Why I'm here.

That was a tumultuous week and a bit!  Every reason why I am back in this country was played out and I’ve never felt more helpless in all my life.

So, the show went well.  It was everything you expect a school show to be: celebratory, difficult to hear at times, excellent comic timing, full of glances off stage and into the audience, first class playing to the spot on the wall at the back of the hall.  It was superb and brought the house down.  The thrilled looks on the faces of the pupils made it all worthwhile.  The grip that daughter had on me in the hug at the end I can still feel around my neck.  She was beaming.  It’s why I’m back here now.

After the curtain calls were the last few days of the school year.  A trip to a pub to hear about a World War Two dogfight, some squash and a play in the local park.  Daughter was happy for me to come along.  She knows that I am fascinated by war stories.  Watching her, afterwards, sitting with her mates for one of the last times at school and eating her lunch was a beautiful sight.  Friendships will grow and evolve and change over the years and this last snapshot of, not innocence exactly but childhood, perhaps more correctly, was just delightful.

That has been the mark of the past couple of weeks.  We are entering the transition phase.  I’m now told to “shut up” every minute for each of the banal Dad joke phrases and promises that slip out of the mouth in a purposeful attempt to make her smile.  She is on the cusp of genuine embarrassment for the “olds” - you know, that part of growing up where independence is marked out with shrugs and tuts and despaired pouts.  At the moment she is still happy to hold hands as we walk down the street and, even though I’m being told to shut up, she’s telling me so through a smile still, and barely contained giggles.

And then we had the Leavers’ Assembly and I cried.  I cried because they all stood up in turn and spoke about an aspect of their year they had enjoyed or had been of significance to them.  Daughter stood up and spoke about learning the haka that had been written for them by a colleague of mine back in NZ.  Then they played a video of them performing the haka.  I had not seen this.  Daughter had made much of learning it at the time but then wouldn’t do it for me or kept saying she forgot the words and whatever excuse she could come up with.  I don’t think she did this completely on purpose but for the video of the whole class doing the haka to come on to the screen in the hall did for me.  I cried.  I’m about to cry now.

After that they sang a Bugsy number and sang a bit more and I cried again.  I am in awe of daughter.  I know that she feels these times as important.  She is looking forward to secondary school but has, as you would expect, all the nerves and butterflies that go with a step like this one.  But she has strength and guts inside her that I don’t know where she gets them from.  The last four years of her life have been an avalanche.  At each moment she has kept herself and kept going.  She is incredible.  I hope that the bond we have now will help us through the next years, especially when she gets to the part where she starts to ask questions of me and why I turned her life upside down.

Now we have the holidays.  I told daughter she could be lazy for the few couple of days off.  She took me at my word and has been exactly thus.  Next she has the duty of family visits and trip away to look forward to.  She’ll soon have “have you done that homework?” ringing in her ears and she’ll be getting ready for another tumultuous week in September. I’ll be helpless again.

"We could have been anything that we wanted to be..."

The final “La la la, lalalalaaaa” ended and I had a tremendous lump in my throat.  The dress rehearsal for Bugsy Malone finished.  The kids on the stage held their jazz-hands pose and the gathered teachers and kids from lower classes applauded and cheered.  I had to quickly wipe a tear from my eye.  I may have to do that again just now.

School shows are magnificent.  They are an obvious celebration of the talent and the determination of the children who get up on stage and place themselves in an extremely vulnerable position.  The courage taken to step up, don a costume and belt out a line or a song is enormous.  Its effect was right there on the stage, right in front of me.

It was there again at a local fair, when the kids gathered to sing a few of the songs from the show to entice an audience for their performances, this week.  You could feel the effect and you could hear it; not just in the voices of the children singing but in the “Wow!” that greeted the first soloist who sang.  They ran out of wows.  Each soloist in turn was beautiful and beaming with confidence.  You could put it down to childish naivety but these are all on the cusp of adolescence, all in the transition from primary to secondary, all very certain that they are going to be uncertain in a month’s time and they walk across the threshold of a new school.  If any one group of kids had the excuse to be shy, it was this lot.  They weren’t though.  They were both loud and proud.  They were magnificent.

For all of you who did, the flashbacks to shows of your own may have already started.  Daughter was desperately excited to tell me they were going to be performing Bugsy; she knew I’d been in it at school too - just over thirty years ago, now.  And I remembered nearly every piece of dialogue and nearly every lyric.  The brain is a very curious machine.  Then again, allowing positive, pleasurable memories to be trapped for replaying isn’t very curious at all, I suppose.

I know there’s a comment about living in the past here, too but I’m too much of a coward to face trying to answer that one, just yet.

It is a proper school show too: the joyful and deliberate presentation of a bunch of amateurs having fun and feeling the pressure to entertain whilst also believing, much like Blousey, that they’re all on their way to Hollywood.  It is easy to pick the Britain’s Got Talent aspirees, the kids who want to “act” and those who’ve taken a part for a laugh and who can barely contain themselves on stage.  The talent on show is genuinely astounding.

I hope that each of these children look back on this show with the warmth and fond memories I look back on my Bugsy.  It isn’t just isn’t the time on stage, of course, it is the fierce bonds of friendship you thought would never be broken, the time when you were master of your universe.  It is bathing in the adulation of the echoes of applause you received; applause given with affection and relief and appreciation bundled together in that unique package that is the school show audience.  Parents, like me, who love seeing their child taking these steps, who have eyes for just one performer on stage but who are then won over by the ensemble and who see another kid in a different light; where did that voice come from?  How did she know the timing on that gag? When did he become so slick a mover?

For every lobster in a Nativity there’s thousands of Tallulahs and Blouseys out there carrying the song, thousands of kids who’ve been told to “Quit doin’ that, Knuckles!” or fallen off their chair at the mention of Dandy Dan.  This collective wallow in nostalgia and rose tint is a wonderful thing. Remember when all you had to do was give a little love?  And there I go again, having to do that tear wiping away thing. “La, la, la, lalalalaaaa.”

Positivity x 6

You’re right, I’ve read it back over and the last list was a little bit negative.  No list that has pork pies in it can be all negative, you’ll agree, however; come on, Simon, you must be able to find six things to write positively about since you’ve come back to the UK…surely?

Six?  OK – and no, there are not numerous other edits of this blog with a variety of numbers falling and falling to get to the number six.  That said, I am happy I didn’t decide to do a top ten!  Stop it, Simon.  Positivity.

Right.

1.     Chinese Takeaways

Thank all that is wok’d for the unhealthy option!  In NZ a chow mein is a healthy dinner.  There it’s steamed/flash-fried veg, noodles in a broth and whatever variety of meat you’ve decided to eat that day.   Here is it a glorious melange of noodles, minimal veg, meat and beansprout, either with a hint of soy/oyster or in a gloop of wonderful MSG.  That is a welcome guilty pleasure NZ has yet to properly get the hand of…although, they do have Noodle Canteen, so they are catching up.

2.     Affordable Books

Simple.  Books in the UK are cheaper than they are in NZ.  There may be all manner of reasons for this – distance, market size, etc – but for all the reasons, books in NZ are so expensive.   You can pay up to 50 bucks for a paperback book, that’s about 25 quid.  And when you can see £15.99 on the book cover itself...well, that’s all so very annoying.

3.     Libraries

To deal with the silly prices, you can go to a library.  These next two are shared positives.  Both NZ and UK do libraries well.  The one in Stroud is superb.  The staff are quite magnificent, the selection is varied – and it’s easy to choose books from other collections to be picked up from Stroud too – and the facilities are comfortable and conducive to reading and working.  Lovely.

4.     Second Hand Book Shops

This is another thing NZ and UK both do brilliantly.   In Stephen Fry’s The Liar, he refers to a room belonging to Professor Trefusis as a librarynth.  I have now found the bookshop that most resembles this.  There were elements of it in the local second bookshop in Picton, NZ, but Moss Books of Cheltenham is the winner.  Piles and piles of books and boxes and boxes of books obscured the double shelved books on the shelves themselves.  Fragile pathways wend through the shop and then up the stairs there are rooms and further rooms of tomes to investigate and discover.

5.     Vinegar on chips

Heaven.  For some reason, given that NZ was a colony and is a member of the Commonwealth, broadcasts Coronation Street – or Coro, as they call it – drives on the left, etc, and has fish and chip shops coming out the wazoo. They don’t do vinegar on chips.  Salt, yes, plenty of salt.  Ketchup for dipping? Of course, help yourself.  Mayonnaise or Aioli, naturally.  Vinegar? No – well, one pub in Blenheim that I’ve found…and returned to a number of times.  To have a vendor say, “Salt and vinegar?” is to hear the angels sing and the gods declare that ambrosia is on the menu.  That glorious burn and sharp-sourness is divine with the tang of salt and the smooth pulpy potato under the crisp skin of the chip.  Delicious.  So, so welcome.

6.     Confection Affection

A proper sweet shop. You an buy by the measure…loads of sweets in jars on shelves: bonbons of wonderful flavours, aniseed balls, barley sugar, cough drops.  Packs of Refreshers and Fruit Salads.  Popping Candy.  Magnificent.  A glorious trip for the tastebuds and for the maturity levels.

As I may have alluded to with the previous list, finding my feet again in the UK is proving to be very difficult.  It’s a curious place to be at the moment; whether from the wider perspective of what Britain actually is in the world, or from the very narrow perspective of the type of town you live in, the type of street. Still, I am glad I was able to compile a list of six. Hopefully, the list will grow.

Six Months! No, really, it's been six months!

Six months! It's been six months, now, since I arrived back on these shores.  It must be time to do some sort of list thing.

Marmite

The horror of squeezable Marmite lives with me still. The horrible oxtail soup taste…no…just no. Thankfully Vegemite exists here.  I know I have been told that Marmite exists in non squeezable form but the fact that it does exist in that fashion is just an….eeeuuurrggh.

Chocolate

Oh, for a piece of New Zealand chocolate!  Proper NZ Cadbury chocolate that tastes of chocolate and is creamy and smooth and delicious and not bitty and too sugary sweet and sticky on the tooth and … Cadbury is a British thing, remember?  And then the bastards go and shut the Dunedin factory! Bastards!

Running

Ok, Ok… So, the hills here mean that the leg muscles are getting a good workout but…but…the views from the top of the domain, looking out across the Sounds, and being able to run alongside the sea out past Waikawa Marina.  Giving the marae a nod on the way out and thanking it for still allowing me puff on the way back.  Yeah, nah…Gimme Picton, please.

That said…Sunshine

What it is to go brown instead of red!  What it is to be back in a climate where I can sit out and work and not just burn. Being turned into a tomato by overcast, grey weather in Dunedin is now gone, sitting in the garden and reading is now back.

And, of course, if there’s sunshine, you go out, so – Litter

It is rubbish, the way in which the (y)UK deal with this.  This morning I happened to walk past this marvellous tractor/mower contraption that was cutting back the greenery on the side of the road.  As it past, the detritus left behind had flicked coke cans and food packets out from the hedge line and out into the road.  The litter in this country is soul destroying.  It isn’t rocket science to fix, there just does not seem to be the will.  And, where there’s litter, there’s…

…Cigarette Butts

They form basic blueprint plans for the layout of town centre.  I’ve had need to go to Germany for work.  There, in certain towns at certain times of day, smoking appears to be compulsory.  They do appear to be better at extinguishing cigarettes in the bins provided.  Any way, along with the litter and the dog shit that lines the pavements, cigarette buts play a rich and comprehensive part of making the UK (y)UK.

Speaking of it – the Shit

There is nothing as edifying and uplifting to see dog shit spread along a pavement by the wheel of either a pram or child’s bicycle.  Maybe, perhaps, the smear of a shit from a sliding shoe.  Whichever; the sense of pleasure one gets from the ubiquity of shit on the streets and the fact Great Britain seems perfectly at ease with this is a little scary.  Again, not rocket science but seemingly beyond us here.

And it’s a real shame because – Britain Can Be So Pretty

Driving to the Cotswold Wildlife Park, the other day, the villages you encounter are so wonderfully picturesque.  Stroud, here, is a beautiful town.  Caerleon, just down the road from where I’m from in Wales, wears its Roman cape with distinction.  I mean, these towns are hopelessly inadequate to cope with modern life – you know, traffic and numbers, but they do look ever so nice on a sunny day.

Coffee

Black Book Café is a delight: brilliant coffee, very toothsome cake.  I haven’t yet found the café I would wait twenty minutes for a coffee in, though.  I’ve done that in NZ.  They do good coffee in New Zealand. However, one thing they simply cannot get the hang of – and I don’t understand why because pies are central to Kiwi existence:

Pork Pies

The Marmite may make me shudder but it has been something to come home to a pork pie.  Brown sauce on a pork pie.  It does not get better.

I miss New Zealand.  Tremendously.  Great Britain struggles to justify the adjective in the name. I wonder what will make the list in another six months’ time?