Going, going, nearly gone...

Radio silence from here for way too long but this is why.

I have been tidying, cleaning, scrubbing and smiling (not) my way through a house sale. And it paid off. Sold with only a few tears from me. I have loved this house and our little villa life.

Oh yes,  mid marketing campaign this happened...

The three year old pulled a table down onto his big toe breaking it at a rather nasty fifty degree angle in the wrong direction. Apparently the table fell down "all by itself."

After a hospital visit to have the break reset he was plastered up to his thigh to keep him immobile and the toe still. That is working - we just have to lug him and another five kilos of plaster around. Kids though are incredible. He's perfectly happy and has adapted to crawling and bum-shuffling around on the floor and is very proud of his 'blaster'.

I think it's my fault... a few days earlier I had foolishly muttered something about the move going smoothly this time. How little I've learned.

Busy, busy...

It's said a picture is worth thousand words so this will have to do today. This pretty much sums up the last week or so. We've had a painter in to touch up the house and it's looking tidy and terrific. So terrific I absolutely do not want to sell it. So tidy that I may keel over before the week ends. Blogging is taking a back seat along with exercise, a social life and my sanity. Ah well, who said moving was easy?

The Notebook...

Time to buy The Notebook.

It is the key accessory for any move we've ever made and I'm an old fashioned girl so it's going to be a non-digital, no iGadget sort move again.

The Notebook becomes my go-to-spot for any list, phone number, email address, website, school info, house appointment, rental requirement, packers list that we have. It is my bible for the three months it generally takes to shift a family a couple of hundred (or thousand) kilometres.

At the climax of the move - when stress levels are peaking - and everything is boxed and in a container I move onto a flip folder full of paper - final bills, health documents, passport copies and bank statements. All the stuff we're going to need urgently in the new place.

I found this one here - bright is better because of course usually The Notebook goes missing right about the same time as the truck pulls in to load your gear. Luckily by then all the lists are pretty irrelevant. Mostly....

A little more about the move....

There won't be too many more doors... Auckland's home owners can breathe easy again. I love this one and have been trying to take a picture for ages but the family living behind it quite often leave it open to let the sun stream in.

Thank you for all your good wishes. I think I forgot to say yesterday that I am happy to be heading home to Australia but also really quite unhappy to be leaving Auckland.

It wasn't an easy move here and if you'd told me then that I could leave I would have whooped all the way to the airport. We arrived in the middle of a wet bleak winter and it took a while for me to meet people and make friends.  I think because I'd moved a lot I thought I could snap my fingers and settle straight away.

Nearly two years later there is rather a lot to leave behind. Good friends for all of us, great schools, a beautiful country we've hardly had time to explore and an easy, pleasant family life.

Now I just want to snap my fingers and fast forward a year - in three months we'll have moved and after nine months in our new home I know we'll feel fine. That's my nine month moving theory - so grateful to have a chance to test it again....

Melbourne is not really home for me but I lived there for ten months or so five years ago and loved the little life we built then. Last time we lived in an inner city suburb - this time we're looking for a little more space for the boys so it will be an altogether different Melbourne life.

My six year old is embracing the move - I was very worried as he didn't like moving much at all at the age of four.  This time he's very interested in getting a new house, a new school and new friends and most of all very, very pleased that his new life will include lots of time with his very cool Uncle. We're very pleased too.

A little news from NZ...

Channel calm. Look at the lovely picture. Breathe. And again.

I have some news and despite the breathing lesson above it is not a new baby.  I have no intention of starting over - no matter how sweet those babies look.

It's time for another move.

Remember this blog belongs to a serial mover? Well, I am a reluctant sort of serial mover so we are hoping this move will be the last. At least that's what I've been promised...

And the city of choice?  Drum roll.... Melbourne.

I will be strolling up my local high street, shopping 'til I drop, looking sharp in black, eating out and talking about it and unearthing little thrifty finds at Camberwell Market. I am sure you CAN'T wait to read all about it....

OH NOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
Not another bloody Melbourne blogger.

Before that though, it's the move. Sorting, packing, sorting, emailing, sorting, sorting, sorting.

OH NOOOOO!!!!!!!!
Not another bloody moving blog.

It could be worse. You could be moving. Again.

Image from here 

Why I am Australian...

I read this book in two hours... with a two week break in between. When I first picked it up I had tears welling up by page four. I had to put it down at page 80. It was as though she'd taken something sharp and cut a little hole somewhere in me and I couldn't quite handle the flood of emotion.

Nikki Gemmell is an Australian writer  - the name behind the The Bride Stripped Bare. We are terribly similar. (ah yes apart from the award winning author bit)

She moved to London 12 years ago when I did, also looking for a life outside the ordinary and stayed. I lasted seven years, she's still there. Her husband is Australian too. They even did the same sort of work I did. She has two boys a little older than mine and a little girl.  Now she wants them to know Australia. This book is written for them.

It nearly broke me but I loved it. I finished it last night and read it all in such a rush I felt as though I hadn't quite taken a breath for an hour.

Nikki (we're on first name terms, now of course) who lives in Notting Hill writes so vividly about London that I can almost smell it and taste it again.  Those were the first tears.

Then I welled up a little more at her rich descriptions of Australia, its openness, it's roughness, its sunshine. She's sunshine obsessed and I remember that feeling after the suffocating, grim, grey, endless English winter. She wants her children to know Australia and to be Australian. She feels as though she's raising little English boys, pale and polite.

I laughed at her memories of her own childhood and her joy in coming home each year... the way I also used to revel in coming back and eating buckets of mint slices, the joy I had when we left London for Australia and saw our toddler in turn revel in the wide open spaces and warm weather, knowing we'd made the right choice.

I come from a family of migrants. My great grandparents were all migrants to South Africa - one set gave up and went back to Scotland. Snakes or snow I suppose. In turn, my parents are migrants to Australia.

I feel embarrassed by this reaction, this flood of emotion. I am not a migrant who's moved cultures, left Russia or China and come to a totally foreign culture. I haven't fled a despot or war or persecution. 

I don't see myself as a migrant but I know what it is to not quite know one's place in the world.

I have spent just long enough in another country to start to feel as though it's more home than the old home. I felt such a wrench leaving London that I felt I was making a huge mistake leaving. It took a year to like Australia again and get used to it.  I now live in a place that is so close to Australia that people often think it should be. They're wrong, New Zealand is  different. Similar but not the same.

Now I guess I'm raising little Kiwis. My five year old cried in frustration when I mimicked his changing accent the other day. I remember my parents doing the same to me. I'll try not to do it anymore.

I know I am Australian. Not born but bred. As my new mate Nikki agrees, it's not perfect (just watch breakfast television and you'll want to leave again).

We'll get back one day and before we lose our children to the land of earthquakes and All Blacks... for my husband I don't know which is more dangerous.

The nine month mark...

I think it's nine months. Well close enough anyway.  That's the time it takes for me to settle into a new city or a new country. Nine months has nothing much to do with me and babies.  My pregnancies last around 15 months. (Just ask my husband) which is why I am most definitely not doing it again. Sit down Mum, sorry I got you excited.

I remember hitting the nine month mark in Melbourne. (We moved two months later.) I hit the nine month mark in Auckland a month or so ago.  I feel really happy, I thought. I like it. Life is pretty good. I have friends. I know what I am doing tomorrow and next week. I know where to find things.

I even welled up when my kid sang the New Zealand national anthem  at his school assembly with a couple of hundred little Kiwis.  The first time I heard that my thought was "Oh hell, that's right we live in New Zealand... how did we get here again?" So to hear it and feel a little moved (like you should when you hear a national anthem) is quite a change.

New friends have invited us to their bach in the summer.  People have now started letting us in on the local secrets for day trips and weekends away. We can even give some tips of our own.

I can say some Maori words without stumbling too much. You pronounce all the vowels, 'wh' is 'f' and you listen to Radio New Zealand a lot. You try it... Whangaparaoa, Tawharanui, Komokoriki.  Heavens, our first few car trips into the countryside were fun with me trying to match the signs we whizzed past with the map in my hand.

Ah yes, and if it's wet you say "wit" or if you're five years old "it's wit as, Mum." Sorry couldn't help it. Apologies for poking fun at the accent... there go at least half of the new friends I've made.

Three months in to our move I was depressed and a little snappy. "Why won't these bloody women just talk to me," I thought. Now I don't mind as much if someone doesn't chat back. Australians I think (or maybe just me) love a bit of a chat without consequence. I have now found other people do do that here too. Just not as often.

I think what I've learnt with the whole moving chore (I used to say adventure but it's worn off) is that you can't rush the process. Just wait and slowly but surely it will be fine.

I lied a lot in those first nine months, telling people "yes, we're feeling so settled now."
I am not lying now when I say we're feeling settled. Must be about time to move.

(By the way my husband read this and muttered, "pregnant for 15 months? More like two years...")

Most liveable?

Auckland has been voted the fourth most liveable city in the world. Equal fourth with Vancouver and beaten by Zurich, Geneva and Vienna.

I look at the Mercer list every year. How could I miss it?  The Australian newspapers always argue the toss about whether Melbourne beat Sydney or vice versa.  In New Zealand they crow about their win over Australia.

It's really a list about expats and how liveable it is for them in each city.

This year I realised I've lived in four of the top cities - a bit of an expat expert.

Sydney is 10th. Melbourne is 18th and my beloved London is way down at 39.
The city I would love to live in, New York, is at 49 out of 50. Clearly my liveability index is way off.

I don't mind Auckland but it doesn't set my world on fire. Maybe it will take time. Have I just lost the friends I have managed to make here?

I do think it is incredibly easy to live here (if you don't try to drive too much) and the suburbs and villas are gorgeous. And it's very, very easy to get to places like this. You know how I love a beach.

When we moved from Melbourne to Sydney, my very Melbourne aunt was horrified, "They can't MAKE you," she said. Even the local drycleaner had an opinion. He was pretty dismayed too.
Interestingly when we got to Sydney nobody much cared about the great Melbourne/Sydney debate. "Ah Melbourne, oh yeah, it's nice there. Good coffee. Great shopping."

When we moved here most Aucklanders we met said "Why did you leave Sydney?"

Everyone loves their own place with a passion, hates the bigger city and treats the smaller with disdain.

In Melbourne they're pretty scathing about Tasmania. I met a Melbournian in London once who was a little shocked a Tasmanian had managed to adjust to city life. Ah yes I told her, "Thank you, we've had traffic lights down there in Tassie for a while so I managed." Then I muttered something about bloody mainlanders.

Me? I don't know if I have one city I love enough to stick with. I can see the pros and cons of them all and one day I'll have to choose.  I hope my husband chooses the same one. He's as hopeless as I am.

Renting vs buying

There is something so grounding about buying a house.

I even planted pots this summer.... twice. (they died of neglect over Christmas)

I think Australians and New Zealanders share the property dream and certainly the English do too... owning your space just makes it feel so much more like home.

It doesn't make much financial sense (so I'm told but would rather not believe) and I know many Europeans live in beautifully decorated rented homes all their lives. But here and in Australia and the UK you're very limited as a tenant and have to ask before putting in a picture hook.  And I always felt like a naughty child on inspection day - even when I was older than the estate agent!

We bought our first place together in London. It wasn't a house of course - just half a house - but we loved it.  I'm writing this at the small desk that was our dining table and can't believe we used to get four around it for dinner. I could turn around in my seat to reach the oven and whoever was opposite could get into the fridge while at the table. It was tiny but it was ours - even the crazy yellow walls in our bedroom! They didn't last long.

After renting three houses in another two cities we bought a house here in New Zealand and it feels good. Actually, really good.

It made the move much more exciting and I felt I could really put the effort into becoming part of the local community - and put effort too into decorating.

As tenants we were hopelessly unsettled. We had the three week rule.  If the pictures weren't on the wall in the first three weeks that was that. There they stayed stacked in groups next to the books with no shelves and the blinds that didn't fit but might in another house.

Not to say there aren't a few pictures stacked in this house but they ARE going on a wall...

A start

It has taken me six months to feel at home in my new city and to start writing.

We moved to Auckland in July last year. I think. I can't remember the date. It was not one of our easiest moves. We're lucky, professionals do all the packing and paperwork for us but I was wrong to think that experience would make it easy. A bout of swine flu the day before moving day was the icing on the cake. Got to love Tamiflu.

We moved to New Zealand from Sydney. Quite out of the blue but a better option for the family than Asia or back to Europe. My husband broke the news almost a year ago by bringing home a lovely bottle of NZ pinot (more on that later) and making me drink a glass or two to soften the blow.

My first impressions of my new home. Well, it rains in Auckland. A lot. It's not that cold here but it rains.

Here's the proof.

Coromandel Peninsula

It doesn't get that green without water. Buckets of it.

Now though after a pretty long six months we are happy. My five year old has started Big School (it is always spoken in capital letters in our house as it is a Very Big Deal). My youngest is nearly two and very happy although I think he'd be happy anywhere. And I'm happy. I wasn't for a while - blamed the rain mostly - but I knew it would just take time to find a friend or two and a couple of places that made me feel like it was home.

So what am I doing here? I have had a lot of time to myself as a new stay-at-home mother and blogs have become a way to connect with an amazing array of interesting people, artists, craftspeople, designers and thinkers so I thought I'd join in. I don't really belong in that list but I like lovely things. Is that enough? We'll see.