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| Lisa's birthday boat trip |
Our 10th
year in New Zealand. In some ways it feels like we have been here much longer
and in others it feels like we moved a couple of years ago. Some new ways have
become embedded. It is a widely accepted practice to take your shoes off before
you go into your house and that also applies when you visit someone else’s
house. I now bring my slippers if we go to someone’s house for dinner in
winter. Not all houses are as warm as ours! I also get annoyed if the odd
person turns up and comes into our house with their shoes on. When we see TV
programmes we notice if people wear shoes indoors! I now think why we ever wore
outdoor shoes inside.
Over 10
years we have become better bakers. Kiwis, from a young age, do a lot more
baking than in the UK. We rarely buy cakes or biscuits and now prefer what we
make for ourselves. Our diet in general has changed as we have gradually
evolved to a vegetarian/pescatarian diet. We drink very little cows milk and
mostly due to keeping my cholesterol levels in check, we don’t eat much cheese
either. This is probably a good thing as the price of cheese is high. Ten years
has softened the blow of how expensive food in supermarkets is, but you still
notice the high cost of food and the overall high cost of living. Who would have thought that pine nuts would be
such a luxury? Basil pesto is made here with cashew nuts as pine nuts would be
way too expensive. Petrol and diesel prices are the only thing you would notice
as cheaper here than the UK.
Our trip
back to the UK just reminded us of how ‘cheap’ groceries and eating out seemed
to be in N Ireland. It also reminded us of how NZ is less pre-occupied with
shopping for more stuff. Although I would say it has crept in over the 10 years
we have been here, it is till not on the same scale as the UK.
We continue
to be active, and all our friends are active. A group that I cycle with has an
average age that is easily over 60. I am quite fit and enjoy the social side of
the rides as well as the routes. One
lady mentioned she would miss a few group rides as she was going in for an
operation. It turned out that she was getting a new hip joint. She then
casually mentioned that her next birthday she would be 80, so she thought she
would maybe allow herself to buy an e-bike. She was quite fast on a regular
bike so she will be a demon on an e-bike. Three weeks after her operation, she
started to do a few short bike rides (but not the e-bike) which turned out to
be about 30 km each.
Enjoying
health and fitness without the need to compete has been a good transition for
me. I don’t have the time or inclination to train to compete, but I enjoy hard
training sessions and then enjoy being able to use my fitness on gravel bike
rides. I also enjoy going to the velodrome and doing some hard sessions on the
track on my track bike. I still enjoy going for a run and restrict myself to
shorter routes and stay off hard surfaces. It’s a compromise of continuing to
run without doing more damage to my knees etc.
Rabbit Island- my running and swimming beach
My love of
swimming in open water has evolved into short sea swims and this year I started
a Tasman Dippers group that meet to go for a dip in the sea all year round. Now
that the sea temperatures have dropped to 11C it is a short dip with no
swimming, no wetsuits and just enjoying being in the sea each week. We then sit
on the driftwood on the beach after the dip with our flasks of hot drinks and
bask in the feeling of the après dip while having a chat.
After 10
years of building our own business, the insecurities of that, especially in
covid times, ebb and flow. You work so closely in it and on it that sometimes
you don’t see how far it has come. I enjoy the flexibility of being your own
boss and after 10 years without the strict routine of teaching, I could never
imagine working as a full-time teacher again, but I do miss thinking about
geography. I still enjoy talking to students about geographical content when I
get the chance to do relief teaching in that subject. If I was still in N.
Ireland I could have retired by now. That is an interesting thought as I see so
many people who live locally that retired when they were quite young and a few
of them look like they don’t have any purpose in their day. Many are involved
in classes and community organistaions. There are a lot of community groups
making a difference in their communities. I also see how great it would be to
be able to do volunteer work for charities and contribute to society into much
later life. That is quite the norm here. Unfortunately for many older Kiwis,
they also have to continue to work long after the 65 yr pension age.
It would be
wrong to think that NZ is a perfect country. It has shortcomings with embarrassingly
poor statistics in things like child poverty. Human nature is the same the
world over and there are still annoying things that happen. We had to take a
neighbour to a disputes tribunal to get them to pay for a fence we agreed they
could temporarily remove to help them remove trees. Long story short we ended
up having to get it put back up and after the tribunal they had to pay us the
full amount (3 years after we had helped them out). Having said that the values
which drew us to NZ are strong and they became very evident when Covid closed
down the country. The team of 5 million all played their part and so far we
have managed to keep both a healthy population and healthy economy. As I write
this, we are still cut off from the world and most people in NZ like it that way. Soon we will have a high enough vaccination rate to be in a position to open our borders again.
We are
proud New Zealand citizens and are proud to be part of this country that is our home.
Let’s see
what the next 10 years bring.
