A Tribute to All Those Who Have Come to These Shores

Yesterday was the one month anniversary of my arrival in New Zealand and I must admit when I woke up in the morning I was feeling a little under the weather. I'd worked all weekend and Labour Day - the wettest, windiest, coldest, darkest Labour Day weekend in a decade. 76mm of rain fell on Wellington over the holiday compared with the usual average of 6mm! Not that I minded - I was working and when I wasn't the rain beat on the tin roof of my room while I was snug inside. But it carried on raining on my Tuesday day off; cabin fever was creeping in and on the way back from a Tim-Tam run I caught myself thinking about going to the pub. Now I knew when I set out on this little escapade that in order for it to have any chance of succeeding certain old habits were going to have to die - no matter how hard - and top of the list was that well worn favourite 'Drinking alone'. So I was pleased to hear a strange voice in my ear telling me to go home and have a cuppa tea with my new housemates instead. Which I did. If I carry on winning battles like this I might just win the war. Still, by yesterday morning I was feeling out of sorts. Even though the rain had stopped and the sky was clear I was feeling blue. So I breathed deeper, opened my eyes and ears wider and struck out in a new direction - namely Roseneath. I followed the road which winds all the way to the top of Mount Victoria and from there surveyed the city which is now home. Fantastic. On a clear day like yesterday you can see all the way out to the Cook Strait, to the Rimutaka Range and north to the Hutt Valley. To one side the suburbs of Hataitai and Kilbirnie, to the other the towers of downtown and Lambton Quay. And one-by-one, from out of the sky above comes plane after plane, banking hard over the harbour, lower and lower over Evans Bay and now it's below you and it seems it's too low and it's going to crash but lands safely on the Lyall Bay runway. From here I descended down onto Courtney Place and over coffee and cake saw a listing for a film that very hour at the National Library - 'Beyond the Roaring Forties - a history of sealing and whaling, of shipwrecks and marooned castaways and of man's doomed efforts to settle and farm New Zealand's sub-Antartic islands. Fantastic! I don't know about beyond the roaring forties but I was certainly the only person in the auditorium under 40. The film dated from the early 80s and featured many a bearded jumper - the kind that if worn in the Orkney rather than the Auckland Isles would certainly still bear a well-worn Blue Peter badge. Footage of oily seals and penguins sent me home feeling refreshed and best of all - a call from a friend to say she is coming to stay next February. Perfect x