A mild winter

The second snowfall of the winter today. There was about 3 inches (10cm in new money) overnight and it’s still coming down heavily now (at 11.30am). Until today all the talk has been about how this is the mildest winter on record - which it has been.

Getting into work this morning was a nightmare. It took me nearly 2 hours to get to work I didn’t leave home till 9, knowing that things would be mental. (It’s usually a 45-minute journey by public transport or 35 by bike).

It’s amazing how nothing works properly at the merest sniff of bad weather in this country. Schools are shut, transport has largely ground to a halt, even the tube, which is (mostly) underground, isn't working properly.

Out the back window.

New Zealand studies

Getting the most out of your degree? If not, then perhaps this might be the thing for you.

Birkbeck College at the University of London now has a Centre for New Zealand Studies. The centre opens today, Waitangi Day (New Zealand’s national day).

Strange to think that a country of just 4 million people warrants an academic centre of its own.

Walk it

This is great www.walkit.com
If you're in London, you enter details about where you want to walk from and to and it produces a route map and directions.

It also tells you great things like the time it will take (based on how fast you walk), the distance you will cover, the calories you will burn and the C02 emmissions you save.

Walk it.

France, October 2006

Some pic's of our holiday to France, which included Sean and Cecile's PACsing.

Metro, Paris

Laborie - Sean and Cecile's place.

Sean and Cecile - post-PACsing



Post-PACsing

Thirty-five today

Thirty-five. It’s one of those useless in-between ages isn’t it? No longer am I a young(-ish) man of thirty, nor am my 'middle-aged' yet (or at least I don't feel as though I am, thank the lord).

Maybe these feelings have something to do with the fact that I can feel 40 looming on the horizon. Forty is definitely one of those ‘marker’ ages.

I never attached much significance to 30 but find myself increasingly thinking about the psychological implications of 40. Particularly in light of the need to feel like I am living the kind of life I want to be living, ie in a state of reduced compromise. Which certainly isn't the case now.

Truth is always the first casualty

Is Russell Brown the best commentator writing in the New Zealand media at the moment? He is certainly the most versatile and prolific that I have come across. He’s written an excellent piece on the Middle East today.

The answer to his first question perhaps goes someway to explaining how the Bush administration has got away with so much:

“So if polls find that more than a third of Americans believe the 9/11 attacks to have been an inside job by their own government, and around half still believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with it, does that mean only about 15% have any idea at all?”

While his last encourages us to think about an alternative reality:

“consider this: the total financial cost of the Iraq war - taking into account the cost of servicing the debt that funded it - has been repeatedly estimated in excess of a trillion dollars.

Try and imagine the impact on hearts and minds of a trillion dollars worth of benign investment in the Middle East and the wider Islamic world: in business development, health care, education, NGOs, printing books. Might things have worked out better?”

Read the article in full.

You can take the boy out

A good column in the Wellington Dominion-Post today by Chris Trotter (I never expected to write those words in that order), which offered more food for thought as I continue to wrestle with the idea of returning to New Zealand to live.

When you’re so far away from home and, after 10 years, still trying to work out whether or not you should go back, it’s things like this that help you to remember where you’re from and what it is about place that is important.

In day-to-day conversation it’s difficult to pinpoint the intangible characteristics of ‘home’ or what it is to be a New Zealander that really matter. Then you see or hear something and all of a sudden you’re sitting at you desk stricken by homesickness, wishing you were walking along a beach covered in ink-black iron sand, waves crashing in beside you, staring again at the conical mountain that moves you every time you see it thinking: where the bloody hell did that come from?

You can take the boy out of New Zealand but can you take New Zealand out of the boy?