Category: Travel

Today’s goals are to cart boxes up to the storage unit, inventory the storage unit (a task which will be made difficult by it being full of boxes), and cart things in boxes off to Lifeline.

Oh, and a lot of washing, vacuuming, dusting, vacuuming and washing.

The infuriating thing about boxes is how difficult and expensive they are proving. So far we have found exactly one place – Bunnings – that has left-over cardboard boxes for the taking and using. It’s called recycling. This morning, not wanting to make the lengthy drive over and back, I went down to our local shopping mall. Not one, but three stores that I approached told me that it was not their policy to recycle boxes this way, that all their boxes had to be flattened according to policy and placed in the recycling bins according to policy. And that I could buy some archive boxes made out of recycled boxes. Well done Coles, Kmart and Choice.

I estimate I’ve spent around $250 on cardboard boxes, tape, bubble wrap and sundry packing stuff over the past couple of months. I shall treasure these boxes when they arrive, and carefully preserve them for re-use. According to policy. Maybe I can sell them at a profit.

There’s less than a week left now, and I would like to feel more excited and enthralled, rather than inanimate and slightly broiled. I’m blessing the air conditioning that has been repaired, and hideous expense, just in time for me to leave, as every opportunity sees me sitting in shorts and shirt in a room chilled to 20 C, hoping that my brain will soon start working again.

Our departure party was quite successful, and I was pleased that we drank or disposed of a very large amount of mead, and that the locusts swept through the box-of-stuff and took most of it away.

The packing is almost complete, although it appears completion can only be approach asymptotically and never actually attained. Some critical point was passed in the past few days, a phase change, a crisis, as the number of items on my to-do list fell rather than rising.

Giving away items has proved to be one of the most complex parts of this whole exercise, although spending a disturbing amount with tradesmen to make the house liveable has not been fun either.

What has bewildered and frustrated me most is that people who are getting Free Stuff can be so difficult about actually coming and picking it up. Ok, I do know that I get a benefit from them taking it away, it’s stuff that otherwise I have to lug off to Lifeline or St Vincent de Paul, but the lounge is still an Aladdin’s cave of items with name tags on them, waiting for someone to come and pick up whatever artefact the tag is attached to.

Frankly it’s going to be a relief tomorrow when I take whatever is not being packed for shipping, and not being packed into our backpacks, and take it to some charity. So if you were totally gonna get it sometime real soon now… too late.

Still not counting down. It’s been a productive week, helped along by having set myself a calendar of tasks for the week, and having met all the goals so far. Today’s effort is a good example of the sort of day I”ve been having for a long time, but particularly this week as we get very close.

Up early, coffee, left over paella. Check how much paint I have, walk down the street to buy cheap brushes and some decking oil. Spent the morning in the heat painting the front porch, the back stair rails, and the rails around the front porch. The nice thing about the heat was that it dried very quickly, and I’m pleased with how much of an improvement to the appearance of the house such a simple thing has made.

Then I went mad with the decking oil and drenched the front and back stairs – both are unpainted natural timber since I had them repaired, and the oil will keep them as protected as paint ever will. I also managed to get oil and paint in my hair, up my nose, in my ear and all over my clothes. But it’s done.

I also cleared out the study, other than the remaining computer, and we carted boxes up to the storage unit, boxes to Delia’s parent’s house, and still had time to stop for Gerbinos for gelati on the way back.

Finally I sat down with everything that was potentially to be packed into my daypack, put it in, took it out, reduced it, put it back in again, and poked around to confirm that it was actually functional and that I was not taking things too phenomenally dumb.

Now, the sound of crickets and cicadas, and possums thumping on the roof. Barking geckos, finally a cooling breeze, a glass of wine and some goats-milk cheese.

This is going to work.

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.