rubbery quality to it, which I'm putting down to fractional underbaking. Cooler for longer next weekend, I think, this could be me needing to get to grips with my oven. Flavour-wise I think I'm onto something good here, the sourness is really coming out now and the bread has a big, full flavour right through the crust. It's gaining character.

This far it's being mainly used for morning toast, and to accompany cheese. I may start attempting sandwiches with it at some point but I have yet to see what my new job's lunch arrangement is, so we'll see if it's worth bothering before going down that path. There's talk of a wine, cheese and bread event going on at our local wine merchant, so I need to get my bread in shape for that - there's some serious amateur bakers attending and I don't want to be shown up!

First loaves!

2009-05-10T06:45:00.004+01:00

It's been a month or so in gestation, but my sourdough starter came of age this weekend. Hoping that it was finally stable, I made a couple of loaves out of it. Things seemed to go well, so I've stopped feeding it and it lives in the fridge now, instead of the sunny spots in the living room. The whole process to date has been about building a yeast colony which is stable - as you may remember from earlier posts, in the early days it changed appearance and smell quite frequently as the yeasts and various bacteria etc tried to reach equilibrium. Over the past week, it's been fairly unchanging, so I'm assuming that's proof of stability.

So, two loaves this weekend. I only have one loaf tin at the moment, so I'm making them in sequence rather than in parallel. Fortunately that gave me a bit of opportunity to make some changes to the second one. So here's the first:

Not a bad start, I reckon. It's a bit wonky, which doesn't really come across in the photo, but the texture is good, nice and elastic if a little less open than I was expecting. The crust is good too, and the flavour's typically sour, with a good depth and a nice, rounded fruity hint. I'm not happy that it split so much, and how lopsided the top is. A bit of research suggests this might be due to an overly speedy prove.

And so here's the second one - a much better shape, possibly due to an extra hour on the second prove. It got right up to the top of the tin this time (the first one fell a little short) before it went in the oven, so I think I need to benchmark it right there. This probably helped the shape too.

So there we go. I'm going to aim to do this every weekend (although I'll be getting a second bread tin, you mark my words), as it's not that much of a hassle. Friday night, combine starter, flour and water, feed the original starter. Saturday morning, beat in more flour and a bit of salt. Five or six hours later, bake. By my reckoning, excepting electricity charges, two loaves of sourdough a week should cost me about $2.30ish for the flour.

Still need to work on that shape though. Will be interesting to see how the flavour develops as the starter matures.

Excuses, excuses...

2009-05-09T01:31:00.003+01:00

I've just noticed that the cheesy little Nike+ widget in the right-hand bar on this page is gently making fun of the fact that I've not been for a run in a while. The truth is that I have, but my Nike+ sensor has run out, so I need to buy a new one, which won't happen until I get paid. I'm still putting 50k a month in, don't you worry, it's just not being recorded.

Honest.

Brilliant

2009-05-09T01:09:00.003+01:00

The waiting is over - this week I agreed terms with an employer, and I start work on the 19th May. After five months of not working, this is an overwhelming relief. We're not entirely out of the woods yet though, as there are bills to be paid at the end of this month which my pro-rated pay won't cover, but hopefully a client for whom I've been doing a little work back in the UK will actually bother to pay me for it at some point during this month.

I don't think I'd realised quite how much being unemployed had affected me. Friends of mine have told me in the past that my job (whatever it was at the time) was always far too important to me, and it's true to an extent that my sense of self-worth is entirely wrapped up in what I do for a living. So to be out of work, to me, is to have no social worth. Entertainingly, I don't view other people like this - this rule only applies to me, you understand. The Kiwi and I had a celebratory curry on Thursday night and I realised that I was smiling properly for the first time in ages; smiling with total happiness, without that lurking feeling that had been telling me up to this point that, until I had a job, I had nothing to smile about.

So I suppose there should be a learning experience here in finding self-worth in places other than the workplace, but I suspect I'll not really take it on board. This is the usual way of things.

And what of the job? Well, suffice it to say it's in the insurance industry, and involves me forming and implementing a strategy for the online channel. Currently the online arm of the business is... me, but over time it'll need to grow. The main challenge in moving a mainly offline business to a true multi-channel one is predominantly a cultural one, and although the top level of this organisation is open to the concept, it'll be convincing the troops that'll be the 'pushing water uphill' element of this particular engagement, I suspect.

I'm going to remain coy in this forum about who it is, so I can be reasonably open about how it's going, but most of you probably know. Very excited about starting indeed, they're a good bunch of people from what I can see, with a very clear and pragmatic view on the next steps for their business. Prior to that, though, I have a week of genuine holiday to get through, so with that, it's back to my baking... on which more later!

How to stretch a chicken

2009-05-04T08:38:00.004+01:00

Today, I made chicken stock for the first time in ages. There's something very ritualistic and soothing about doing this, the preparation, the slow simmering, the straining and the portioning out into 500ml portions to freeze. If you have a freezer and a stove, and you don't make your own stock, you're cheating yourself out of the one thing that'll make your cooking taste really, really good. With no freezer in our rented flat in London, I've been grimacing at powdered stock in food for too long now.

Although the Kiwi now has a job (yay!), we're still very much on a budget, so I thought I'd see if I could stretch the bird a little further than normal. When I jointed it for the stock, I peeled the breasts off with the peg-bone attached (a supreme, I believe), and jointed the rest for the stock pan. These, once marinated in sumac, lemon, pomegranate molasses, garlic and thyme and olive oil for a while, were served on a bed of couscous for dinner tonight.

The stock, once simmered for three and a half hours, was strained, and whilst I would normally have chucked the resultant sieve-full of veg and chicken bits away, I took out the chicken pieces and whizzed the veg in the blender with a little stock to loosen it. Chopped and bones and gristle removed, the chicken went back into the mix. With a bit of seasoning and possibly some cumin, this will be tomorrow's lunch. Granted, most of the flavour in the pan went into the stock itself, and so the soup is a little less punchy than I'm used to, but needs must.

Tomorrow evening's dinner will be paella. The depth of the flavour will come from the stock absorbed by the rice grains, and the prawns and squid rings cooked in it. Two blocks of stock are also in the freezer, to be used at some point in the future. By my reckoning, that's three meals for two, plus the two more I'll get out of the frozen stock. Quite pleased with myself, I am.

Oh, and this weekend, if the starter's up to it, I'll bake my first sourdough loaf!

Making money

2009-04-26T04:59:00.003+01:00

When I first started this blog, I decided to start running Google advertising on it, mainly as an experiment for me to find out how it all worked in practise than with any aspirations to be the next Rupert Murdoch. Apart from anything else, the fact that I purposefully keep the existence of this blog reasonably quiet sort of stands in the way of significant traffic. Anyone who's stalking me will notice I've removed this blog from my profile, so I can promote my other blog without worrying about traffic spilling over onto this one. I'd like to be able to be as frank and honest as possible on this one, without worrying about who's reading it.

On Eating Auckland though, I actively promote it using things like Twitter, Facebook, Google and good ol' word of mouth, and traffic is picking up. One of the things I've found interesting recently is the way much more traffic than I expected is coming through feed readers, such as Google Reader. During April, I've had about 400 page impressions, and around 100 feed impressions; basically this more or less means about 20% of my audience don't tend to visit the site at all. Fortunately I use Feedburner to advertise within feeds, and peculiarly get a very good result from that.

The thing about this statistic is how it, in microcosm, outlines a changing behaviour pattern in media consumption in general. Apart from my daily visits to the Guardian website, all the news I consume comes through either Google Reader or Newsstand (on the iPod Touch). This means I'm reading articles without actually visiting any of the sites I use, so I'm not viewing any advertising on those sites. An online publisher is paid per ad displayed, effectively, so by the numbers I'm seeing, a fifth of potential revenue is being lost by users managing their own news consumption in this way.

What's weird is that, in all the feeds I consume, my feeds are the only ones with adverts in. Am I the only one who's worked this out?

Finally, to those of you who use ad-blocking tools, what you're doing is effectively theft, and to do so displays either astonishing ignorance or just plain unpleasantness. Please stop it.

Not about breadmaking

2009-04-25T00:31:00.003+01:00

Amid all this sourdough nonsense of late, I've perhaps been avoiding the subject of what's actually going on over here. Coaxing my starter into life has occupied a fair bit of my time, admittedly, but I do have (part of) a life outside of the kitchen. Sort of.

So on the job front, I'm still bashing away at the market here, trying to find a suitable niche. Next week I'm to be subjected to a battery of psychometric tests as part of a conversation I'm having with an insurance company, and it's hard to say just how much I'm not looking forward to it. Still, needs must.

The Kiwi's faring a little better, but out of sheer superstition I'll refrain from commenting until the process has moved on a bit further, but at the moment things look good.

In other news, I have begun to miss London, and I always wondered when it would happen. It was sort of inevitable that springtime would be the time, as we slip into grey skies and all-too-obviously unheated houses, all I hear from the other side of the world is news of beautiful spring days, the optimism of the coming summer and the excitement of eating and drinking outside. I think what really precipitated this homesickness was a comment in this week's Popbitch newsletter, which simply said 'The sun is out. The sky is blue. The ska is on the stereo.' I've tried a bit of Desmond Dekker's superbly sunny '007' this morning, but it's not really having the desired effect and our sky is still a leaden grey.

Perhaps I might try a bit of the Specials later on.

Also, it seems that people I don't know are reading Eating Auckland and enjoying it - I started getting a bit of traffic from an unfamiliar site the other day, and it turns out it was a discussion on a (more popular) blog about maintaining a point of view whilst blogging. Someone was holding my site up as a great example of a totally impartial blog and said some lovely things about it too, which fair made my day.

Feeding... and feeding... and feeding...

2009-04-24T05:24:00.003+01:00

Open the box. Examine contents for signs of life. Stir the mixture. Pour away 200ml of it. Combine 100g flour and 150ml water. Mix into mixture. Close box.

Twice a day. For two weeks. Apparently this is what it takes to get a sourdough starter to a stable existence, when one can actually make bread out of it. It'd better work.

I'm a bit less concerned about it now than I was, as it's still alive and bubbling, just very slowly. It's behaving a bit like a sulky teenager, responding only to the odd poke and regular feeding. I think the problem is that it's got a bit colder of late, and so our inside temperature is a bit lower than the required 20C (central heating has apparently not made it this far south), and so my little yeasts are working very sluggishly indeed. From what I can tell, this isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it might mean it'll take a while to get stable. I've been placing it in what sunlight our flat gets during the day, and feeding it with slightly warm water to try to keep it cosy.

Hmmm. Ten days or so to go, possibly more.

Phase 2 begins...

2009-04-22T01:16:00.008+01:00

After two days of seeming inactivity, I've decided my starter needs feeding. We're six days after birth, well short of the stated ten day minimum in my recipe, but after the five day period that some online recipes say. Also, the book I'm following (Moro) says that after ten days the bag containing the crushed grapes should be inflated - this happened after about three days for me. So here we go, moving on a little early.

As you can see, it's all gone a bit quiet and has separated out quite a bit. After so much activity at the start, I've got a bit nervous with all this quietness.

A quick look in the top shows that there's a healthy-looking yeast bloom on the surface of the liquid and the bag, and there are still a few bubbles coming up from the gunge in the bottom. I'm not sure what this means, but I've embarked on this feeding lark and I'm going to see it through. I suspect yeast needs a firm, decisive hand to coax it into full, breadmaking productivity.

Odour-wise, it's not actually as bad as I thought. It's hardly Chanel No.5, but it's clean-smelling, sour and definitely grapey, with a growing yeasty character. It doesn't smell rotten, and the slight cheesiness I got off it the other day has gone.

So I lifted out the bag, scraped off as much gunge as I could, and squeezed the residual juice out of it, which by now had taken a decent amount of colour from the grape skins. This went into the sink, to be dealt with later on.

A quick stir, and in went the requisite 100g of flour and 150ml water, more stirring and we're done. I realised with some horror that I'd forgotten to discard a third or so of the total mass first, as all the recipes tell you to do, but there's plenty of room in the container, so I think (hope) it'll be ok this once. I've made a mark on the side where the mixture comes up to, so I'll keep an eye on it and see if it's getting unruly.

Here it is after its first feed. It looks quite contented and settled I think. The lumps of flour in it are apparently ok - I've broken them down a bit but didn't want to work the mixture too much. We'll see; if it's still lumpy in a few days I might give it a bit of a go with a whisk or something.

So here we go - two feeds a day at regular intervals for two weeks. Who knows though, this might come together sooner if the process to date is anything to go by. This is the bit I've been worrying about a bit to be honest - it all seems like rather a lot of work, but I'm sure it'll pay off in the end.

I'll post a next instalment either in a week or so, or if anything astonishing happens, whichever comes first.

Poor willpower and over-attentiveness

2009-04-20T03:55:00.002+01:00

I've been getting a bit concerned the past few days about the health of my starter. It's turned itself back over, with the liquid now sitting on the top, and the bag of grapes which was quite inflated is starting to sag a bit. It doesn't look at all as lively as it did, either. It smells pretty unusual, but it's not a mouldy or overly unpleasant smell, sort of cheesy and yeasty with a bit of sourness on it, so I think we could still be on the right track.

So I've given in to temptation and given it a stir. I've also turned the bag over in the liquid as it was starting to dry out on the top. Finally, in response to a number of internet sources, I've unclipped the lid, so that the seal isn't airtight, which should let the thing breathe a little whilst ensuring it's not entirely sterile. Letting natural yeasts and things in from the air is apparently to be encouraged. It may start to make the kitchen smell funny though, in which case it's back on with the clips.

I'm also starting to doubt our recipe a little, which says to leave the starter to build for two weeks prior to the first feed. Some online recipes have you feeding it in five days or even less, and normally say it's ready for one once it starts to get active, which it certainly was a few days ago. I hope I'm not starving it. I reckon that if it's not done anything by tomorrow afternoon I'll feed it, as that'll make five days. Perhaps I have peculiarly lively (and hungry) yeasts going on in there, who knows.

Real world vs Twitter

2009-04-19T09:36:00.003+01:00

Tonight, the Kiwi and I took part in a wine tasting on Twitter. Interesting concept, one that was dreamt up by three guys, the owner of a wine store in Auckland, a wine writer in Oamaru and a winemaker in Marlborough about two months ago. The deal is simple; you buy a bottle of Fiasco's 'Black Pearl' Pinot Noir, have your first taste at 2000 on April 19th, and post your tasting notes on Twitter.

Here's the feed: http://bit.ly/9UGeH

On the whole, a bit of a success. The wine itself is excellent, not only superbly priced at $20 (special Tweetbunch price, apparently), but it's Aaron's first Pinot of his own, I think, which is a fair achievement in itself. It's actually quite European in style, with a bit more juicy acidity and slightly more forward fruit, but with a great earthiness that NZ Pinots often don't have, certainly not this young (2008).

You lot in the UK probably won't see hide nor hair of it though, as I don't think he makes all that much. Such is life.

And of the event? A great idea, I think, and it went really well. True, there's the lack of face-to-face interaction that's the hallmark of online social interaction, but realistically that takes nothing away from it. You're still chatting away to a group of similarly-minded people, still tasting wine, still enjoying the experience, but with the added bonus of not only being able to talk directly to the winemaker, but not having to leave the house. I know there'll be a few 'social networking stunts our emotional growth' comments bandied about, as there always are, but the long and short of it is that this was a really innovative use of Twitter which worked tremendously well.

I think there may be more in future. Also, we made it onto Twitscoop, but that might be as much to do with the rest of the world being asleep / just waking up as because a few dozen of us were tasting wine at the time :)

It's alive!

2009-04-18T01:10:00.003+01:00

This is bizarre, truly bizarre stuff. About 24 hours after kicking off the starter, a layer of yellowish liquid appeared on the surface of my starter, presumably some of the water and grape juice separating out. It got steadily deeper, and I considered stirring it in but thought better of it, deciding to follow the book (which doesn't say to do anything to it for two weeks).

This morning, the Kiwi pointed out (with some alarm) that things had changed somewhat. As you can see from the picture, the whitish goop has surged up from beneath the liquid and is full of bubbles, proving that something is active within the box. The photo doesn't really do justice to quite how mental this thing's gone, and we've still got a minimum of eight days left to go before I'm allowed to tinker with it. The recipe says ten days to two weeks, and I'm sticking to it. The one thing I'm allowing myself to do is to pop the lid every now and then to release any gas - I don't fancy scraping fermenting yeast and flour off my kitchen walls in the event of an explosion.

This is brilliant - a great sign that my starter is alive, for now at least. I'm very proud. More on this as we get it.

Starting the starter

2009-04-16T03:47:00.006+01:00

Finding myself recently with quite a bit of spare time, I've begun a project I've been meaning to get into for a while. I'm going to bake my own sourdough bread, but rather than using brewer's yeast of the sort you can get fresh from a friendly baker or dried in packets, I'm making my own sourdough starter, using natural wild yeasts. This is a bit of an undertaking for me, so I'm going to document the process on this blog - it should take about four weeks until I can make some bread, and we're dealing with me trying to keep a bucket of micro-organisms alive for that time, so it could be interesting.

The way this is supposed to work, I think, is that we try to slowly culture yeasts, found both naturally in flour and on the skins of organic grapes, in a food-rich mixture of flour and water, until we get to the point where the starter is a more or less stable environment containing both active yeast colonies and a fair bit of acids and all sorts of good things. Once we're stable, we use a bit of the starter to bake some bread, and feed the starter to replace the lost volume and kick it off again. That's the rough theory, anyway.

So here's where we begin, with the stuff needed to make the starter. I decided that spending a small fortune on organic flour was probably out of the question at this point, so for this run I'm attempting this with normal high grade bread flour. The grapes are organic, all $11.00 of the blighters. I'm also using water that's been out of the tap for a while, to let some of the chlorine gas escape (our water here is somewhat aggressively treated). The water and flour variables are ones I'll change if this doesn't work.

Here's it all mixed together. The grapes are tied up in a light tea towel, so they can be lifted out later on. They're lightly crushed, with the juice mixed in with the flour and water, and then submerged in the goop. Lid on, wait two weeks for stuff to happen. I will report back.

Woohoo! Mantis!

2009-04-11T03:46:00.004+01:00

A few weeks ago, I noticed a praying mantis clinging to the wall above the mystery tree, and it freaked me the hell out. Today it's still there, and from a quick check on Wikipedia, it seems it's to be encouraged as it's entirely carnivorous, so I'm ok with it now. Right now, it's standing guard over the basil (although from the looks of it it'd be better off in the spinach pot), as you can sort of see in this mildly out-of-focus picture. My phone isn't good at close ups.

It looks pretty mean. I wonder if I should put a warning sign on the gate.

Easter, more gardening

2009-04-11T02:50:00.007+01:00

This weekend is unusually holiday-like for the Kiwi and me. The past few weeks have been unusually hectic, with the Kiwi's dad's 60th birthday going on last weekend and planning and execution of those plans taking up a bit of time. Well worth it though - what a weekend. So amid all the job-hunting and so on, we're taking these four days to actually have a break. I know it sounds a bit rubbish, given that we don't tend to actually do much during the week, but I think it's more that we're having a break from the constant stress of it all, knowing that there's nothing we can do about it over this weekend.

So I have been tending to our garden. It's been going a bit mental lately, with the spinach sprouting all over the place and the basil beginning to look a bit weird. I think it might be planning to bolt at some point, so I'm feverishly trying to work out how to inveigle some of it into our cooking plans over the coming days, so I can harvest it without just chucking it away. The lime tree, as I've mentioned, is seeming a little bit overenthusiastic, so I've repotted it and am trying to find out how best to prune things like this to keep it in line. I want it alive at least until it has a chance to fruit.

I've also put out a pot with some rosemary and thyme in it, although I'm not sure how well thyme does outside, particularly with the weather cooling down a bit. We'll see - it's quite sheltered where it is, and the plant seems reasonably mature, so it might make it. We'll have the full Simon & Garfunkel if I can find some sage, but apparently that's a right bugger to grow and it always reminds me spookily of rabbits' ears, so perhaps not.

The mystery tree seems to have gone back to sleep. I think it only likes it when there's tons of sunlight and constant warmth, so it looks like we're back to the 'is it just a dead stick?' phase for a while. Everything else seems to be thriving, especially the parsley, and the chilli plants are looking more promising by the day.

So that's the garden update so far - other highlights of the weekend are an Easter dinner out west tomorrow at which I'm cooking a paella (others are doing other bits), and some sort of networking event at a local wine merchant on Monday night which could be entertaining.

One last note before I go and read the paper or something - I had a truly bizarre dream last night which I'm moved to share with you all. Working back at my old job, my boss had sent me to work at a Virgin Megastore, under the sea. It was laid out like the old Piccadilly store, but was submerged a long way off the coast somewhere. The only customers were terrifically rich people with submarines, so whilst the footfall was quite low, the average spend was massive. My role here was to improve the customer service processes, specifically around the handling of telephone and email complaints. I came up with a few options but the staff involved were highly resistant to change and to be honest, seemed to be managing ok. Working in this store was seen as a really great job for most of the staff, who spent most of their days sitting around listening to music and maintaining their spotless racking and promotion spaces, rarely troubled by customers. I remember looking out of the front window to the parked submarines outside and thinking what a great idea it had been to open a branch under the sea.

I would like to point out though, that this is in no way indicative of my normal thought processes whilst acting as a retail business consultant.

Another month...

2009-04-09T01:43:00.003+01:00

You may have noticed an uncharacteristic lack of posts here of late. This is mainly as very little has changed over here - we're still looking for work, still getting up in the morning and scouring the job sites, still getting remarkably little traction from doing so. A promising conversation I've been clinging onto for three months fell through yesterday, so we're back to square one again. This ceased to be funny a very long time ago; now it's just boring, and not a little terrifying.

I am not, though, at the point yet where I'm questioning whether or not this was a good idea. It'll take a little longer for that to happen, and a few more rejections too, I think. Oh, and the UK economy would need to be in a better shape than the NZ one, which will take some time, I reckon.

It's still sunny here, although as we move into autumn the breeze is getting a little cooler. What's funny from my perspective is, whilst walking around in jeans and a t-shirt and finding it quite temperate, hearing other people shiver and complain. It's still over 15C and beautifully sunny, FFS people! Man up a little!

The garden, such as it is, is going great guns, although something or other is eating our spinach and some of the leaves on my chilli plant. We've been using the flat-leaf parsley, the basil and the (uneaten) spinach quite happily for a while now, which is nice, and I think the lime tree needs pruning as some of the topmost leaves are looking a bit sickly. Oh, and the Kiwi's spring onions seem to have, er, sprung, finally.

More news as we get it, on all fronts.

The Curious Case of a Truly Awful Film

2009-03-29T06:10:00.003+01:00

Last night the Kiwi and I watched 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', the latest film to involve Brad Pitt and apparently also-ran for last year's Academy Awards.

What a terrible, terrible film. It's like a 166 minute slap in the face, a prolonged insult or a particularly bad case of constipation. From the overall concept to the appalling acting and stomach-churning attempts to tackle 'deep' subjects in ways that the Dawson's Creek kids would find mawkish, it almost motivated me to call up David Fincher and ask for that 166 minutes back. There is literally nothing of merit here, not even Cate Blanchett's initially hilarious 'old southern woman' accent (which fast matches being poked continually in the chest as a number one annoyance).

I rarely post about films, but I really had to get this one off my chest. What an absolute shocker.

Kings of Leon, Vector Arena, 25 March 2009

2009-03-25T22:37:00.003Z

A couple of disclosure points first. Last time KoL came to London, they played Wembley and I kept my distance. I hate stadium gigs with a white-hot burning passion, and much as I really enjoyed the album they were touring (Because of the Times), I couldn't bring myself to pay a fair amount of money to be made to be even more splenetic than usual. I hate the muppets who go to these gigs, hate the way they act like teenagers on a school trip, hate the endless trips to the overpriced bars, the dodgy sound and the fact that the stage is a mile away so you end up watching it on screens and so you'd be better off buying the DVD and watching it at home where the atmosphere is bound to be a million times better and the idiot count is a bit lower.

However, this is Auckland, and things like this don't come around every day. So late last year we bought tickets (on the pound, so they were actually pretty cheap) and went last night. The Vector Arena actually turned out to be a great venue, of reasonable size, acceptable bar prices and well toileted. The sound was superb too, unusual in cavernous places like this. The band played a more or less note-perfect set, just like they did on the records. They adhered to all the usual rock tropes - the limited interaction with the crowd, comments like 'you're the best audience we've had on this tour', and 'hello, we're the Kings of Leon' (uh, thanks for that).

The audience was utterly insane. Seated in great seats (4th row back, rear), we were surrounded by female Beatles fans circa 1967, screaming All The Way Through The Performance. The sort of scream that's literally a heartbeat away from pure hysteria, that rips through the eardrums like a burglar alarm and will not shut up. They really did like the Kings of Leon, clearly.

So on the whole, they did very well indeed. A nice long set with a four-track encore, great sound, great lights etc. They knew exactly what their audience wanted and delivered no more, no less.

Coming away from it though, I couldn't put my finger on quite why I was left feeling so underwhelmed. Compared, say, with Elbow at the Roundhouse, or TV On The Radio at ULU. Different styles of band, admittedly, but what makes the difference between 'good' and 'exhilarating'? You couldn't fault the band in either case, nor the venue. I think it has to come down to the crowd. When every soul in that room is there for one reason and one reason only - to watch the band and drink in every nuance of their performance - that shared focus seems to make the whole experience so much better. When it's more about getting hammered and jumping around and yelling and generally becomes about each individual, it kind of leaves me cold. More than that, it brings uncharactaristically violent urges to the surface.

I wondered for a while if this was an age thing, but to be honest I think I've always felt like this, every since Dinosaur Jnr at the Manchester Academy (my first gig on my own). Loved every minute of that.

So I dunno. I'll probably still go to the odd stadium gig, the odd mainstream band and so on, but I'll probably go on finding it pleasant enough, but a bit disappointing all the same.

Ouch

2009-03-12T11:04:00.003Z

Before I go to bed, I feel I must share with the world two things I've just heard.

1. The sound, on getting up after having leant on one elbow for about one hour, of something in the shoulder area going like this. Only a bit... wetter.

2. The other sound, on standing up after having leant on one elbow for about an hour, of either my right hip or knee making something close to the sound hydrogen makes when ignited.

And they, ladies and gentlemen, are the sounds of old, old age.

On running in Auckland

2009-03-11T00:48:00.002Z

By my nature I'm a pretty lazy sort of person, like water I always try to choose the path of least resistance. My running habits are fairly well aligned with this trait, as I run purely to combat the damage I do to my body with fat and alcohol, and try to make it as easy as possible in the process.

Auckland has challenged this somewhat. A typical run might go a bit like this:

Decide to run a bit further today, so plot a 10k route that avoids all known hills. Turn left out of the flat and immediately encounter a hill, tell myself that it's only a short one and charge up it into a headwind. Canter another kilometer or so, turn a corner and am faced with what can only be described as a wall with cars going up it. I can just about see the top, so set a determined pace and chug up it, trying to keep a decent cadence. Get to the top, decide to reward myself with 50m of walking (it's either this or a seizure).

Spotted by someone running on the other side of the road, so start running again out of shame, into a headwind. Get to the end of this bit of road and see the sea (the eastern end of the harbour), start feeling all worthy and windswept. Head along the coast a little to a quaint little Cornish-style bay, the pleasure of seeing which is diminished slightly by the hill rising vertically in front of me. Can't see the top of this one, so adopt a slightly cautious pace and pant up it into a headwind. Woman pushing baby buggy passes me halfway up. At least it wasn't twins, I suppose.

Feel a tiny spot of rain, followed instantaneously by torrential, vertical, drenching downpour. Soaked through in seconds, at which point it stops, sun comes out, pavement and clothes bone dry again. Time elapsed, 20-30 seconds. Reach a turn-off point which thankfully isn't quite the summit, but it'll do. Turn off into a park, get lost. Find a road, predictably (by now) a hill leading upwards. Run up it, starting to lose sense of humour somewhat.

Begin looking for necessary turning off this road. Find to my dismay that few of the roads are actually signposted. A few minutes of searching at each one eventually turns up the right one, which is amazingly a hill leading downwards! Surely homeward bound?

Scramble down hill, avoiding cars parked on the pavement, half out of driveways, half on the road, in the road, across the road. Notice that the road appears to turn upwards relatively soon, note also that it doesn't seem that much of an incline. Sprint up small incline into a headwind, realise too late that behind this tiny lump lurks a chasm, a volcanic valley leading straight down, and straight back up again. Limp down the hill like a lamb to the slaughter.

Halfway up the other side, receive a tiny respite as I cross a road, which is mercifully flat. Unfortunately, this means the next 10m is considerably steeper to compensate. Three-quarters of the way up, I'm whispering encouragement under my breath. Seven-eights of the way up I'm murmuring abuse at myself. At the top I look back down and almost believe it was worth it, the view to the city on one side and the suburbs punctuated by the volcanic cones of Mount Eden, Mount Albert, One Tree Hill spread out on the other. Realise with horror that I'm still one valley away from the home straight.

Another downwards stumble, across the motorway into a headwind that leaves ripple effects across my face. Haul myself up the other side, turn 90 degrees into a headwind and note with a sinking feeling that the home straight is in fact a deceptive incline. Attempt to pass cafes, bars and restaurants on this stretch looking like it's all a bit of a breeze and secretly cursing these people for spending all day in cafes and bars and restaurants and still looking in reasonable shape.

Arrive home, wondering how a circular running route can contain more up than down, and how it can be all into a headwind. What a bizarre place.

Question for you all

2009-03-09T23:41:00.006Z

Although I'll not be actually doing this until I start earning, I have time to think about it now and so I could do with some help from all you internet people. I currently don't have a satisfactory way of playing audio and video media in our house. Right now, I play music by plugging either my laptop or my iPod into the speakers I sometimes use to amplify the TV. Video I play by connecting the laptop to the TV using a VGA cable - the audio goes through the same speakers.

Problems:

- it's not instantaneous - there's plugging in of things to be done before it goes
- I prefer using my laptop to play music from, as I can use my iPod Touch to remotely control iTunes, but
- I can't use my laptop on the sofa whilst this is going on as it needs to be within VGA cable reach of the TV
- the external speakers don't have a remote (although we will be getting a Viera home cinema system at some point which should solve this to an extent)

So, basically, whilst sitting on our sofa (3.5m from the TV screen), I want to be able to browse a library of audio & video files, and control playback, with the audio and video playback going through the TV (album art would be nice alongside audio). I'll want to be able to add to my libraries through this interface, so a browser at least, and a few toys like Spotify and Last.FM will be needed. At some point in the near future, I'll want to use something like Boxee to access online content as well. The TV is full-HD, and it would be good to make use of that if possible. Note that the home cinema addition will take up one of the two HDMI ports.

I also want nothing to do with Apple hardware (other than the iPod), as it's ruinously expensive over here.

The next step will be setting up speakers in another part of the house, and playing the same audio library through there - I suspect that an Apple AirPort or similar might do the trick here, but that bridge we can cross when we come to it. Got all that?

At the moment it's sounding very much like a small PC tower with a ton of storage space, running Windows (preferably XP or maybe 7), and using the TV as the (primary or secondary) monitor with an HDMI connection. Problems there are that iTunes is rubbish at video playback, and although the DivX player has been working well for me of late, there's no iTouch remote for it. Secondly I'd have to get a wireless (bluetooth, probably) mouse & keyboard for it too, not much of a hassle but still more crap to have lying around the living room.

Years ago, I remember conversations around the critical points of convergence being mobile/media player/online-enabled device, and office/living room. The former we can now see in multiple guises - until I have a satisfactory, cost-effective way to fulfil the above requirements, I don't think we can quite say we've got there just yet.

Answers, suggestions in the comments, or email me directly. This should be fun...

We continue...

2009-03-09T22:57:00.002Z

Anyone who ever listened to Radio 1 in the early 90s surely can't hear those words without remembering Pete Tong's radio show, each track preceded with those sternly intoned syllables. Weirdly, I notice that noble-minded but severely irritating Gok Wan has adopted exactly the same intonation pattern with Every. Single. Sentence. he utters. Bugs the hell out of me, even though I have to tip my hat to his efforts to reverse the trend in body dysmorphia among women. A trend which, walking around the UK, I saw absolutely no evidence of. Curious.

Anyway, that small digression aside, this week has begun much like the others, with visits to recruiters and not a lot else. For some reason the Wii has stopped working, hopefully something to do with the fuse - I have yet to replace the plug with one of the worryingly fuseless NZ ones, so perhaps I'll get round to that today. This little event will be the highlight of my week so far, replacing one of my key distractions at the moment - along with Facebook, Twitter, numerous blogs and the odd bit of cooking, the Wii makes up the group Things Which Keep Me Sane at the moment.

Twitter I continue to find fascinating. For some reason though, what fascinates me most about it isn't the application itself, or even the ecosystem of other bits and bobs which use it, but the way it's exposing a very basic human need for interaction, boiling down this need to very simple components; sharing, informing, questioning, assisting. Twitter is just a vehicle for this sort of thing, and in time will be seen to be one of many increasingly refined vehicles - the important thing is the human component.

This got me thinking a bit lately. I've said before that good advertising is relevant advertising, both in terms of content, context and timing, but I suppose a slightly cynical refinement of that would be in saying that advertising is good in inverse proportion to how irritating it is to an individual. This adds an extra dimension to the whole thing, in terms of how likely I am to be irritated by the mouthpiece of the advertising message: TelstraClear, for example, are right at the top of my shitlist right now, so even their fairly bland advertising gets my blood pressure up.

On the other hand, before Christmas, I was getting discount vouchers emailed through from friends at the rate of two to three a day, and although none of them were remotely relevant, it didn't really bother me all that much. Perhaps if they had all been from the same person, I might have politely asked them to stop, but my point is that I'm more likely to put up with spam from someone I know. It's like a 'micro-irritant', as opposed to the macro-irritants we get every 10 minutes on commercial TV. Questions about Twitter's moral responsibility to allow users to filter out commercial (or technically, semi-commercial) traffic are pointless. My feeling here is quite the opposite - Twitter has an obligation to allow and even encourage commercial use of the service - users themselves have the responsibility to control what they do and don't want in their feeds. I'll happily put up with my friends spamming me every now and then if they're getting something out of it.

Anyway, since I left work in the UK, I no longer have a professional blog, so you'll have to put up with musings like this on this one.

A brief diversion

2009-03-03T22:43:00.004Z

In the interest of keeping ourselves sane, we've been using some bits and pieces we picked up at a garden centre a while back, and a bright green watering can we got as an engagement gift from the Kiwi's sister, to create a bit of a garden of sorts. Our outside area isn't huge, but it gets a fair bit of sun during the day, so what we have put in seems to be doing quite well.

From left to right in this picture, we've got basil and chillies, spring onions, the mystery tree and spinach. The chillies took about 10 days to germinate, which at the moment seems like about a year, so I was actually going outside to dig them up this morning when I saw some tiny little shoots poking through the soil. It's amazing how little it takes to lift your mood, isn't it? The spinach is also doing well, showing its first leaves and generally looking all shiny and green.

As for the mystery tree, we have two of them. They were here when we moved in, and were in a bit of a sorry state as I don't think anyone had lived here for a few months, very dry months at that. So we gave them some smart white pebbles and plenty of water, and over the past couple of days they've repaid us with a burst of flowers which smell like honeysuckle, complimenting the smell of the Hatter's lilies which permeates the living room. If anyone out there knows what they are, do let me know! Have a look at the close-up and see what you think.

Just out of shot in the first picture is the Empty Pot, which is currently awaiting something to grow in it. We've been going through a ton of flat-leafed parsley (called Italian or Continental Parsley here), so I think some of that might be called for. On the post-job shopping list is a lime tree too, as they're not only decent to look at, but limes are about $1 each here, which is extortionate. I reckon a tree would pay for itself within a season quite easily. We go through a lot of limes here, if not in Pacific cooking, then in Gin & Tonics.

Updates will be forthcoming.

On jobhunting

2009-03-03T03:38:00.003Z

I have always hated jobhunting with a passion. More than once I've resigned myself to a few more months working in a job I've outgrown purely because I hate the whole process. I hate the constant disappointment, the way your personal worth is evaluated in terms of keywords and qualifications, and the way nine recruitment consultants in ten actually bother to read your CV, let alone take the time to understand what it is that you do. For someone like me who has a fairly shaky grip on my own self-esteem, it's a challenging process.

I don't think I've hated it as much as I do right now though. Two months after arriving in the country we've still to gain any real traction with anyone or anything, and as we come to the end of our interim cash, what's irritating me the most is the creeping sense of desperation, the sense of needing something from someone, the increasing feeling that I'm going to have to take the first thing that comes along and just be grateful for it.

Past experience doesn't help, either. All the positions I've ever worked in have come about through a personal contact, one way or another, with the possible exception of Virgin Digital, and as a colleague there rather unprofessionally told me once, I only just got that job, mainly as someone much better pulled out. So I don't have a huge amount of faith in the recruitment community, you could say.

Anyway, there's a little insight into what's going on at the moment. I applied for a few more things today, so chin up, this might be the week. I should probably take a leaf out of Melvtopia's book and find the hidden positives here... watch this space. Next week, if there's still silence on all fronts, I'm going to the pub.

And asking them if they have any jobs going. Backpedalling 10 years in my career could be just the thing to do, who knows?

Damn weekends

2009-03-01T03:51:00.003Z

I reckon that, until I'm retired, this is the last time I'm going to have the luxury of disliking weekends intensely. Here's why:

At the weekend, no recruiters are working on my behalf, no businesses are working on job descriptions. Things stop.
At the weekend, the shops are full of people
And so are the roads
For some reason, I'm still in the habit of doing less at the weekend than I did in the week, with the result that my weekends are practically catatonic

This Friday we took a mini road trip to Hamilton, taking the opportunity of a friend's birthday to get out of Auckland for a night. The town being one week away from freshers' week, there was an air of expectant hope in the bars and restaurants, the calm before next week's storm I think. Dinner was great, the comedically bad waiter actually serving as a sort of entertainment in itself, and the pizzas mercifully free of jam, fruit and so on, something I'm grateful for every time it happens here.

Yesterday, I built our new barbeque, how butch is that? Tools and everything. I'm pleased to say it went up just within the alloted one hour's construction time, and although it was a bit rainy last night so we didn't use it (it hasn't got a hood, yet), I think it's reasonably sound. I'm going to christen it tonight with a couple of lamb leg steaks that have been nestling in some smoked paprika, garlic, red wine vinegar and olive oil all afternoon, should be a worthy first dish.

I've noticed a degree of curiosity people have over here for the relationship between the English and barbeques. I suppose it's the same intrigue we have for an African who's never seen the snow - a sort of 'have you ever used one of these before' attitude and a slight puzzlement that someone could have attained the age of 31 without using one regularly. It's true - I wasn't brought up with one and I'm still getting to grips with it, and it's always irritated me that there's a whole school of cookery that I've never really been anywhere near, so it's good to have the opportunity. One of the things I'm keen to try is ribs - cooked under the hood (once we get one) for hours until they're meltingly tender.

I've also noticed that in the time since we've been here, I haven't noticed one female going anywhere near one. Barbeques is men's business.

So that's where we are right now. Oh - I'm currently reading Brillat-Savarin's classic 'The Physiology of Taste', translated by the amazing M F K Fisher. I don't think I've had this much fun reading a book in quite some time.

Is it really late February already?

2009-02-25T22:52:00.003Z

Time is seeming very elastic at the moment, stretching out like caramelised sugar and constantly wrong-footing me. This morning I was inspecting a pot outside where I'd planted some chillies, and decided glumly that they weren't sprouting and so were probably dead, when I noticed on the label that I'd only put them in three days ago. It seemed like over a week.

On the other hand, it seems ridiculous that our second rent payment is due next week. It only feels like we've been in here a week or so, but in reality it's been quite a while. We're pretty much settled in now, with all the absolutely necessary furniture installed and most of our stuff unpacked. Still in boxes are most of the books, CDs and DVDs, which are waiting patiently in the spare room for us to buy a bookcase. This is one of those purchases that we've relegated to the 'when we have jobs' list, along with a thing to put the TV on (entertainment cabinet? I'm sure they have a name), a barbeque, an olive pitter and some decent cheese for a change. Our warped sense of priority means we bought an ice-cream machine this week - it was on a 50% off deal though, in fairness. So far I've made an orange & grapefruit sorbet and some plum ice-cream, both of which pretty good. It's taken a bit of getting used to but I think I have the hang of it now.

Actually, that said I think we're going to relent and get a barbeque anyway. The main reason for this, apart from the social stigma of living in New Zealand and not having one, is that our smoke alarm is so sensitive that showering with the bathroom door open can set the upstairs one off, so the indoor grilling of any meat at all involves all the windows being open, the Kiwi racing round the house flapping things, and me occasionally holding the grill pan outside the kitchen window. Yesterday evening I was grilling some chicken, and poked the sizzling, smoking pan out of the window just as a neighbour walked past - fortunately missing his suit by a whisker. So I think it's a worthwhile purchase. The smoke alarms, you see, are linked to the fire system in the building, which in turn is linked to both the fire service and the sprinklers, neither of which I want going off. We get charged for every fire truck that turns up, and they usually send several.

No news on the job front, although the Kiwi seems to have found some more tame recruiters, which if I've not heard anything by the end of this week I might be pimping myself to as well. The thing that's really getting me worried is the boredom and lack of stimulus - despite trying to follow all the online media and industry buzz I used to, I can feel my brain drying up and grinding to a halt, and the temptation to retreat from the world into a comfortable cocoon of Mario Kart, Simpsons, Quake Live and the odd glass of wine is getting harder to resist.

Hilariously, in the context of all this media nonsense about social media atrophying the brains of our young, Twitter and Facebook are about the only things keeping me sane at the moment.

Eels

2009-02-21T21:49:00.003Z

Earlier in the week, in search of fish (snapper and salmon, respectively), we took advantage of having NOTHING TO DO ALL DAY and went to the Auckland Fish Market early one morning. We got the fish we were looking for, but I couldn't leave without taking a look at this:

It's a tank of live eels, all intertwined and murky, eyeing me furiously through the glass. We left the market sans eels, but with this little ditty* winding its way round my brain...

*warning: contains distressing and possibly impenetrable British humour

Lounge Jazz / Tigers

2009-02-21T21:35:00.004Z

Every now and then, one of those happy coincidences occurs that prove to you that you're being shepherded through life by something other which has a rather capricious sense of humour. Yesterday afternoon we wandered over to a friend's house (not far from ours) for afternoon drinks, intending to be off by about 6. It turned out that that evening they were headed to Auckland Zoo, which apparently moonlights as a gig venue in the evenings. Nathan Haines and Hollie Smith were playing.

So we joined them. I can honestly say that this is the only gig I've been to where one of the headline acts was upstaged by a tiger having dinner. Other highlights of the evening included a wallaby bouncing past in the background, and apparently there were otters somewhere too. I'd been keen to have a look at the sealions, but I imagine it was past their bedtime.

As for the music, Haines turns out a pretty good brand of dance-y jazz, possibly a bit lounge-y for my taste but the tiger seemed to enjoy it. Hollie Smith was excellent, if only for her tremendous band. Vocally she's good, not great, but her bassist was worth the admission price alone. Perhaps this is just me, but I often find the rhythm section the most interesting bit of jazz bands, and in this instance the two held the entire set together.

The best bit? We could walk home afterwards. A slightly bizarre, totally unexpected and excellent evening. This morning I'm listening to Miles Davis, specifically the phenomenal Rudy van Gelder remasters series, which is probably a bit unfair on last night's artists but I felt the need for some proper jazz after last night.

Back on the horse

2009-02-17T21:32:00.003Z

I'd not actually realised quite how long it's been since my last post. It's been a little strange, but I've been trying to get started again for a week or so, but for some reason haven't been able to crack it. I think it's got something to do with the volume of stuff that's going on at the moment; it's having a sort of 3 Stooges effect, where everything tries to get through the door at once but nothing can.

In a nutshell, since the last post, the following things have occurred, which most of you following Twitter and/or Facebook will already know, but here we go, in no particular order:

The Kiwi's got better
We've found a flat
We've bought a sofa, a fridge, a washing machine, a bed and a TV, along with a whole load of much less interesting stuff
The Kiwi's bought a car
We've each met with numerous recruiters, with varying degrees of success
We've planted some spinach and some spring onions - I'm drying some chillies to plant the seeds too
We've had another engagement party (any excuse)
We've eaten pies (multiple)
We've been to the beach (frequently)
I've got a New Zealand driver's license (looks a lot like the EU one)
I've been blogging a bit at http://www.eatingauckland.com
Our shipping arrived, with the only thing broken being a salad server, not bad out of 48 boxes
We've unpacked most of it
I've got back into Mario Kart and Guitar Hero
I've got hold of some English Marmite, but I'm not entirely sure it's quite the same...

You may notice the omission of the crucial 'we've found jobs' point, which is because we haven't yet, something that's soon to move from frustrating into problematic. The economic situation over here is pretty awful, it's true, but mostly due to lack of confidence and a bit of scaremongering. The exchange rate's not great (for New Zealanders), but realistically it's not as bad as the media would have you believe. Nonetheless, business in general is declining to commit to much expenditure, and some organisations are using the situation as an excuse for 'pro-active cost cutting', ie restructuring. The employment laws here are notoriously strict, so much like in the UK, it's hard to get rid of someone useless once you've employed them. The opportunity to make people redundant is apparently too much to resist for some.

So on the whole it's been very quiet on that front. At the moment I'm having a positive-looking conversation with a business that I'm quite keen to be involved with, so we'll see how that goes. More news as we get it.

Day 2, Kiwi on drugs

2009-01-07T06:17:00.003Z

Our second day of reality in Auckland. Over the weekend, the Kiwi was bodysurfing at Pauanui (something she's irritatingly good at), and she apparently managed to damage some cartilage in her ribcage. Following a long walk this morning, the dull ache turned into agonising pain, so much so that she couldn't move at all without hurting. It got so bad today that I took her to a doctor, who diagnosed the problem, prescribed no fewer than three different painkillers to be taken together, and told her not to do anything energetic for at least two to three weeks, taking painkillers constantly, remembering to breathe and trying not to get pneumonia and so on.

Apparently unloading boxes and moving into a new home comes under the heading 'anything energetic', so getting our 48 boxes moved around might be interesting. Still, she's fully spaced out at the moment and experiencing the joys of prescribed chemicals, which is better than lying down in what looked like unbelievable pain, so she's on the mend, I think. My only real concern is that, true to form, she'll be unable to actually rest for longer than, ooh, 30 minutes at a time, so I'll be enforcing some serious 'do-nothing' rules for the coming three weeks. After which I'll be waited on hand and foot, oh yes.

On the job front, had a meeting with a (rubbish) recruiter this morning, which was good only in that it reminded me what wearing a suit was like again, and helped brush up my skills in talking about work things, which are a bit rusty at the moment after 5 or 6 weeks off. Interestingly, had a call from an old acquaintance which might prove profitable as well, taking me up to three opportunities about which I'm quite excited. Next week everyone here comes back from holiday, so I'm taking it reasonably easy this week and expecting more to happen as of the 12th. Which, by the way, I'll be starting a fair way before those of you in the UK. Ha.

Auckland - reality looms

2009-01-04T07:33:00.001Z

And so finally, here we are. Just over a week ago, we arrived in Auckland, and stayed one night before heading off to a beachside apartment at Pauanui, on the Coromandel Peninsula. New Year's week featured sea swims, walks up Mount Pauanui, a fair bit of lying around in the sun and the attendant rounds of barbeques, beers and so on. Absolutely superb. Although it doesn't really do it justice, here's the view from our bedroom. The beach is just over that grassy patch. The Kiwi took loads of photos, so there'll be some coming up on Facebook or Flickr or wherever we end up putting them. My brother kindly sorted us out with a Flickr account for Christmas, so we'll give that a whirl I think.

I came back yesterday, in order to attend a stag do in Auckland (much fun), the Kiwi's back today attending the hen version. Tomorrow, we officially begin non-holiday life in New Zealand, starting with NZ mobile phones and graduating to things like flats, cars and jobs. Currently we're staying with friends, which is a bit of a godsend and very much appreciated, but we're both longing for a time when we can put clothes away without knowing we have to repack them in a week's time.

We've even been looking enviously at some pretty fine barbeques, too... but one step at a time, I think. This is where it gets interesting; the sooner we're both in paid employment, the sooner we can actually relax and get on with building our life together.

In other news, dinner out last night turned out to be quite good despite being a stag event, so I took the opportunity of kicking off my other blog, Eating Auckland. Best culinary find so far is a superb hot sauce by the name of Kaitaia Fire - powerfully hot but possessing a deep smoky, citrussy flavour all of its own. I can confidently say this will be the first thing in our new fridge, at such as time as we have one of our own.

Australia. Hot.

2008-12-19T07:14:00.002Z

Another quick post, as I'm just about to get ready for dinner tonight and I'm using the Kiwi's mother's PC, to say that it's over 30C here and the scorching weather is somewhat at odds with the snow-encrusted Christmas decorations everywhere. It's a bit weird, but after spending most of the day reading Simon Sebag Montefiore's excellent 'Young Stalin' by the pool, I think I might be able to get used to it. It's a great book, incidentally, brings this fascinating figure to life in a very even-handed, accessible way. I might even be moved to read more about him at some point in the future. I've just got to the point where he uses the codename 'The Milkman'. Would our friendly local Milkman have any comment on that? Did I unwittingly work alongside a dyed-in-the-wool Bolshevik whilst at Virgin?

Anyway, the drama of recent days is mainly that whilst we arrived safe and sound at Brisbane on Wednesday morning, our baggage did not, remaining as it did at LAX, possibly the worst airport in the world. Whilst we were queueing up for our transfer to the Qantas terminal at a fire exit onto the tarmac I did suspect they might not be an entirely competent bunch, the no-show of our bags confirmed this. They arrived today (Friday), and the Qantas people had given us AU$100 each for the trouble, so we were able to buy some new clothes to tide us over. Still, it's a funny thing - on the way over I was ruminating on how despite having travelled a bit in my life I've yet to have my luggage lost. How ironic.

Irritatingly, our bags arrived via Melbourne, which puts me in the unenviable position of having a suitcase that's better travelled than I am.

End phase two...

2008-12-16T01:10:00.001Z

Isn't technology weird? Here I am in Vancouver airport, happily connected to the gloriously free wi-fi they have here, whilst for some reason Vodafone seem unable to allow me to make or receive calls or text messages whilst I'm here. Bizarre.

Anyway, lack of mobile-ness aside (which hasn't really bothered me tbh), it's been a terrific week. When we arrived on Monday, the temperatures were somewhere around freezing in Whistler village, and we got a fair bit of snow through Tuesday to Friday, which meant that by and large the runs were gorgeous, with snow like icing sugar, tons of dry powder and only the odd bit of treacherously hard ice on the upper slopes. The Peak to Peak Gondola opened on Friday too, linking Whistler and Blackcomb mountains and reducing the time necessary to get from one peak to the other from over an hour to 11 minutes. More of an event for them (it's a big part of their 2010 Winter Olympics things) than for us, but a bit of a diversion nonetheless. After the opening ceremony, we headed across to Blackcomb, where I slid down most of a totally ice-covered run on my back and promptly decided it was time to call it a day.

By Saturday the temperatures were down at around -14C in the village and below -25C on the mountain (plus (or minus?) wind chill), so we managed one long-ish run before our feet froze and we couldn't control our boards properly. The wind made it a bit tricky too, every now and then practically stopping us in our tracks with its force.

Sunday morning we decided we were definitely not going back up, so we went to the pub instead.

My second week of snowboarding has seen me acquire a fresh new array of bruises, although not as many and varied as the first week, in Italy last year. This time it's mostly knees, elbows and arse, and I think that on the whole I fell over a bit less than last time, so who knows, I might be improving. The new board and boots help, definitely, very impressed with both. I managed to whack my head on a particularly hard bit of ice on Thursday too, which has made me think that perhaps a helmet might be in order next time.

The Kiwi also tells me that I've lost some of the deeper, darker lines under my eyes too, ones that apparently had been there for months, so something's going right, I think. I'm sure though, that the next 21 hours' travelling will put them right back there... 3.5 hours to LA, 3 hours in LA, 13 hours to Brisbane... with any luck we'll be able to sleep through most of the last leg.

Very quick post...

2008-12-11T20:02:00.005Z

I've been meaning to post an update all week, but in between falling down mountains, eating and sleeping, there's not been much pooter time (and they make you pay for the wireless here, shocker). I will do at some point, but for now, here's a photo of what I've been up to this week, mainly. Give it a click to embiggen it. Thanks to the Kiwi for a tremendous photo...

Last night in the UK

2008-12-07T19:18:00.001Z

This is weird. Very weird indeed. After a week in Manchester, where I grew up and still call home, I'm about to leave the UK. This is my last night as a resident of the United Kingdom, and for the first time in this whole process, I'm genuinely excited. Speaking to people up until now, everyone's said 'this must be so exciting', and my response has always been a dutiful 'yes, it is'. The truth, though, was always something different.

You see, the word isn't quite right. Excited is what you feel on your birthday morning. On Christmas Day. Unfettered positivity, happiness, joy etc. The feeling I've had isn't quite that - there's been lots of positive stuff, yes, about the future, the quality of life, the ability to finally settle, starting a very grown up life with the Kiwi, but along with all that was the sadness of leaving my family and friends here, of friendships that have just started and those that've lasted many years, and in particular putting distance in between me and my family, who mean so very much to me and on whom I depend probably more than they know.

This week has been one of saying goodbye to those people, and it's been painful in the worst way. Not the quick pain of whipping a plaster off, but a long, drawn-out ache, a week of catching people's eyes mid-conversation and both thinking the same thing, of last hugs that neither wants to end, of tears and the hope this isn't as final as it feels.

Tonight we're staying at Yoog's with his wife and son, as we have been for the past few nights. It's fantastic that we can spend this time having dinner with one of my oldest and closest friends, in such a calm, welcoming atmosphere, drinking brilliant wine and, from the smell of the cooking downstairs, soon to be eating excellent food. Tomorrow we drive to London, fly to Vancouver, and begin a phase of our lives we've talked about, dreamed about, and planned for for years.

Now I'm excited.

Explanation

2008-11-26T08:15:00.001Z

Following on from yesterday's brief post, let me go into a bit more detail about the shape the next few weeks are going to take. As I've worked with laptops provided by work for the past four years or so, I've not had to buy a computer of my own since, like, 1999, so the prospect of leaving my place of work and subsequently having no computer was a bit daunting.

So I put aside a bit of cash to buy one, and mentioning this to my current work, they told me not to worry, I could buy my laptop off them for about a quarter of my budget. Nice. Thing is, I found out yesterday that their policy is actually not to sell laptops to leavers; something we could have done with knowing before we shipped the Kiwi's laptop to NZ.

So I got a bit stressy about it and generally acted like the world had come to an end and so on. And then I realised that it's not all that bad - I have an iTouch which can deal with emails and internet access, and there'll be the odd PC available most of the places we're going. And it's saved me a fair bit of cash too.

The upshot of this is that, whilst I'd hoped to be entirely blogtastic during my travels, it might be a little less prolific than I'd intended. Posting from the iTouch, whilst mainly very convenient, doesn't lend itself to particularly wordy posts. That said, I'm sure that's no bad thing where I'm concerned!

Stuff moves on here in the UK, this week's mentally busy for me and I can feel the physical effects of several flavours of stress building up. The Kiwi's under slightly different stress at her place, but stress all the same.

More later - last post from this machine on Friday, perhaps...

New Blogging Tool

2008-11-25T15:10:00.001Z

So as it happens, work have decided they're not going to sell me a laptop for my travels, so in order to keep up with emails, blogs and the world in general, I'm resorting to using my iTouch. This is being laboriously typed using LifeCast... We'll see how long I can keep this up for.

Posted with LifeCast

The last week in London

2008-11-24T17:21:00.001Z

I can't believe it's been two weeks since my last post. It seems like about five minutes. Five very packed minutes, but nonetheless it's gone by very quickly. It's been a fortnight of catching up with people, saying goodbyes, spending too much money, getting stupidly busy at work and generally not stopping once. Both of us are knackered.

So here we are at the start of our last week in London, for both of us our last week at work, and I can't speak for the Kiwi but I'm feeling a bit emotionally numb right now. There's been so much stuff twanging around my head for the last few months that it's almost like I'm becoming acclimatised to all this, or maybe I'm just coping with it all by studiously ignoring it.

Anyway, this week is about tying off loose ends at work, trying to close off my UK tax stuff, trying to remember if we've sorted all the last bills out, changing addresses, our last few drinks with various friends, and our last meal at the brilliant Turkish restaurant near our house. With our flat all empty and bare, and the weather doing that peculiarly British thing of just being... crap, I'm sort of keen to get moving, if I'm honest. With our worldly goods either on their way to New Zealand or in suitcases on our bedroom floor, it feels like we're properly IN the process now. There's quite a lot of it to go, though, and hopefully I'll be near enough wireless networks as we go to keep you updated.

Big Milestone: The Visa Has Landed

2008-11-11T22:36:00.001Z

Very quickly, as this is the third post today and that's all just a bit extra: my passport came back from New Zealand Immigration today, complete with a two-year returning residence permit. That means that I can live in New Zealand, leaving and returning freely, for two years. After that, I go on to be assessed for a permanent one.

What a relief. I have to confess I got a bit emotional on leaving the embassy (not outwardly shown, of course), as the excitement of leaving began to feel really real, and some of that stress started to melt away. When I got down into Piccadilly tube station, a fairly good busker was knocking out a pretty good version of Here Comes The Sun, and I dug into my pocket and dropped all my change into his guitar case. Something I never do, but as I said I was feeling a bit emotional. Anyway, how very appropriate.

Also, the Kiwi's new snowboard arrived today, and all packed up, our snowboard case weighs in at around 0.25kg under our limit, AND I got an overdraft charge withdrawn from one of my banks, so all in all it's been a pretty productive day.

Goldfrapp, Brixton Academy, 10.11.08

2008-11-11T08:52:00.001Z

The Kiwi and I have seen Goldfrapp live a couple of times to date, and have always been impressed by the live shows. You'd be hard pressed not to, the lengths they go to to put on a real spectacle, and last night was more of the same. It was the last gig we'll see in the UK, now Ben Folds in Manchester has been postponed until next May.

In general, overall, it was brilliant, like always. We knew she's ace, we knew every track would be a winner, and we knew they'd do Black Cherry and Strict Machine as encores, and we weren't disappointed. A blistering version of Train, and Happiness complete with dancing mop / sheepdog monsters (pictured) were the highlights, along with Strict Machine, which absolutely shook the building.

Image from Dave Smith on Flickr, used with thanks but not permission.

But something seemed missing somehow. She did mention that the whole band had colds (in a rare moment of verbosity); perhaps that was it.

The first few tracks suffered from a weirdly bass-less sound, none of that gut-shaking thunderous bass-ness that we know Brixton can summon up. This came back, to an extent, later in the night, but it left the whole thing feeling a bit of a lack of punch. The odd bit of feedback didn't exactly make it feel like a professional production.

Secondly, and I know I've ranted about this before, but the crowd sucked massively. It's part of that whole thing where, once a artist gets to a certain size, no one at the event seems to be there to listen to the music, and seems perfectly happy to stand around yapping to each other. In recent Goldfrapp tours this probably wasn't such an issue, but with the recent tracks being a little more subdued the chatter was all too obvious.

So on the whole, the band were brilliant as always, but were let down by a dodgy sound system and a bunch of idiots in the crowd. My last and lasting impression of London gigs.

Shipping Vol.2

2008-11-11T08:33:00.001Z

All of it. All 47 boxes, tea chests, packages and so on, packed up by our shippers in three hours 20 minutes, with the Kiwi cracking the whip throughout, no doubt. I have to say, I was nervous yesterday about how it'd feel once I got back from work and saw our empty flat, but to be honest it's brilliant.

Not only is the flat considerably more spacious and minimalist than it was - just like when we first moved in really, but it feels like the whole thing we've been planning for for the last year or so has finally started. And that feels pretty good.

Last night we semi-celebrated (there's a lot to do yet...) with a visit to Brixton Academy - more on that in the next post.

Shipping Vol.1

2008-11-10T13:11:00.001Z

I wasn't going to blog about this until it'd happened - rather than leave you on tenterhooks - but I'm so nervous about the whole thing I can't help it. It's moving day today, and whilst I'm at work fretting, the Kiwi's in our flat, presumably trying to make sure all the right bits get shipped.

Fortunately, we've gone for a slightly more expensive but probably more professional bunch of movers, who're packing all our shipping stuff up for us, so all we really had to do over the weekend was separate out everything we're going to carry with us when we go, but even that was no small order. At the moment, our best guess for when we'll see our stuff again is about 10 weeks, and in that time we've got work in cold London, snowboarding in cold Canada, beach in hot Australia, beach in hot New Zealand, interviews in hot New Zealand and potentially even work too.

That's pretty much my whole wardrobe, and Sonya's too, so with baggage allowances, we've had to make some compromises (and you know how much I hate that). Here's hoping we can carry it all come December - we're literally right on our weight allowance, so we're not allowed to buy or otherwise acquire anything in the coming four weeks.

More on this once it's gone, and the empty flat's weirding me out. On a more optimistic note, we're going to see Goldfrapp tonight at Brixton, so hopefully that'll take our minds off it. Much like a pair of cats with buttered paws.

Last Supper (sort of)

2008-11-04T20:56:00.001Z

I'm a simple chap at heart, and in general it doesn't take a lot to keep me happy. This sort of explains why, at 0630 on Saturday morning I was wide awake and heading for the kitchen, all wide-eyed and excited by the prospect of chopping, roasting, reducing and boiling stuff for the rest of the day. Which is exactly what I did.

The event was the last dinner party I'll cook in my own kitchen, and E&T, who I know from Oddbins days, were coming up all the way from darkest Surrey, so I thought I should do it properly: haricot bean and tiger prawn soup followed by venison with chocolate sauce, followed by the Kiwi's amazing lime mousse, and some carefully chosen cheeses from various Borough Market stalls.

Wines were Ruinart NV to start, then a superb new white Burgundy with the soup, and d'Arenberg's 'Dead Arm' Shiraz from 1998 and 2003 with the venison. We moved on to a tremendous Southern French beast with the cheese, and then, possibly ill-advisedly, continued on with Port Ellen and Ardbeg for a bit too long.

Sunday was a bit of a write-off. But it was SO worth it.

This weekend we'll be packing up all that kitchen stuff (and some other bits and pieces), because some men are coming round on Monday morning to take it all away. Ten weeks later, customs and quarantine and bureaucracy notwithstanding, it'll arrive on our (or to be more precise, some kind friends') doorstep. The interim weeks, involving London winter, Canadian snow, Australian summer, New Zealand summer, interviews and so on, we'll be living out of suitcases, which poses an interesting wardrobe conundrum.

It'll be fine. I'm sure it will.

Curry, wine: Edinburgh

2008-10-29T15:51:00.001Z

WHAT a weekend. After a fairly legendary lunch with my boss on Friday afternoon (finalising the deliverables for the coming four weeks or so...), I kicked off the weekend by watching the brilliant Spaceballs with the Kiwi. I'd forgotten how shamelessly puerile that film is, possibly one of the last spoof films whose tone is 'gently mocking', rather than simply vicious or way over the top.

Saturday morning involved a train to Edinburgh, all six hours of it, and that evening we caught up for a curry with my brother and his wife. Both were on sterling form and blessed with a superb local Bangladeshi restaurant. One of the things that's been bothering me 'n' the Kiwi lately is that it seems to be impossible to get a decent Indian or Chinese meal in London unless you're in the market for a £60+ a head dinner. It's a real treat to be able to get back to good, local food again.

Excellent to see them both too - it's been years since I saw either of them, and it's the first time they've met the Kiwi. Good to knock back a few whiskies with my brother too, for the first time in waaaay too long.

The Oddbins wine fair on the Sunday was a whole lot of fun as always, smaller than in previous years (or perhaps I've just got bigger), but the old crew were still there as always. The range is looking a fair bit better than it did in April (at the London version), with some astounding French wines on the way for once, and the German range finally worth a look. It's fair to say though, that these last two are more indicative of trends within the countries in question, but Oddbins has been notably light in these areas for the past few years, so it's refreshing to see something interesting there.

We ended up buying a mixed case. Quite what's in it I've very little idea.

Testing New Toy

2008-10-16T15:36:00.001+01:00

As I'm sure you've noticed, I tend to use this blog rather a lot as a testing ground for new things, some of which I go on to use regularly, some I don't. I'm posting this post from Ping.FM, at this point through a browser, but possibly in the future from some other device. It collates lots of things into one interface; Facebook, Twitter and lots of others, so I might be using it a bit in future. We'll see...

Elbow, Roundhouse, 11.10.08

2008-10-16T15:34:00.001+01:00

I'm obviously a bit preoccupied at the moment - with all the stuff that's going on at the moment I'd totally forgotten to tell you about the brilliant Elbow gig on Saturday night. What a perfect (almost) evening.

I'm fast becoming a fan of the Roundhouse, generally the sound's great and it rarely feels that full, either through great capacity management or tardis-like architecture, I'm not sure. Weirdly, their normally dull beer selection was complemented by the addition of Sagres, which we'd just been drinking in Nandos down the road. Little things like this help, I find.

They were supported on the night by Jesca Hoop, who I suspect is really quite good, and judging by some of the streaming tracks on Last.FM, I think she probably is. Unfortunately her delicate voice combined with the relative lack of interest from the crowd meant she was more or less inaudible, and as she only played a handful of tracks (including a duet with Guy Garvey) I'm not sure she didn't wander off out of sheer annoyance. Poor lass, I thought she could've been great in the right circumstances.

The main event then. The Kiwi made a great point at the beginning about how good the sloping floor in Brixton Academy is, in that you're more likely to be able to see (especially for her, she's ickle), and this was one of my two criticisms of the venue. The opening track was spoilt slightly by us shuffling around trying to get somewhere we could stand next to each other and still see, which depended largely on a very specific configuration of people of certain heights going all the way forwards to the stage, so it's safe to say it didn't really happen.

The band, without exception, were tremendous. Opening with 'Starlings', complete with a trumpet wielded by each band member (whether mimed or not, I don't care), they had the audience grabbed from the word go (or in this case 'How'). By the second track, the bloke next to me singing at the top of a voice so flat it had canals was getting to be too much, so we moved to the middle back, and better sound.

On that note, what amazed me throughout was the quality of the sound, and the preciseness that they got in playing almost note-for-note versions of the tracks we were all so familiar. There's a time and a place for innovation and so on, but a band at Elbow's stage in their career and with their sort of fanbase, should know that they're not going to get away with Jazz Odyssey: we want to hear what we've got on our stereos, just louder and in real life.

And that they delivered. Unusually, one of my favourite tracks of the night was one which didn't really grab me on the record; "The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver", which Guy really seemed to enjoy and absolutely took it by the scruff of its neck. It's great to hear a proper Manchester accent in song - a friend of mine once mentioned how much she loves hearing regional accents on singers, and I have to agree. Not only is it so... honest, but it gives the work a sense of place, and much like terroir in wine terms, embraces its origins. One other track stood out, but you'll have to come to our wedding to hear more about that one.

On a final note, whilst writing this, my iTouch has been in an unusually capricious mood. I've had it on a Genius playlist it's built around Elliott Smith's perkily scornful 'Somebody That I Used To Know', and it thought to include Ben Folds' slightly mawkish but still touching 'Late', his posthumous tribute to Smith. It's a bit like a Spielberg film, in that it's a bit cheesy and predictable, but in such a way that you can't fail to be moved by it. The 25th and last track is Fleet Foxes' gorgeous 'Ragged Wood', which reminds me that we're going to see them in November and it promises to be an amazing night.

Stress notches up, application submitted...

2008-10-13T17:08:00.001+01:00

This morning I took a big file full of carefully collated stuff to the New Zealand embassy in London, and submitted my application for a permanent resident's visa, on the basis of my relationship with the Kiwi. £460 lighter, and the wheels are in motion.

The process is unfortunately extremely lengthy. It'll take them two to three weeks to get a case officer assigned to my application. They'll then look over all the documentation and assess whether I look healthy, intelligent, crime-free and sufficiently enamoured of my Kiwi to be allowed in. They'll get in touch with me, and will let me know how long and arduous the process is likely to be. Timescales from this point in are, at the moment, about three months, but it's fairly open-ended in reality.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that that takes us beyond our departure date, but apparently that's ok. I can get into New Zealand on a tourist visa, as long as I have a valid ticket out of there, but I won't be able to start work until it's processed. Provided everything goes smoothly, this will be ok. If things don't go smoothly, this will most definitely not be ok.

So, not ideal, but ok. Worryingly, the lady who took my application mentioned that some of my blood results were marginally outside the normal range, and that they've been very strict on that lately. I may be asked to undergo (and pay for, presumably) another medical, but right now I'm focusing on that not being necessary. I am a big pile of stress and nerves and freak-out at the moment and I really just want this all to be over. More on this as I get it...

Two sorts of limbo, 80s soundtrack

2008-10-10T16:23:00.001+01:00

So it's a Friday afternoon, about four pm, and I'm officially clockwatching. I've got myself into a bit of an odd situation at work where I'm sort of on standby for two reasonably big things, putting finishing touches to big-ish presentations for both but not... actually... presenting them. Once the clients are ready I'll spring into action, but until then I'm a bit devoid of busyness to be honest.

With this in mind, I'm here waiting for five pm and pub time, experimenting with iTunes 8's 'Genius' tool and actually finding it rather helpful. I'm normally a curmudgeonly old soul when it comes to software having the audacity to second-guess my musical taste. Although I'm always going on about Last FM, all I really use it for is for the glorious statistical wonder that is my listening habits - geeky I know but something I find genuinely fascinating.

In terms of Genius, I'm actually rather enjoying it. Whilst I don't actually take any of its' recommendations on what I should actually buy, I do make use of the playlist generator a fair bit. For example, being in a bit of an 80s mood this afternoon, I stuck on Scritti Politti's 'Word Girl', feeling the need for a bit of that sleepily precise bass and all. The playlist Genius made out of it looks pretty good so far, with a bit of Elvis Costello (I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down), The Specials (Do Nothing), Depeche Mode (See You), The Smiths (Girlfriend in a Coma) and plenty more besides. Weirdly including the Keane single 'Spiralling' which I actually rather like. Am I a Bad Person?

So ok, it's not technically recommending me anything, as everything that's in my iTunes library is there cos I put it there, but it's doing a good job of getting my mood I reckon.

This weekend will hopefully see the arrival of my completed visa medical, which will be dropped into the NZ embassy on Monday morning along with the numerous other bits of paper and things that they require. Apparently it can take about three to four months from now, so I'm rather hoping it'll be a bit quicker. The timescales don't bother me, as I don't see myself needing to start work til the beginning of Feb, but what is a bit of a concern is the lack of a postal address or regular email access between Dec 1 and Jan 5.

Hmmm. Let's focus on this working out ok, shall we? Fingers crossed, everyone...

Half marathon done, legs falling off

2008-10-06T12:24:00.001+01:00

Well, there we have it. My first half marathon completed in the pouring rain, wind, cold etc, in what the Kiwi and I think was about 1hr 52mins or thereabouts. I can't verify this yet as the organisers continue to compound what was a pretty poor event by not telling anyone their times. Judging by the forum posts on the website, it's unlikely we'll get them at all, as some people have had texts, some people haven't, and most people seem to have been sent the wrong times. If the data's that messed up, it won't get unmessed any time soon.*

Still, I know I beat 2hrs, which was my goal all along, so I'm relatively happy. The pain in my legs, hips, knees, shoulders and feet all feels sort of worth it, especially as the non-localised muscle pain suggests that I've not damaged anything significant. That said, I've never experienced pain quite like the final four miles or so. It felt almost solid, like something I could hold onto or bite down on, quite a new feeling for me. The weirdest moment was right at the end, coming across the line and slowing down, and feeling the endorphins wearing off as the pain notched up every few minutes. Amazing things, bodies, eh?

As I mentioned though, the event management was a bit of a shocker. Looking through the website this morning has reminded me of a few things. Firstly, that the distance most runners with GPS's ran was actually about half a mile longer than stated, so it's not actually a true half marathon, and the mile markers were all wrongly places, so we couldn't pace properly. Secondly, that no one had the faintest idea where to start - I stood in the rain for about 40 minutes and ended up near the start - other runners had to jog/walk for about half an hour before they got anywhere near the start line. Thirdly, that the course is listed as 'mainly flat' when in reality it had some pretty mean hills in it. It was compounded by the weather (drizzle turning into torrential downpour) and the transport issues (the whole tube network being snarled up, pretty much), but even without these things it was pretty poorly handled.

In fact, some kind soul has detailed the route here: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2248895, showing not only a half-mile extra, but also the distinctly not 'mainly flat' elevation.

Anyway, I'm happy with my time, as I said. I reckon I need to do another one before too long though, and to prepare for the next one properly. I can honestly say I did no training for this one at all, and I reckon I could aim for 1hr 40min without too much trouble. The Kiwi was absolutely brilliant throughout, waiting in the rain for me to start, hurrying to meet me at just past the halfway mark, and hurrying back to catch me at the finish, all on her own in the rain (everyone else, supporters and runners alike, had dropped out due to illness, transport issues or general can't-be-arsed-ness). I can't tell you how good it was to see her bouncing up and down and yelling encouraging things half way through.

So that's the last event for this year. The next scheduled bit of physical exercise will be snowboarding in December... then I think I'll have to look for another half marathon to run in Auckland!

*edit: the provisional results came out at 1630 on the 6th Oct, and show my full time as 01:54:35. Still happy with it, puts me in the top 25% anyway. Looks like I need to work on my tactics though, as I passed the halfway mark at position 1413, and the finish line at 1795.

Keep calm and carry on...

2008-10-02T10:30:00.001+01:00

Saw this in a shop window in Cambridge today, somehow felt like someone trying to get a message to me:

It helped :)

First hurdle over

2008-09-30T17:17:00.001+01:00

There are some things that invariably make me go a bit dizzy. One is bleeding, the other is spending lots of money; both of these things happened to me this afternoon. I had my visa medical.

It wasn't all that bad to be honest: the Polish receptionist directed me to a brusque but good-natured Australian doctor, who poked me and peered into bits of me and tickled me and hit me with a hammer and took plenty of blood and asked me very politely for a, erm, sample. He relieved me of £300, and sent me to the South African on reception at radiology. This person sent me in to the Kiwi radiologist for my chest x-ray.

Somewhere at the back of my mind I couldn't help think that this farrago of nationalities was there to rub it in that they'd been able to emigrate whilst I, thus far, have not. Smug just isn't the word. Still, they were all very helpful and pleasant, and the whole thing was over in ooh, about an hour. I'm dizzy now for two reasons.

The next steps seem simple enough. I have to collect my test results a week on Saturday. They will be in a sealed envelope. I must not open the envelope. I must enclose it with my other documents (application form, police certificate for me and the Kiwi, various bits of proof that we're an item etc) and get it to the New Zealand High Commission. It's the only copy, so if it gets lost we have to go through the whole thing again. It's not clear if I'll ever get to find out what my test results actually were, which if that's the case will be a bit of a swindle, if you ask me.

Apart from the slight dizziness, which is almost gone now, I feel quite unusual this afternoon. I'm really happy that one of the steps in the process has passed without incident, and as the excitement about leaving mounts, so does the pain of doing so. Friends and colleagues, as the date's getting closer, are reacting less with the excitement they initially showed, and more with sadness that I'm leaving. I almost want to say to people 'I know you're upset, but please try not to show it, at least not in front of me - it makes this all so much harder'.

Unreasonable I know, and I suppose it's selfish of me to say so, to an extent. Something I struggle with a bit sometimes is the desire to make everything ok for everyone else, before thinking about what's a priority for me personally. Seeing people upset because of something I'm doing pricks that emotion, unleashing waves of guilt. I don't have a solution though. I know what I want, and I know what I'm doing - the next few weeks though will be a case of putting my head down and getting on with it. It's going to be very hard indeed, but we knew that, didn't we?

Two months to go

2008-09-29T09:56:00.001+01:00

A productive weekend, then. Faced with a couple of months of mental busyness, we'd decided not to go to Wales this weekend, tempted as I am to see the house I was born in one more time before we leave. Not only did another weekend away seem extravagant, but the opportunity to have a relaxed weekend together was too good to pass up.

Saturday I can barely remember, such was the level of inactivity. I know there was cheese involved at some point, a light, chalky chèvre, and some ridiculously creamy brie, and possibly a slightly disappointing St-Agur. I also know there was a brilliant hour or so spent on the phone to my sister (the younger of the two), talking about our week in Manchester in December and sharing plans for the future in general.

Sunday, bar a wander down the river for lunch in Putney, was mostly spent working out the insurance value of our shipping. Seemed like a fairly innocuous task to start with, but as it turned out, working out the detail of what we were shipping, leaving and packing, and the value of it all, was actually a bit of a mission, and at points pretty traumatic. The trade-off between 'what do we think it would cost to replace it' and 'how much will it cost to insure it' isn't a pleasant thing to do at all.

Still, we got through it, and the Kiwi even managed to chuck out a whole load of clothes she's not work in years.

Tomorrow is Medical Day, which I'm not looking forwards to at all. One more thing out of the way, I suppose. And yes, in 8 weeks' time, we'll be leaving London and starting our journey over to Auckland. Not all that long, really...

Banks. Grim the world over.

2008-09-26T07:21:00.001+01:00

Whether you like it or not, I thought I'd introduce you to an intriguing little sub-plot to the whole emigration thing. One of the points that's been troubling me a bit is the piece of the puzzle that concerns banking.

As I've hinted at before, I'm not entirely without debt. Perhaps not as submerged as I was about three years ago, but still enough to be a millstone for another three to four years. It's all on payment plans, so there's a finite element to it, which is nice. Light at the end of the tunnel, even if that tunnel is extremely long.

So there's a certain amount of money that needs to go out of my UK personal account every month. Not having a UK salary to pay into it poses some issues. So I read with interest that HSBC offer what they call an 'International Personal Current Account', which purports to allow you to pay in and out in different currencies. Brilliant. Or so I thought.

Phoning HSBC was a bit of an experience, as no one person out of the five or six that I spoke to admitted to the existence of such an account. The most sense I got, having been shuttled from department to department, waited for a call back for a week, tried to arrange an appointment to no avail etc, was from a chap I spoke to this morning.

He said, and I'm so fed up with the whole thing that I'm prepared to believe him, that what it actually is is a number of individual accounts in the various currencies you need, which are loosely federated and allow you to transfer funds between them. At a cost, admittedly a small one. So far so... average.

The next bit's the punchline. The privilege of having them set up an account for me in New Zealand will cost me £100. This will save me a few weeks (and presumably a ton of hassle) getting it sorted once we're over there. I've not read all the documentation yet, but so far it looks like it might actually be worth doing in the general scheme of things.

Tell you what, this is like getting married. Wherever I turn there's another inflated charge that I can't really avoid paying. I'm seriously tempted to follow my grandparents' example and keep it under my mattress...

Visa worries, cathartic blog post

2008-09-23T20:48:00.001+01:00

We're almost down to two months out before we leave - two months and one week, give or take a day. Still left on the to-do list (amongst things too numerous to mention) is the tricky issue of a New Zealand visa. Now, were we to start the application process now, we'd stand a bit of a chance of getting it sorted before we leave. As it is, I still need to get a medical in order to apply.

Not just any medical, you see. This is a full-on, total head to toe MOT given by one of only two clinics in London which are authorised to do it, costing £250, and involving laboratory work which can take weeks. That's assuming they don't need to have me back for more tests. So as you can imagine, I'm a bit stressed.

On the whole though, I'm reasonably calm about the whole thing. There are nerves, yes absolutely, and I'm about 85% terrified. The thought of leaving my friends and family is horrible, and things like seeing a friend's baby boy last weekend, and knowing that he's basically not going to know me when he's growing up, really set me off.

And yes, the opposite is also true. The thought of bringing up my own children without my family, and without friends I've known since school, is hard to deal with.

But the thing is, I've been through this all in my head over and over again for years now. For so many reasons (not least that I'm completely in love with the Kiwi) I know this is absolutely the right thing for me. Also, staying here in the UK, I couldn't see myself actually getting to the point of children at all. There are so many reasons why I'm looking forward to the move, and I'm never more excited than when things are going right. That said, I'm prone to being a bit doom-y about things sometimes, and when there's as much at stake as there is right now, it doesn't take a lot to go wrong for me to let all the scary thoughts get a bit overwhelming.

So this is what's left to do, the big bits, anyway, and in no particular order:

Medical
Visa
Bank account (international & NZ)
Job interviews for January
Saving (more)
Shipping
Buying stuff (laptop, mainly)

Not all that bad, when you look at it in list form. I've got an appointment for my medical next week, which is a bit of a relief. The saving thing's a bit of a challenge too, given the amount of various things (the visa's £460 too) we need to pay for between now and then. I'm also counting on a fairly significant bonus payment before I leave, which in this economic climate isn't quite as sure a thing as it was.

Anyway, thought I'd document what's going on. This blog was always supposed to be about documenting transitional periods and so on, and there are few bigger changes one can make to ones life than this. Expect more, hopefully bearing mostly good news...

It's Talk Like A Pirate Day

2008-09-19T16:35:00.001+01:00

Yarrrrr.

Sore legs, decent result

2008-09-15T12:11:00.001+01:00

I’m in a rather unusual situation at work at the moment, in that I’m trying to write a paper on maintaining levels of service across an organization or some such, and in order to do so I need to refer to some stuff on the internet, and our internet access is currently down, so I’m a bit stuck. I’m also completely devoid of blood sugar and thus concentration, so trying to even draft a structure for the thing is futile at this point. So, I’ve decided to write a blog entry in the 30 mins or so that remain before it could be considered reasonable for me to head out to lunch, for one of those amazing ciabattas that the Tasting Room serve in Borough Market.

One of the main reasons my blood sugar is so low, I’m sure, relates to my efforts yesterday in the London Duathlon. Without a doubt, it was one of the most demanding things I’ve done, right up there with the second sprint triathlon I did a few years back. A 9k run, 20k bike and 5k run strung together, I was a bit concerned before going into it, especially as I’d done next to no training, and had spent the previous week drinking and eating to excess in southern Spain; not ideal.

On the day though, after I’d warmed up in the first 3-4k, I began to really enjoy it. The legs were starting to feel a little fatigued towards the end of the 9K (45:08 – bit below par), but a decent transition of 02:23 went smoothly enough and gave me a bit of time to get some fluids in comfortably before getting on the bike. Two laps of Richmond Park is something I’ve done before, but not after a 9k run. To be honest it wasn’t that bad; running then biking is ok, it’s the other way around you’ve got to watch out for. Two downsides on the bike: firstly I’d done pretty much no training, so my legs weren’t as up for it as they could’ve been, secondly the fastest downhill bit of the course suffered from a massive headwind, so I managed a time of 49:45, some way off what I think I could have done.

Still, a slightly quicker transition (02:07) got me out on the run without any trouble, save the inevitable crunch when you start running and the pain begins. It was basically 5k of sheer slog, with a slight incline up the first 3k or so. Quite a few walkers on this bit, which sort of spurred me on to not stop at all. Kilometer 4 was probably the worst; constantly thinking my legs were going to give out and a few of the quicker runners flying past me. I got home in 25:41, surprisingly quick considering how slow it felt and only a few minutes off what I’d have done with fresh legs.

That gives a total of 02:05:03, which is an improvement on my target of 02:15:00, which is great. Making the day pretty much perfect was the sight of the Kiwi and some friends of ours cheering me on every now and then, and being there to meet me at the end. The highlight of the day? Hearing that wonderful woman say ‘I’m so proud of you’ at the end. Simple things, but there you go, means a lot to me.

Now, I’m hoping that I can get my legs to work properly again in time for the Half Marathon. I’m still short on sponsorship, so all are welcome to donate at http://www.justgiving.com/[my name with no spaces]. Thanks!

Holiday good, gloomy home weather bad

2008-09-08T22:27:00.001+01:00

What's happened to the weather? I go away for a week, ok - 9 days, and suddenly winter's crept in the back door whilst I wasn't looking. Not happy with this.

Anyway, we got back yesterday, so the memory of our stay in a brilliant villa in San Juan de los Terreros, which is here. The satellite photo was taken a little while back, so it doesn't look like the houses on our street are finished yet, which they all were.

It was a week of 30+ temperatures, lots of sleeping, both beside and in the pool, plenty of brilliant food, both in and out, and some truly excellent wines, the best from the Ribeira del Duero.

I have to say though, that Almeria, which we flew into, is a bit of a dump. We were lucky enough to chance upon a really good restaurant for dinner, but otherwise it's not all that. The one thing it has to recommend it is this hulking great contraption sticking out into the harbour.

It's some sort of industrial revolution-era device originally used to allow freight trains to drop stuff into waiting boats. Most cities built docks and the like, but the Almerians did this instead, and when it was decommissioned (assuming it actually was...) the mayor of the town decided that, given it was one of the only things the town had to differentiate itself, it should stay. Interesting, yes, but the appeal is somewhat limited as a tourist attraction.

The rest of the coast, up through Pulpi towards Alicante, alternates between beautiful desolation and near-desert conditions, and massive, semi-built urbanisations forming either second homes for wealthier Spanish families, or boxes for sunburnt cabbies from Romford to stash their horrible kids and sullen wives in for a week or two's drinking and complaining there's no chips on the menu.

Fortunately the Kiwi, in her infinite wisdom and skill, chose a predominantly Spanish town for us to stay in, so the only football shirts we saw were in Murcia airport on the way back. Seriously - whole families in them. I really feel for respectable football fans, like the Mighty Melvin - this lot really gives that garment, which I'm sure some people quite rightly wear with pride, a terrible name.

So anyway, the week's bookends aside, the holiday itself was one of the best to date. The villa we rented was pretty much perfect, with loads of space, air conditioning and a large enough pool to actually get a proper swim in of a morning. The perfect way to get us both to chill out a bit, before we begin the 11-week countdown to leaving London. The remaining diary pages are beginning to look very small indeed...

New internet toy! New internet toy!

2008-08-27T21:06:00.001+01:00

Once in a while you find something on the internet that you suspect might change the way you use it. It's a rarity, and you have to trawl through lots of crap to get there, but when you find something like this it's well worth taking a few minutes out to get to grips with it:

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Watch the video, install it (and if you're not using Firefox 3 by now, more fool you), and trust me, you'll notice it.

Tarts and other diversions

2008-08-25T20:51:00.002+01:00

What a weekend. Scouting for engagement do venues on Friday night followed by dinner at home, once round Richmond park on the Black Panther on Saturday morning, drinks out on Saturday night, Gordon's with T&E on Sunday afternoon followed by dinner & movie at home (Cloverfield, don't believe the hype), long walk by the river this morning followed by a day in the kitchen at long last. This evening's dinner worked pretty well, though I say so myself, roast lamb rump with puy lentils, rosti potatoes, glazed shallots, tomato concasse and herbed gravy.

The bit I'm really pleased with is in the photo; bitter chocolate tart, served with a splodge of sour, cool, sharp crème fraîche. The crumbly bits on the top are a result of some last minute emergency pastry trimming needed to get it out of its case. I've had a bit of a challenge with tarts lately (ho ho), as they've all refused to set properly, but this one seems to be holding its shape reasonably well. The crisp vanilla-tinged pastry is a bit of a winner too. Both recipes from Gordon Ramsay's Passion for Flavour, one of his earlier books that's still a bit cheffy and not quite so 'posh Jamie Oliver'. Sometimes you do want to spend 6 hours on dinner, rather than trying to fit preparation of a memorable meal into 30 minutes.

Sitting alongside this little lot was a bottle we brought back from Australia last time we were there, a 2002 Vasse Felix Shiraz, which I reckon is just about peaking right now, at least this bottle was. Good luck finding any in the UK though, we tend to drink all our Aussie wines shockingly young, so there's never anything of this sort of age around.

And so ends the last bank holiday of the year (I think). Three and a half days of work and we'll be heading out to southern Spain for a week in a villa somewhere near Almeria, with nothing on the agenda but reading, drinking, eating and the occasional dip in the pool or, should the effort seem worth it, the sea. I can't wait.

On the reading front, I'm currently sailing through M F K Fisher's excellent 'The Art of Eating', which I'd recommend to anyone, whether they care about food or not. It's so brilliantly written, without a hint of pretence or self-consciousness, and provides a valuable missing link between the likes of Brillat-Savarin and today's food writers, not to mention a fascinating and well-researched insight into culinary culture over the past few thousand years.

I'd take it on holiday, but it's about five inches thick.

A gentle reminder

2008-08-20T21:41:00.002+01:00

To those of you who've already kindly donated to my day of pain, thank you very much, you're guaranteed a place in the heaven of your particular denomination.

To those of you who haven't, go on, click the button - it's for a good cause and if I don't get to the target I'm going to wet out. If I do I promise to put myself through it.

Oh alright then...

2008-08-18T23:01:00.001+01:00

In response to Kathryn's comment below (and the numerous requests on Facebook), photos of the ring have now been added to the album.

The ring thing

2008-08-16T08:45:00.001+01:00

So if you're on my Facebook friend list, you'll already know this, but last night I asked the Kiwi to marry me, and cor blimey she only went and said YES, so we are now officially betrothed, I believe. Brilliant!

Very briefly, as I need to get in the shower and prepare for a fairly intense day in the pub, the whole night was excellent from start to finish. We started with Champagne (Pol Roger NV, if you're interested) at Vertigo, where I mumbled the question. At 600ft, it's the highest building in London, a real landmark, and the view from the bar's tremendous. Our table faced northwest, towards the Telecom tower - the weather was perfect too, watching the sun set over the most amazing city in the world.

Following that we got a cab over to Wild Honey in Mayfair, the sister restaurant to Arbutus, which we've also been to. Terrific food and superb wine was somewhat overshadowed by how excited and dizzy we both were, but it was superb nonetheless. Would definitely recommend it. It turned out that a friend of ours was having a birthday party over in Soho, so we dropped in on that on the way home.

I feel absolutely tremendous. And I can't believe the ring, whose size I guessed, fits perfectly and looks so completely natural on that wonderful girl's finger.

Singin' In The Rain @ Somerset House

2008-08-08T11:11:00.001+01:00

Quite how good this was can't be expressed in bloggage - watching Singin' In The Rain in the open air at Somerset House. Perfect summer evening, lying on a picnic blanket with the Kiwi, watching one of the most heartwarming films around. It's right up there with It's A Wonderful Life, in my opinion.

This, as you might be able to make out, was the scene - you can make out the south block of Somerset House in the background, onto which the film was projected.

One of the things that made the evening was the fact that his widow and daughter attended. It got me wondering what goes through a widow's mind to see her husband on the big screen, looking his absolute best, and with hundreds of adoring fans still hanging on every tap, jump and twirl. Fascinating stuff.

I know it's a cliche, but they really don't make 'em like that any more.

Sponsor me!

2008-08-05T13:57:00.002+01:00

After a few years of running, I've decided to do something worthy with it, so on October 5th, I'll be running in the Run To The Beat London Half Marathon. I'm running for Woolworths Kids First, who're not only providing me with a place, but do all sorts of brilliant things... you know, for kids.

So, chart my progress on the widget to the right, and visit my fundraising page to help me out!

Gold cockles?

2008-08-01T13:56:00.001+01:00

Is this the biggest piss-take in the entire world? Homemade pasta (ie flour, water, eggs), cockles (ie weeny shellfish), mushrooms & lemon (ie cheap), for £13.50?

For those of you on the NZ$, that's $36.65 for a fairly unremarkable bowl of pasta, eaten in a stall to the side of London's Borough Market.

Tut.

Bicycles

2008-08-01T13:49:00.001+01:00

I've just opened up Windows Live Writer to find a blog post I started writing on Monday but didn't actually get round to posting, so you'll have to do without tales of me 'n' the Kiwi cycling to Hampton Pool on the weekend, oh yes we did - all 17k there and back. We're so proud of ourselves. It's probably about time I got the Black Panther* out again to be honest - the Duathlon's in about 6 weeks' time and I've not bestridden** it in almost two years.

It's hard to believe we're in August already. This means there are only four months left before we leave London; five months until we arrive in New Zealand and it all suddenly becomes very real. The excitement's really starting to build now, both of us I think just really want to DO IT. In the meantime, there's a ton of stuff to do; my visa application needs to start this month, really, and that's just the start of it.

This weekend we're off up to Manchester - I'm getting all the visits in that I can before we leave as you can imagine. Should be fun; lunch with the family tomorrow and spending a bit of time with Yoog on Saturday night. Presumably the latter will feature a Guitar Hero challenge, presumably with me getting my arse kicked again despite buying my own one in an attempt to get better at it.

Something tells me August is going to be a fun month. Watch this space - I'll try to document as much as possible...

Oh, and the new addition to my page on the right? Wordle is a truly brilliant application - try it for yourself, it's completely addictive.

*ironic macho naming of my bike. Ironic in that with me on its back, it's anything but.

**is this a word? it is now.

Perils of online translation

2008-07-24T12:34:00.001+01:00

This is brilliant. Obviously the owner used an online translator to work out a name for the restaurant - unfortunately assumed the error message that was returned was not an error...

Terrific.

Woo for the internets

2008-07-21T09:26:00.001+01:00

I've finally got around to buying a domain name - rather wish I'd done it years ago but there you go, every day's a school day, isn't it? So I've gone and bought my first name last name dot co dot NZ, and currently there's nothing of any real worth there but just owning it is immensely satisfying. I've just got dot net as well, and am considering going to the arse who's parked surname dot co dot NZ and seeing how much they're going to charge me for it. Imagine how cool that email address would be...

Anyway, beyond my absurd geekiness, stuff is definitely good right now, although the Kiwi and I looked through the diary to try to find a spare weekend before we leave, and horrifyingly didn't find ONE weekend we can fit anything else into between now and then. We've got the whole of November free to do moving stuff, but other than that it's pretty much full, which in many ways fills me with dread - apart from anything else it makes it all seem so very close...

On the moving front, things continue to fall into place. HSBC have just added NZD to their supported currencies on their international current account, and the job trail is warming up, I think, as the housing market is cooling down, which is precisely the way I want things to go. It's almost time to start my visa application too...

On that note, my train's just pulling into Cambridge, so off I go to bang my head against the client's wall for another week. What fun.

Houston, we have a sore head

2008-07-10T17:18:00.001+01:00

It's the last day of the conference and I'm hiding in the main hall, pretending to be working so that no one will try to talk to me - I'm suffering a bit from what's basically been a three-day bender and am in no fit state to talk retail strategy. It's been a lot of fun though and, despite the lack of sleep, insane heat and the occasional moment when I realised I was completely out of my depth, I'm really glad of the opportunity to do this. I'll be coming home with a sheaf of business cards, a pretty good understanding of how partnering with Microsoft works, and a firm resolution to detox next week.

Naturally, the thing I'm looking forwards to the most is getting back to my London, my flat and my Kiwi, but there's a whole lot of time in between now and then; two flights (including that horrible connection again) and hopefully not too much stress. What I want to do right now though, is just go... to... sleep...

Houston, we have a conference

2008-07-07T23:16:00.001+01:00

A bit of a day of firsts for me, yesterday (or at least, the past 36 hours or so, thinking in terms of days is challenging at the moment). Getting into the Virgin Atlantic lounge was one, all lovely and great and all but somehow not quite the land of dreams I'd hoped for. Perhaps, because we only had about 30 minutes in there, I didn't really get the full effect. That said, it was a damn sight better than the alternative, fast track security and free wine and all.

Second on my list was actually flying Virgin, which it sort of surprises me I've not done before for some reason. Although the promised upgrade to Upper Class didn't materialise, I was in Premium Economy, which is better than it sounds. I spent most of the flight in the bar being force-fed red Bordeaux by the barman.

Third was actually being late for a flight. I know how anal this sounds, but this is something I just. don't. do, and haring through Newark airport trying to negotiate the (irritatingly chatty) immigration and customs people, pick my bags up, re-check in, go through security AGAIN (this time with the plebs) and get to the gate isn't really my idea of fun. Travelling's mental enough without that sort of stress, and to top it all we proceeded to spend the next hour on the tarmac. Fortunately, for some reason I was in first class, which meant there was a lovely lady on hand to make sure my wine glass didn't get empty. So much so that I had to pretend to be asleep so she'd stop.

So after all this, we got into Houston at about midnight-ish, which as far as my body was concerned was 0600. Getting a good 6 hours' sleep meant today's been reasonably ok, but I'm not sure how tonight's going to be - a networking cocktail thing followed by a dinner we're hosting for some people or other. I'm currently wearing a pink striped shirt with a frankly enormous collar, which I'm rather enjoying - most Merkins are so excruciatingly dull and conservative with what they wear that I'm standing out as if I was wearing a clown suit.

Fortunately we're taking cabs everywhere. I don't imagine they like pink shirt-wearers here, it's still very much a moustache and cowboy hat sort of place*. Over lunch, I was introduced to the various forms of the contraction 'y'all': 'y'all' refers to one person. 'All y'all' refers to more than one person. And, dear god, 'y'all's' means 'your'.

Needless to say, my accent has moved into the sort of RP register of which Laurence Olivier would have been proud. I might even start drinking tea.

*yes, the irony hasn't gone unnoticed. The Village People are probably seen as 'good hard-workin' decent men, 'cept for that injun' by those who remember them.

Sore head, busy week ahead...

2008-07-04T15:19:00.001+01:00

I am physically destroyed. We went to a wedding reception last night, which was brilliant, danced like fools and drank like bigger fools, and wore a lovely new suit which I'd bought the previous week at Ted Baker as part of a horrifying splurge of clothes-buying. Tremendous event it was, both bride and groom looking superb and very happy indeed.

But this morning was a bit of a challenge. In fact, the whole day has been, and I'm a little concerned about the impact this is going to have on the week to come. You see, I found out on Tuesday afternoon that I'm being sent over to Houston (yep, the one in Texas) for a week to attend a conference over there. I'm flying out on Sunday afternoon, back on Friday morning, mental schedule in between and hopefully I won't have to present.

Now, today should be the day on which I print out all the stuff I'll need in order to get onto flights and into hotels etc, and although I'm fairly sure I've done all I need, I'm also acutely aware that I turn into a bit of an idiot whilst hungover so I'm bound to have forgotten something crucial. Ah, well.

So there we are, little me representing my company's retail function to lots of Merkins. It's either going to be REALLY REALLY GREAT or horrible, and I've decided to shoot for the former. If there's interweb access at the Houston Holiday Inn Express (I know), I'll see if I can squeeze out a blog entry or two whilst I'm there. Wish me luck...

Minor changes, new blog toys

2008-06-30T16:16:00.001+01:00

The eagle-eyed among you (you know who you are, I'm sure) will no doubt have already spotted some tiny changes I've made to this blog. Along with the brilliant SnapShots I've been using for a while, I've put Lingospot onto it too. This is quite a sexy piece of fun, which picks up words I've published and gives you a little run-down of what they're about. Check out some of them further down the page - you'll see a little arrow next to them which, when clicked, opens up a window where you can see the Wikipedia entry for that word, plus some Flickr photos and so on. Nice, no?

I've also shuffled some of the ads around, including this one at the top which I'm not sure about really. Don't forget that advertising on this blog does actually pay me money when clicked...

Oh, and the other thing is the little doo-hickey on the right hand side that cleverly dumps my blog into your feed reader, should you use such a thing.

That's about it, will write more shortly. This past weekend deserves a bit of bloggage, I'm sure.

Not so bad after all...

2008-06-22T17:59:00.001+01:00

It's occurred to me lately that this blog's turned into less of a worrying insight into the byzantine workings of my 7-year-old mind, more a sort of 'this is what we did on the weekend isn't it nice' thing, which isn't what I'd planned at all. I'll do better in future I promise.

Despite that, this weekend has been fairly pleasant; tapas and cocktails on Friday night and a bit of a drinkathon with Keef on Saturday, strangely woke up feeling bright as a button this morning which sort of made up for Friday morning, when I woke up feeling disastrously hungover having (purposefully) not drunk a drop the previous night.

So we made use of the day, wandering out around Kensington in the sun, downing a massive, largely fried brunch at Café Continenté after which I'm fairly sure I went into shock for 30 minutes or so, heading to Oddbins for some of their amazing own-label rosé, and slowly winding back home via Tesco for lots of exciting spicy things to cook over the coming week.

So just before I wrote this, I was in the kitchen watching the Kiwi bake some banana oat muffins. She's wearing a gorgeous royal blue maxi-dress with a halter neck, the afternoon light's coming softly through into the kitchen and she's a perfectly beautiful image of femininity to me, and just at that moment, I hear the living room stereo, with Adele singing 'all the wonders of my world...', and it occurs to me, not for the first time today, that stuff can get pretty good really, can't it?

70s food, Kiwi-less, plans

2008-06-10T21:57:00.001+01:00

Oh hilarious. I'm watching, as I have been doing every Tuesday evening for a few weeks now, 'The Supersizers Go...' with Giles Coren and Sue Perkins. This week, it's the 70s, and it reminds me quite how much I really like prawn cocktail. I remember having it at my eldest sister's wedding when I must've been all of five, and thought it was about the most exotic and brilliant thing I'd ever had. It was served with buttered brown bread, out of which I made a prawn cocktail sandwich. Classy.

I still make it, if the truth be known, with my own marie rose sauce and big fat tiger prawns - and it's still ace.

Anyway, childhood food aside, I'm writing this stretched luxuriously out on the sofa, as the Kiwi's in New York this week, generally attending numerous parties and watching films, I think, damn her, and so here I am, all by my self. She's back on Friday, which at this point is seeming very far away indeed.

My weekend was spent back in Manchester, which was brilliant - catching up with the folks and the family Yoog, then back to London on the Sunday night for drinks with my old housemate which were probably more enthusiastic than they should've been; Monday morning was a bit of a challenge.

I do have a bit of news for you all. The kiwi and I have been thinking about it for a while, but we've decided for definite to move to New Zealand. In about six months' time. Scary stuff, but massively exciting too. We'll go via Manchester for a week (early Christmas), then Canada, snowboarding, then Australia for a bit of time with the folks, then NZ for New Year. And then back to reality with a crash...

More on this later, but I wanted to let you all know. Funny, I started this blog to document some work-related changes in my life, but I guess the changes will be a little more wholesale than that.

In other news, Nick Drake has been in my headphones a great deal of late, what terrifically brilliant lovely stuff it is too. All three albums, in sequence, at least once a day.

Being very grown-up (sort of)

2008-06-02T11:07:00.001+01:00

This Friday saw our annual 'doing something loosely defined as 'cultural', when the Kiwi and I went to see Pygmalion at the Old Vic. It got off to a slightly shaky start, when (being used to films and concerts) we turned up on the dot of 1930, expecting it to start some time afterwards, and were made to wait upstairs and watch the first act on a monitor before being let into the theatre. Nonetheless, the remainder of it was superb, Tim Pigott-Smith attacking the Henry Higgins role with evident relish and Michelle Dockery brilliantly timed and spot on as Eliza Doolittle.

I've not seen the play before and, although this could be as much down to the performance as anything else, I was surprised by the savagery with which Shaw tears into the privileged classes, showing through Higgins a thorough hypocrisy and lack of humanity, particularly in the face of Eliza's articulate, grounded and self-aware father. Whilst Col. Pickering offers some hope of redemption for the upper classes, he's still shown as fundamentally juvenile and short-sighted as Higgins.

It also reminded me how damaging a 'happy ending' can be to a play's message - in stark contrast to My Fair Lady, there's no closure to Pygmalion. For the viewer, this means the questions raised in the play are still firmly in the mind long after the show's over; it doesn't offer answers, forcing you to mull it over for yourself.

Anyway, following that we wandered down The Cut to Livebait, where the food was brilliant but the service, unfortunately, was catastrophic. Hey ho. The rest of the weekend involved travelling down to East Sussex to see some friends of ours and their 5 month old baby girl, who's a right bundle of smiles - although for some reason the sight of the Kiwi was enough to reduce her to inconsolable tears at first.

Fortunately they made friends before too long and that afternoon I was treated to the mildly alarming sight of my girlfriend displaying what can only be described as something of a maternal side - even taking over (bottle) feeding duties for a while. She didn't even seem to mind being vomited on, which is totally not my experience of her. Well well, how times change...

Another bank holiday, toddler tantrum

2008-05-27T20:56:00.001+01:00

Another bank holiday sort of crept up on me this weekend, although this time I can profess to having found out about it a little earlier than last time (Wednesday? something like that). Following a week that was a bit like wading through treacle work-wise, it was very welcome.

So, if you're interested... on Friday night I started to teach the Kiwi how to play chess, and from the looks of it she'll be beating me soundly in relatively little time. She has a naturally analytical, strategic mind that lends itself well to the game, whilst personally I struggle to have the patience. We'll see. We're both about as competitive as each other, so perhaps I'll develop a bit more aptitude for it out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

Saturday we both caught up with friends separately, and Sunday we went to the rugby sevens at Twickenham, at which England beat New Zealand in the first quarter-final round and thus were out for the rest of the day. With that and the tennis result I'm uncharacteristically smug for an English sports fan - we don't often get the chance so I'm rather milking it. That said, rugby was definitely a secondary attraction of the day, the first being smuggling as much alcohol into the ground as possible, along with the usual results. Streakers, pitch invasions, hailstorms of plastic pint glasses, cardboard beer trays, hats and at one point, the construction of a snake of empty pint glasses being constructed that stretched pretty much from the back of the stands to the front, and the length of one whole block.

We called it a day afterwards, and came out of it relatively unscathed. I did run to a cashpoint (run? why? I don't know) and back during the course of the day, out of the ground what I reckon was about 1.5k at a sprint in my non-running shoes, which I think is responsible for every muscle and joint in my body aching today and a suspected pulled calf muscle. Hopefully this will be a learning experience.

Yesterday was hilarious from start to finish, the highlight being the sight of my Kiwi, face down on the living room floor throwing a proper toddler tantrum about having to tidy her clothes off the floor of our bedroom. Fists banging on the floor and everything. Second to this, superb food all day, with a brilliant borlotti bean minestrone for lunch (her) and good ol' roast chicken & veg & pan gravy for dinner (moi). And a short week ahead of us! Brilliant.

One Year In

2008-05-21T09:06:00.001+01:00

Oh, and I forgot to mention. I've been in this company for exactly one year today, and what a year it's been. Tremendous stuff, feels very good indeed.

Run of the mill mentalness

2008-05-21T08:34:00.001+01:00

So I'm sitting here at my desk in London, wondering why I'm so dog tired, and then it hits me - it's 0745. I'm precisely one hour early, and for no good reason. Note to self, if you're going to get up that early, either don't, or do some exercise or something. I blame the Kiwi, she's the one who's always in shockingly early, she works way too hard that lass.

Anyway, so in the lead up to the Move, a few interesting things have been happening at work. Firstly an offer of a contract came in with a different employer, which would have enabled me to save a fair bit of cash and, being self-employed, would have some decent tax benefits. So I took this offer to my current employer, told them the context (ie the Move) and the offer, and fortunately they came back with a counter-offer, despite the impending Move. This slightly changes my role here, and adds a huge amount to my workload, but the benefits are... tangible.

This will rather annoy the party who made the original offer, but I suppose it's all about No.1 when it all comes down to it. The rest of this year should be a bit of a challenge.

Back to reality today though, it's one of those 'head down' days where I finally get around to writing up stuff I've been talking about for weeks. Visio and Excel will be getting a bit more of my attention than they're used to I think, oh joy.

Oh, and I've decided that the new Martha Wainwright album is about 85% brilliant, the new Elbow album is still 100% brilliant, and I'm undecided about Santogold. Seems about 40% brilliant, about 50% meh, and 10% barking (and not in a good way). Recently I've had two songs going round my head constantly: Kate Bush's 'Moments of Pleasure' and Elliott Smith's 'Tomorrow Tomorrow'. The latter has been ringing in my ears since New Zealand (March), and is now feeling like a sort of muso-y tinnitus. Could be worse I suppose. Both of those last links will enable you to play the full track should you wish - just press the Play button.

Hoots

2008-05-12T13:32:00.001+01:00

What. A. Weekend. Kicked off on Thursday night (as the best weekends are) with a work social at which we threw a baby shower for one of our consultants, complete with milk-based cocktails served in Tommy Tippee mugs. As with many of our work socials, it doesn't sound like it'd work but curiously, it did.

Friday was mental throughout, full of meetings in the morning and struggling over to Hampshire to the Hatter's house with boxes of wine and shoes, for 'twas his WEDDING on the Saturday morning and we needed to get ready and such, being as I was his very Best Man and very proud of it as well.

Those of you who have befriended me on Facebook have access to photos of the event, including one or two of your blogger in a KILT for the first time ever (and yes, I was wearing pants). A truly tremendous garment, I have to tell you - would happily wear one more often. Were I a true Scot, I would, but I'll have to settle for Sassenach Troosers as it is. Hey ho.

I am a fool

2008-05-07T15:17:00.001+01:00

How did that happen? Where did that bank holiday come from? Seriously, I've always been bad at working out when they were, but this really takes the cake - it was 1600 on Friday (FRIDAY!!) before a colleague mentioned it to me and this was quite literally the first I knew about it. How does one find out?

Anyway, twas a nice surprise and a much-needed break in the eternal scramble that my professional life has become. Friday night I took the Hatter out for dinner cos he's getting married this weekend and I'm sort of his best man. We went to the French House, which although they always overcook the steaks I really do like, and we drank rather too much.

Saturday I took my hangover round to a friendly American's house and killed it with red wine, the Kiwi having gone to the Nuremberg Horse Trials or some such. Sunday I cooked a semi-disastrous set of creme caramels to take round to dinner with some recently-married Kiwis nearby (it literally did take all day, in between Wii bouts and screwing up the caramel-making bit. The kitchen was covered in strands and blobs of caramel in various states by the end of the day, which the Kiwi and I left to dry and then went round cracking bits off and munching on them like Hansel and Gretel).

Monday (MONDAY!!) I finally got around to getting my bike out of the wardrobe, putting it together and cleaning it. The resultant pic of the Black Panther I posted on Facebook provoked a fair bit of response, which presumably means the respondents thought I'd actually ridden it, when in fact having cleaned it I celebrated the act by doing nothing for the rest of the day.

One step at a time, sweet Jesus...

Exits are here, here, and...

2008-04-29T15:19:00.001+01:00

Good lord - has it really been that long since I posted anything? Things have been rather hectic since, admittedly, but there is an element of laziness about the last few weeks that I'd be wrong to deny. My running record to the right says all you need to know about that.

Work-wise, am more in Cambridge than anywhere else at the moment, have managed to get rid of the Bradford thing (I think) and am back billing more or less full time. The Cambridge thing is taking a little time to get off the ground, which is how come I'm writing personal blog entries during office hours.

Recent non-work things have been somewhat more eventful, me finally cashing in the Kiwi's birthday present from last year on the weekend and flying an actual HELICOPTER, of which I'm inordinately proud. 30 minutes in the air was all it took to convince me that 1. it's brilliant and 2. I'm crap at it.

Now, I can pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time, which I've been told qualifies one to be a helicopter pilot. Although I've suspected for some time that the actual exam is a little more taxing than this, the real dexterity required to pilot something that moves across all planes of movement using highly sensitive controls is something else entirely.

So, when the instructor hands you the controls, with the aircraft in a perfect hover, and you make no perceptible change to any of them AND YET the thing lurches violently 30 feet to the left and jumps 20 feet in the air whilst lazily spinning anticlockwise, you start to appreciate why he's been so smug for the past 20 minutes or so. Brilliant fun.

In other news, we've got ourselves a Wii Fit. It's ace. Oh, and I've entered the London Duathlon, so I'll let you know how that goes. I think I need to get my bike out of the cupboard sooner rather than later.

Oh the glamour pt 2: Bradford, Cambridge, London

2008-04-15T22:57:00.001+01:00

I'm writing this post on a train, reflecting on how much this particular environment will be a feature of my life this week. The two projects I've found myself on lately (the Irish thing does indeed seem to have let me go... fingers crossed) are helpfully located in Cambridge and Bradford, so I've seen a bit more of Kings Cross than I normally prefer to of late.

Small mercies: the majority of the work for both can be done either at my home office near the city or the offices of a creative agency in Piccadilly, but nonetheless this week I'm in Cambridge this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon, Bradford Wednesday and Thursday and hopefully London on Friday but who knows.

Both are good, fun, broadening projects which I'm enjoying a lot at the moment, but the travelling thing does put a bit of a dent in my life and my cashflow (racking up near £500 in travel expenses every month can be tricky to manage). Still, I'm not complaining, it pays the bills, most months.

Last week I ran another wine tasting for the team at work, with attendees from various other parts of the business taking the numbers up to around 30 or so, an improvement on previous evenings and weirdly for some reason suggested that a room of 30 people is easier to control than 20 - or perhaps I'm getting better at it, I dunno. Still, they seemed to enjoy it, and for the Facebookers amongst you the photos are up on our company group somewhere should you wish.

The weekend which followed was great, if surprisingly brief, with E&T coming round for dinner on Saturday night, which involved a morning's barging round Borough Market and Tesco and an afternoon's increasingly frantic cooking. Most of it went well, with the notable exception of me screwing up a lemon meringue pie AGAIN - this is turning into something of a culinary nemesis for me.

I'm sure I've made it perfectly at least once, but for some reason over the past few years they won't hold their shape properly. It all generally tastes great, but it's just a bit runny. I set some of the curd separately this time, and it set perfectly, so I think it's my meringue that's the problem - I think I need to spend a bit more time making sure it's properly robust, otherwise it sags a bit and (I think) causes the filling to sort of unset.

The Kiwi has got tickets to the wrestling tonight. Can't wait.

Toys, changes

2008-04-06T12:44:00.001+01:00

Now I know I've said this before, but I think I might just be finally off the Irish project. There'll be a few bits and pieces I'll probably be hassled about in the coming weeks, but I'm now committed to two main things: an entertainment project and a pitch for some retail work, both of which are intriguing and exciting to say the least. This all kicks off on Monday. I'm also coaching a junior BA onto the Irish project - hopefully this won't take up too much time but we'll see, I suppose.

This weekend's been fun so far - yesterday the Kiwi and I went to the 'Opportunities New Zealand' show to get some info on things relating to moving there; freight, money transfers, jobs and so on. I'm not sure how helpful it was, but we did meet a shipping company who seemed to know what they were talking about, and I picked up a brochure from a recruitment person who had lots of technology delivery jobs by the looks of it. I'll be the first to confess that this isn't precisely where I see my career going, but it's the most likely option in an industry where ecommerce isn't really happening at any scale.

We also had a look in Trailfinders for flights over there via Canada (snowboarding), terrifically expensive as always, but some reasonable deals to be had and to be honest we'd sort of expected it wouldn't be cheap. Irritating that a single ticket is about the same price as a return though, not news to me but it always gets on my nerves. More on this as it develops.

In other news, I have a new toy to share with you. In the box on the right, I've linked up my Nike+ account, which shows all the running I'm doing. It's a little widget that fits on my running shoe and onto my iPod, which then tracks my pace, distance and times, and when my iPod is connected to my PC, uploads all the data to my profile on the Nike+ website. Brilliant.

In fairly typical fashion, I bought the widget and then had to buy an iPod; fortunately I picked one up on eBay for not very much. Today's run was to the tune of the new Elbow album, which is brilliant. I got the new REM one the other day too, but it still leaves me cold, much like every other thing they've ever done. I've really tried hard with that lot, but it's never worked, with the possible exception of Up, which most people seem to think is their bleakest and most depressing album... not sure what that says about me but somehow I found it a little more, um, profound than Shiny Happy People. That song provokes some very dark and violent feelings in me for some reason.

Oh the glamour

2008-03-26T14:17:00.001Z

Proof that the consultancy life isn't all flash hotels and Michelin-starred dinners, I have here evidence of my rather unusual breakfast at the inimitable Leeson Bridge House, Dublin. On the plus side, they do cook your toast to order, and offer both "white" and "brown" varieties.

The Kiwi's Hot Buns

2008-03-24T16:59:00.001Z

Apologies for the lack of bloggery lately. The past fortnight has been a bit mental to say the least, to the point where there've been several evenings when I've not even opened the laptop (unheard of in our house). So, here we are, at the end of the Easter weekend and rather than watch Hollyoaks, I'm getting back into it.

Following on from the last post, the review went well, salary bumped up a bit and more training on the way. Feedback from colleagues was excellent, some constructive feedback but on the whole a reasonably pleasant experience. So on the work front, I'm happy.

Two weeks left to go on the seemingly interminable Irish project, and although I know I've said that before, it looks like I will actually be off it on April 4th. Looks like I'll be onto a number of things following that date, one of which might be the Irish thing but I can manage a couple of days a week I reckon.

That said, they're squeezing what they can out of me whilst I'm still full time, going to Dublin tomorrow evening, coming back Wednesday night and going again next week. Bah.

In other news, the Kiwi made hot cross buns on Friday, and they were brilliant! Here they are... very impressed with her I am.

How good does this feel

2008-03-13T20:33:00.001Z

It's been five long years, but this one's finally finished. There's still something of a mountain to climb, but this is a bit of a milestone for me nonetheless.

We are having a glass of (relatively inexpensive) wine to mark the occasion. I have my annual review tomorrow too, which could be interesting. More on that later...

Food, finally

2008-03-09T21:19:00.001Z

Much as I really enjoyed our recent holiday and everything, sun, food, wine, friends, plans blah blah blah, how brilliant has it been to get back in my kitchen this weekend? Yesterday was spent mostly in a pub in town watching the rugby (boo) and eating rubbish but brilliant pub food. Today, I was feeling the need to get back into the cooking thing.

So, following a morning spent sharpening knives and plotting, harissa roast chicken, patatas bravas and purple sprouting broccoli turned up on the dinner table. Simple, but oh. my. god. how good. The only challenge remaining, apart from the industrial-sized clean up job to be done, is what to do with the small vat of bravas sauce we have left over. Superb cheese from Neal's Yard, too; Cropwell Bishop Stilton and Lancashire Poacher - both impulse buys on the way back from Monmouth on Friday afternoon.

Two other things of note before the week starts again:

1. This is an infallible and brilliant recipe. So much so that I managed to make it this afternoon without the Kiwi noticing.

2. The new Goldfrapp album, Seventh Tree, is brilliant. I have it as MP3, but it's well worth £7.99 - don't steal music, kids. Eagerly awaiting the next Elbow album, too...