Category: Personal

I am still desperately trying to not count down days, although we’re getting very close to leaving. Packing and preparation is going ok since we stopped work on Friday, and it looks like we are on track to being essentially finished packing at the end of this week, with an avowed intention to do very little in the last week.

Three things which have felt powerfully strange in the past few days, since they are things we don’t normally do.

1. Buying money. It felt quite odd to go to a shopfront and buy money. To swipe our debit cards and tap away an acknowledged amount and in return be given a small handful of what looks vaguely like money, but doesn’t feel like real money. The pounds are sepia toned, faded, ornate. In stark contrast to the brightly coloured plastic monopoly money we’re familiar with. And the mirror-world begins, as we find that it is just slightly the wrong shape to fit comfortably in our wallets.

2. Washing walls. The humidity and constant rain earlier in the year left a bloom of mould across some walls, in no particular pattern. Some walls were fine, some needed a scrub, some needed a quick wipe over. But to be lugging a bucket of water into the house, shoving furniture aside, and scrubbing walls is not an every day occurrence. I just hope the tenants appreciate it.

3. Rising at eight. It’s been so very, very long since we’ve felt able to sleep in that setting the alarm for eight in the morning feels wonderfully sybaritic. And I find that I wake up at half-past-six anyway, and lie there wondering about the day ahead.

I will probably miss good coffee, at least in the short term. The coffee culture of Brisbane is no match for that found in the center of Melbourne, but far outstrips that of pretty well anywhere I’ve been in Sydney. Sorry Sydney, but you make lousy coffee.

It shouldn’t be hard to make good coffee and provide a pleasant experience, but it must be, otherwise so many places wouldn’t stuff it up so badly. Burnt coffee, expensive food, weak rancid dribbles out of dirty machines, surly and disinterested staff.

Top of the list of places I will miss is Cartel Coffee. You shouldn’t expect a good coffee from a road-side cart, but these guys and girls really deliver from their cart near King George Square. The blends are excellent, and all the coffee is well made, and consistently made. The ice coffees and ice chocolates are made by making hot drinks and cooling them down. Refreshing, fresh, richly flavoured. The espressos and hot chocolates are obviously made with care by people trained to use the machines, and the results are superb. And to top it off, everyone that is there is genuinely interested in what they are doing, and in engaging with their customers.

My other local haunts are of mixed quality. I frequent them based on a complex calculus of time-of-day, state-of-mind, level of exhaustion, and the possibility of hearing good music. The little cafe downstairs in my office building does a drinkable doppio, but they always seem harried. Pleasant enough kids, but it’s obviously just a job. Still, they are closest. Pour Boy around the corner makes outstandingly good coffee, but they’re a little above market prices, and it never feels like a spot to linger. Bar Metzo across the road, and Sugar-and-Spice up the road, both make really good hot chocolate. The pleasant aspect of Sugar-and-Spice is the cosy little space, the walls lined with cups and teapots, panelled in dark timbers, and the air is always rich with the smells of various tea. Espresso Republic in the little alley near the bagel place is also reliable.

The various Aroma’s franchises have sadly faded. Once they were the best coffees around, but they’ve become dull, expensive and unreliable. The sundry Merlo bars around the place are better, probably because they are using a better blend, and I suspect they are more rigorous about training their barristas.

There’s a Starbucks nearby. The only thing I can say about it is that there’s a semi-reliable iiNet free wifi hotspot. Well, free for me since I’m an iiNet subscriber. The drinks are expensive and not very good, but I guess you already knew that. And the food is very ordinary.

I have no idea what the coffee culture in London or anywhere else in the UK is. I doubt that I will be able to walk around any corner and find a random, tiny, hole-in-the-wall that can knock me up a rich, flavourful short black made on fresh roasted interesting blends. Oh well. I drink too much coffee anyway.

I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time looking at and for bags. Something drives me toward a Shangri-La where the perfect bag for all occasions rests in a temple, waiting for me to pack it with all I need, forever simplifying and organising my life.

Of course the reality is that I asymptocically approach an ideal, never quite having the right bag. I thought my ridiculously large Crumpler messenger bag was ideal, and it was certainly satisfactory for some four years, until I got a laptop. While I could pop the laptop in the messenger bag inside a Built neoprene sleeve, it always slopped around in an uncomfortable fashion. So I grabbed a right-sized laptop bag. The trouble is that a tension then arose between being able to Pack Everything and rational convenience, and I inevitably would be swapping backward and forward between bags for different occasions, inevitably leaving things behind as a result.

My vice, or at least one that I will admit to in a public forum, is a desire to carry way too much stuff around. I never know when I need that stuff. It’s important. It could be useful. And very occasionally is. But a large bag means I carry a lot of crap.

All of which brings me to my latest bag. I acquired a pretty big (70 liter, I think) backpack for travelling, with a removal day pack. Today I moved into that day pack, in order to get used to carrying it, and to figure out just what I should carry. Of course I packed too much, and haven’t packed all I ought:

• Kindle
• Laptop
• Camera
• Torch
• Pocket knife
• Wallet
• Keys
• Gorilla Pod
• Umbrella
• Hair ties
• iPhone
• Headphones
• Earbuds

I guess that’s not too much. I can fit passport, two Lonely Planet guides, and a stuffed koala, can’t I?

I wasn’t going to count down, and I’m trying desperately to not close down, but today is the 1st of November. And every damned little thing that can go wrong, does go wrong.

I have to replace the electric stove, and am replacing the electric stove, since the old one is old and not working well. So I went on Saturday morning to a factory seconds white goods place, and got a simple cheap stove. But I cannot install it myself, because this is Australia, and we need electricians to do that, so I arranged for the stove to be delivered this afternoon, and for the electrician to come later this evening.

Except it’s now after 5:00 and the stove hasn’t turned up and the company closed for the day at 4:30 and the driver has not, as promised, rung to indicate when he would arrive.

And I took the afternoon of work to be here, and am dealing with several significant faults at work, across VPN and mail and chat.

The way things are looking at the moment, the following is probable:

1) the electrician will arrive and the stove won’t be here, so I’ll get charged for him doing nothing, and then have to wait days to get him back again;

2) I will need to work on the weekend or do a 12-16 hour day tomorrow, working into the night, to make up time.

Why does every part of dealing with getting out of this house and onto a plane turn into a nightmare just because third parties cannot turn up on time, will not make allowances for their customers working full time jobs, and charge me hugely for the privilege.

The unrelenting, constant, overwhelming, repeated negativity.

Is it a Brisbane thing, an Australian thing, a human thing, or just the habit of those I know?

I’m on a very short count down to the evening where I go through customs and onto a plane, and fly away into a new life. I know that I am jumping without a parachute, and that I’m trusting to my habit of arsing things through at the last moment, relying on informed laziness. So yes, your words of caution are justified.

But please, could you not be encouraging, rather than relentlessly discouraging? Or at the very least not line up like a Greek chorus to tell me that your cousin said the work situation is grim, that your mum said that she heard that public transport is expensive, that your brother reckons the bottom is going to fall out of the housing market here?

This whole exercise is hard enough as it is, and has been relentlessly grinding for the entire year, without people lined up beside the road chanting “you are doomed, you are doomed, you are doomed”

Recent weeks, and recent days, suggest strongly to me that most folk just really don’t grasp what I’m doing. This business of me folding my tents and vanishing into the night is not simple, or trivial, and particularly not temporary.

Let’s talk about the effort involved, to start with. It’s not about packing, and buying a plane ticket. It’s going through the exercise of obtaining a 5 year working visa. It’s making connections with IT agencies in the UK, and fencing schools, and potential places to lay my head before I get settled. It’s working out what my existing insurance does and does not cover, and how I need to re-jig my banking and tax, and whether I need a NIN when I arrive or I can sort it out afterwards. It’s sorting out to rent my house, and getting the stairs fixed and walls washed and garden cleared, and sorting out the new insurance. It’s carrying out an aggresive triage on every single Thing I have accumulated in my life – this to go in the backpack, that to go to charity, the other to be packed in the correct box for later shipping, all of those to wait endlessly for people to pick up and carry away, and the rest to get to the garbage dump.

And all of that to be fitted around a full time job, and the normal round of housekeeping, and shopping, and cooking, and eating and sleeping.

So no, I don’t have time to be going to fencing two or three times each week, nor to go dancing once a week, nor to be going out several times a week.

I don’t think people really grasp that I’m not coming back. If it doesn’t work out in England, I’ll be trying Spain, or the Netherlands, or Canada, or Japan. Or at worst, Melbourne or Sydney. Oh sure, I may come back occasionally for weddings, funerals, babies. But the nature and extent of the effort is not shaped toward a few months there and then back.

That fencing I did at the PSSF end-of-term party on Sunday? That’s the last time I will be fencing with PSSF. Unless you meet me in a different context, we won’t cross blades again. I will probably drop in to the training hall once more, to pick up Delia’s sword and return some books and drop off my uniform, but it will be a flying visit. I will probably go to the October Brisbane Swordplay in the park afternoon, to say farewell to a few people, but then my fencing gear will be packed away ready for shipping.

So there it is and thus it is. I’m on a strict timetable that I’m resolutely not counting down, and then at the end of November I’ll be flying away into the night. Thus it is, and there it is.

I’m fairly sure that I would have found it easier to wash up at Brighton as an illegal immigrant seeking political asylum from a capricious and repressive regime (which I suspect it will be under Prime Minister Abbot) than it is to seek a visa legitimately. It has been a long, fraught journey, and it’s not over yet.

The online application system is pretty good and the supporting information mostly good, but maddeningly vague in a number of very key areas. Particularly when it came to advising what happens at each stage of the process, and what supporting documents are needed when seeking an ancestral visa.

I laboured late into the night, last night, to gather all the pieces of paper that I believed I needed for the “visa interview” at the consulate here today. I put on business clothes, and shaved, and wore a tie. And then when I got there I found out that the interview was just taking my fingerprints and yet another photo, and that I still had to bundle all the paperwork into an envelope and send it to Sydney. Based on the price of Platinum Express Post, the Post-Master-General or his modern equivalent must carry it personally on the back of a winged unicorn.

My understanding is that I now have 8 or 10 days anxious wait to find out if they will grant me the visa. I just want this all to be over.