Land Of A Thousand Dances

Well it’s been two weeks since I got home and I’m slowly coming back down to earth, and settling into a new groove of work, home, family, friends and hobbies. It’s a wet, blustery Saturday in Paekakariki so I thought I would sit down and write a proper account of what it’s like to come home.

(Well, it feels good, for a start)

Of course you’ll be dying to hear about the new job. Well I’m Communications Advisor at the New Zealand Productivity Commission, which is in one of those buildings with two faces inbetween Lambton Quay and the Terrace. I’m responsible for running all aspects of their comms, from the website, media, publications etc. Basically everything I was doing for green growth at the OECD. The Commission is only 18 months old, but they had some great communications tools already in place, thanks to my predecessor Jenny, who also did a stellar handover in the three days that we overlapped. The team all fits on one floor, so there’s a nice atmosphere, and I think I’m finding my feet. It is a little disconcerting to be new somewhere again, after being so thoroughly immersed in the OECD. But it’s good for me, keeps my brain working.

Everything feels new and familiar at the same time, which is a bit disconcerting. I’ve never commuted into Wellington by train before, so that’s a new experience. The views are extraordinary indeed, but I have renewed sympathy for my old coastal buddies from NZTE, Mike and Chris, whose daily routines were governed by the tyranny of the train schedules, and especially /for the occasions when Tranzmetro would throw a spanner in the works…

I have to say things have been running pretty smoothly so far, but the other morning we stopped at Kaiwharawhara (the last stop before Wellington) and did not start again. After a few minutes another train pulled alongside, but our doors did not open. One of the lovely conductors walked through the carriage saying that she would check with the driver whether ”we would be able to “detrain” you. I was wondering if the logical next step would be ”retraining” us, but was taking nothing for granted. Eventually they opened the doors, and I was one of the few people who got out and stood in the sunshine, pondering the merits of walking or waiting. After a few minutes, a train did indeed pull up, at which point everyone in our train decided to get off and board the new train. If this was Paris, there would have been pushing and shoving, but being New Zealand it was all terribly civilized. People on the new train even stood up if they thought people needed a seat.

Anyway, enough about public transport. What about the coffee! Well as you would expect it is reliably good, but after five years living in France I am soft and out of conditioning, and so a standard double-shot flat white will blow my head off. I have to handle with care. Saturday mornings Dad and I do the shopping at Pak’n’Save Paraparaumu, and the little Streetwise coffee cart next to them provides my weekend fix. (Fairtrade, Sprout, you’ll be pleased to hear.) Last weekend the sun was out and I was inspired to buy one of these KeepCups which you see everywhere here. As you can see, it holds approximately a gallon of coffee.

(Just kidding, it’s a small). Although today, after getting my pre-shopping fix, I did make the mistake of coming home and having two cups of plunger coffee, which generated so much nervous energy that I had to do ninja vacumning just to calm down…

Second week back I surprised myself by starting swing classes! A dear friend, and my partner in crime, is coming down to Wellington in two weeks for the Windy Lindy swing weekend, and I want to go to the dance on Saturday night. The theme is air raid - I wonder if a jaunty beret and a neck scarf will allow me to pass for someone in the Resistance! But more importantly, the footwork for lindy hop still eludes me. So last week I trekked up Cuba Street on a blustery Monday night and found myself back in a beginners class for the first time in about 7 years, and a good 22 years since my first ever rock and roll class, back at Margaret O’Connors on Cuba Street… seems like a lifetime ago now! It wasn’t as painful as it could have been. I sympathise with the guys learning to dance for the first time ever, and I admire their courage. I have to say it was rather gratifying when my turn came around to dance with the teacher, and he congratulated me on how fast I was picking it up… ah, small pleasures.

Am rather slowly working my way around the long list of friends who I have been eager to see since I got back. Commuting, and then swimming at lunchtime does rather cut down the available slots I have to see people, but most of all it’s not even knowing where to start that has induced a sort of social paralysis. And the fact that my new phone has imported all my contacts three times over from different sources, resulting in a confusing list of duplicates…

Some efficiency gains have been made by joining two book groups which involve more than one friend in each! And at the same time I get to brush up on my French, as one of them is the Alliance book group. They are currently reading Les souliers bruns du quai Voltaire, by Claude Izner, a detective book set in Belle Epoque Paris. Looks intriguing. The same week, Paul and Ruth’s group are discussing The Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy. The meetings are in 10 and 11 days time so I’d better get cracking!

And once I’ve finished those, I have one hell of a reading pile awaiting me, courtesy of two of my favourite readers, Mum and Dad. I write the titles down here to remind myself not to succumb every time I pass Unity Books (of all the retail temptations in Wellington, it is the most dangerous).

• Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles –one man’s complaint letter gradually encompasses his entire life, a long semi-incoherent poetic rant.
• Italian Shoes, Henning Mankell - Scandinavian bleakness
• The Perfect Summer, Juliet Nicolson – pre-war England seen through the lives of artists
• Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel – England under Cromwell
• Chopin biography by Adam Zamoyski
• … that’s enough to be going on with!

Movies I want to see, if anyone’s keen, include:

• Looper
• The Sapphires (even more for their cover of the song title at the top of this blog)
• Where Do We Go From Here?
• Pitch Perfect (Glee meets Bring It On!)

Now, of course the big question, am I missing France? Well when I left, I knew I wasn’t going to pine for it. After all, five and a half years was enough to have a beautiful love affair with Paris. I’ll always have the experience of having lived there, and I am so incredibly grateful for that. But it was well overdue time to come home and reconnect with life in New Zealand.

There’s a long list of reasons I’m glad I came home, but some of the top ones are:

• Watching All Blacks matches on the sofa with Dad
• Being able to go to things like Wearable Arts with Mum
• Sunday morning walks on the beach (above)
• Catching up with old old friends – and their kids!
• Running into people on Lambton Quay
• Really really outstanding double-shot flat whites from just about any café you care to name.
• The view from my office window – Post Office Square and TSB Arena across to the fountain in Oriental Bay.
• Coming out of the Johnsonville tunnel on a stunning day and seeing the ferry pull out of Wellington harbour. 
• People saying "Thank you driver" when they get off the bus
• Being able to shop at Max, and Farmers, and buy Minx shoes, and merino tops!
• Vogel’s bread, Sanitarium muesli, Rush Munro’s icecream, feijoa juice, the Embassy theatre, the list goes on, and on…

So no, I don’t miss Paris. Not the city itself, not in the sense that you pine for someone who is far away… The one thing I do miss is the friends that I made there. We shared some unforgettable experiences which I will always treasure, and I know those friendships will endure. But, as Hemingway said, Paris is a moveable feast, you take it with you. He may not have known how true that was. I find myself starting sentences with “When I was in Paris…” or “In France they…” more often than I would like. Am hoping that wears off quickly as I don’t think anyone is interested. But more than five years away does change your perspective slightly:

• Who turned the temperature down? Oh that’s right, no insulation or central heating. And it’s mid-October and I’m still wearing thick tights, hats and scarfs.
• What, you mean I have to look up a train timetable? There isn’t one every three minutes?
• Oh, I have to go up and pay at the counter, they don’t bring you the bill…
• It’s strange to hear Kiwi accents everywhere, in the office, lifts, streets. In Paris my head used to snap round anytime I heard those distinctive vowel sounds, I could even spot an Australian at 100 paces. But here it is commonplace.
• People are so friendly! Cafes and shops, everyone says hello, how are you today? And they seem pleased when you tell them! And waitresses smile! Although if I was missing French café life, I just have to go into Simply Paris (as I did the other day) for a dose of that “we know better than you, and we’re still going to ignore you and forget your order”. No, ok that’s not fair, for the most part the service in Paris was perfectly fine. Perhaps it was the French staff afflicted with their own version of homesickness, which results in them descending into a parody of the worst café behaviour.

There is almost an oversupply of French venues in Wellington, where you can get any French wine, cheese, crepes, or magret de canard that your heart, or stomach, might desire. In fact, Dad took me for a “Welcome Home” meal in a French restaurant the other night which consisted of seven courses of duck, theme and variations. So no risk of my tastebuds missing l’Hexagone. Except for, of course, the bread. No matter how hard they try, not even the best French bakers here can replicate the sublimeness of a baguette tradition fresh from the oven. Bread is so simple, but the flour is different here, even the water is different, and there’s nothing to be done. But I have learnt in life that you don’t necessarily get to have everything at once, and you just have to enjoy what you’ve got. In the words of the immortal Rolling Stones: “You can’t always get what you want  But if you try sometimes, you might just find, you get what you need”.

Speaking of food, time for a brief interlude while I go and start dinner. On the menu tonight are slow-cooked lamb neck chops with white beans and a kumara and parsnip mash, to go with a rather nice merlot I picked up in the Hunter Valley, followed by quince and blackberry crumble… Thanks to Dad’s pile of recipes for inspiration, the quinces preserved by Dad last autumn, and the blackberries picked by him in the park at the north end of Paekakariki.

… Spoke too soon, I just found a bookcase of Dad’s I hadn’t inspected yet. As well as the above, I have now acquired a new pile including:

• Then We Came To The End, Joshua Ferris
• Fierce Pajamas, an anthology of humor writing from the New Yorker
• Man On Wire, Philippe Petit
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (although I gather he has kind of made his point by about halfway through)
• And the assorted works of Nigel Cox (or at least the ones I haven’t already read)
• Plus the remaining Fred Vargas books I haven’t read, which I was faithfully lugging all around France this summer, but kept being given/loaned fascinating books that I just couldn’t pass up.

That should be enough to even stop me speculatively going into the library - apart from their fantastic selection of CDs and DVDs.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go check on dinner…