Some compensation for the lack of snow

In common with many other continental European countries, Poland celebrates the 24th December as being the most important day of Christmas. That's when presents are exchanged, when the main meal is eaten (in the evening, ostensibly at the sight of the first star) and when sins are, supposedly, forgiven.

Poles are a tight-knit community wherever you go, and today we were invited for lunch, along with some other friends and their kids, to the home of a Polish friend and her Kiwi husband, just north of here.

The scenery towards the end of the twisty, hilly drive to their house is jaw-droppingly scenic, and on arrival at the farmstead itself there's a sense of having reached somewhere outside of this world. It's beautiful, tranquil, idyllic. No need to worry about noise from the neighbours, either, since this couple owns the surrounding 4,000 acres, on which they farm beef cattle and sheep.

Usually the 24th December is a vegetarian affair for Poles... but this is NZ, and you can't have Christmas in NZ without a barbecue and several dead animals sizzling nicely upon it.

The food was great, the company was great, the beer was drunk and so were the adults, while the kids wound themselves up on sugar drinks and strawberries dipped in chocolate and then wound themselves down by running around the garden, playing on swings, throwing iced water at each other and chasing sheep and soap bubbles.

I think I've run out of words. Merry Christmas.

Sublime prose

I am again floating towards the conclusion that continuing my English Literature course past the end of the current module, which finishes in February, would be a waste of time.

Not only is the whole course drab and unimaginative - in marked contrast to the texts themselves - but it is woefully unchallenging by any standards, and considerably so when compared with the English course a friend of mine is currently completing at an unassuming ex-polytechnic in the UK.

I am still haunted by the words I read in the introduction to the anthology of poems studied for my English O-level all those years ago. I forget the author - Betjeman or Hughes, I think - but the text ran along the lines of, "the true beauty of English poetry is only destroyed by English Literature lessons." There it was, in black and white; first page of the book. I pointed this out to my teacher at the time and was told to leave the room, though that was a fairly regular occurrence anyway.

Dropping this current course would have repercussions in that it would make any move into teaching more difficult. The Eng Lit would have given me a second major to add to my Physics degree, the Psychology degree not being a 'teachable subject' in NZ, which is itself a retarded state of affairs.

I hadn't exactly set my mind on teaching anyway, but it might have been useful in the future should the need have arisen - as I hope it won't but suspect it might - to take the kids out of school and educate them at home, something of which the NZ authorities are, currently, admirably accepting compared to some countries in the world (it's illegal in Germany, for example; make of that what you will).

But regardless of what happens with the course, my new-found love of literature remains undimmed. So I'm doing it my way. Today I went into Wellington with Ninja, dropped her off with her nanny, went to the gym and then sat in the library for the afternoon reading G. K. Chesterton, on the advice of Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

They weren't wrong.

If you fancy something different, insightful, both emotive and logical, and above all applicable despite being almost a century old, it's worth grabbing a tome of his work; the essays for preference, as they're better than the poems. I think you'll be delighted.

Farting in a hermetically-sealed room

When I wrote this post I wasn't expecting the furore that was to follow a few weeks later. Perhaps New Scientist itself wasn't lying to me, but someone has been.

When the facts change I change my mind, but I don't think enough of the facts have yet changed. My position on this is that I find it unbelievable that the entirety of human industrial activity - all that pollution, extraction and burning of hydrocarbons, destruction of forests and so on - has neatly cancelled itself out with no net effect on the climate. That idea goes way beyond any concept of Gaia that Lovelock would recognise.

And yet... so-called climate change deniers* are being exceptionally badly treated, which is not what debate and reasoned argument is about. There's another agenda here. Whether or not the climate is changing as a result of human activity, the political solutions so far presented are not designed primarily to address that situation but to further indebt populations and curtail individual freedom of movement, to the enrichment of the usual suspects.

Once again: no thanks.

* high-carbon stockings?

Epiphany addendum

These people get it, or at least half of it.

More here, for those of you who want to learn why you're paying the cost of your own slavery.

Epiphany

You sold your children into slavery with your apathetic middle-class greed.

It's a nice enough rant and he makes some valid points (such as birth certificates being Gilts), but he's wrong to try to pin this on the Labour party alone. It would have been roughly the same whatever colour of party was in power. As I've mentioned before, you can't change the system from within.

Most governments appear to exist solely in order to keep people enslaved, either through fear of an enemy (real, imagined or exaggerated) or through debt (personal, national and governmental); preferably both. Without enslaved people governments can't exist.

It's true that Labour has excelled at both the fear (WMD, terrzum, etc.) and debt side of things, but I really doubt that the Conservatives or even the cuddly old Lib Dems would have done things much differently. As Douglas Adams put it, they're not there to wield power but to draw attention away from it. And once they've finished easing another generation into hock, they are richly rewarded by banks, multinational corporations and other wonderful institutions who then fund their retirements through obscenely generous 'consultancy' fees.

The real problem is money. I doubt that 1 person in 100,000 understands what it is, where it comes from and why the entire fiat banking system is fundamentally fraudulent and designed to enslave its (coerced) users. Whenever I try to explain it to friends they think I'm insane (with a few worthy exceptions who'd already worked things out for themselves: L, S, S), yet the information is freely available; just not on the TV or in the newspapers.

I'm beginning to wonder why I bother. I'm trying to explain to people how to escape their own slavery, but the vast majority of them don't seem to care. Worse, they actively embrace their prison; give them a slavebox apartment with an inter-generational mortgage, a pointless job, no free time but a fucking great big television set and plenty of alcohol, and they'll potter along without a complaint, invincibly ignorant to the day they die.

So by my reckoning we have 0.001% of the population who actively understand the situation and want to change it, 0.001% of the population who actively understand the situation because they're in control of it and 99.998% of the population who couldn't care less as long as they get their fix of cognitive anaesthetics.

Perhaps it's time to change sides.

Annus mirabilis, and a bit

It's nearly 18 months since we sold almost all our possessions, packed the remainder into a couple of rucksacks, said a fond farewell to everyone we knew and jumped on a 'plane, arriving in NZ for the first time, after a roundabout trip, a couple of months later.

Whatever anyone tells you about emigration, the first year is hard work. Cultures are different, customs are different, people are often similar but that doesn't mean you'll instantly meet the interesting ones, and your support network is 12,000 miles away.

And it's raining.

We were expecting all this, of course, and had prepared ourselves mentally and practically. But still it was tough. We'd moved from a place we loved, surrounded by people we loved, to a country about which we knew almost nothing and in which we knew almost nobody. There were times in that first year when I felt hollow inside, and Wife was a bit tearful on occasion. Social networks are important and for a while we had none.

But neither of us wanted to go back. Based on everything we knew about moving to another country we were determined to give it two years before making any decision about staying or going in the longer term. It was helpful that apart from a few peculiarities there wasn't much about NZ that we didn't like (residential architecture aside). The problem wasn't the country; the problem was that this was not our home.

So we put our plans into action. Before leaving the UK we'd shamelessly asked our friends for any contacts they had in NZ, and on arrival we set about looking them up. Luck was with us as they've turned out to be a helpful and friendly bunch of people who have made us feel very welcome, and we couldn't have wished for a better start to our social life in NZ.

Then there's the nationality thing. While there are far too many Brits out here to make any kind of song and dance about meeting up with them, Poles are relatively rare and, as always, bloody well organised. Wife met several in the first few months and they're just as varied, interesting and mildly left of sane as the friends we left behind in the UK (yes, you know who you are). Inevitably, so are their husbands.

And although Wife's work turned out to be something of a nightmare in terms of the effect it had on our time together as a family, she met some wonderfully kind people there, too, and we owe them our thanks, not to mention a significant amount of party food and wine.

Then there's the gym, my part-time university course, our neighbours and so on; all of these provided opportunities for meeting people, and we've done so.

Finally, of course, it's almost impossible not to make new friends when you have young children. That was the case in Brighton & Hove and it's just the same here, with first Ninja and now Nippy introducing us to an entirely new circle of friends, all of whom have at least one thing in common: sleep deprivation. Well, misery loves company.

I don't know if we've been lucky or just determined. By contrast we met almost nobody during our prison term in suburban England, but made loads of new friends in Brighton & Hove. I'm quite sure there were nice people in suburbia; we just didn't seem to meet them, which is probably our fault rather than theirs.

Since the B&H move we've generally assumed people are nice until proven otherwise. To date nobody's proved otherwise, here or in the UK.

We've actually moved twice, of course, since a couple of months ago we moved from Wellington out here to the farm. That has truly been a revelation; I expected Hicksville and we found a thriving community of intelligent, opinionated and interesting people from all walks of life and from numerous different countries. Cliché though it is, I do sometimes feel like pinching myself to check I haven't walked into a dream. People are so happy, friendly and full of life (in terms of both their outlook and their past). They're nice, but not in a bland way; in a challenging, thought-provoking, considerate, funny and often cheeky way.

Wife's happy, I'm happy, and the kids... well, let's not mince words: if you're between the ages of 0 and 12 this place is paradise. As Wife said the other day, for child-rearing it just doesn't get any better than this.

I do miss some aspects of our life in B&H, of course. Brighton is a grotty little seaside town in some ways, but it's sexy and I loved our four years there. It's more Razzle than Playboy, true; more back of the fish and chip shop than a four-poster at the Ritz, but on a hot summer's evening, a full moon over the calm sea and the soft tinkle of broken glass all around, there are few more exciting, lurid and downright erotic places to be. We did things there that I'll never write about on this blog unless I happen to get very drunk one evening after accidentally leaving the computer switched on. ("Wassat? Chrissmuss, you say? Oh well, jusht one more then. I'll come back to thish later.")

But with two kids the opportunities for such Dionysian pleasures are curtailed, at least in the early days. If we were still in B&H now our lives would be very different to the way they were before the sprogs came along, and certainly more stressful than they are here.

And, as I mentioned earlier, there are interesting people wherever you go. We're meeting a lot of them. Next year looks like it could be fun.

So far, so good.

T'is the season to be jolly

And I am, following lunchtime beers in Wellington and a very pleasant evening barbecue with some friends just around the corner from the farm.

All of which goes some way towards compensating for the lack of a white - or even light grey - Christmas here, and the fact that I inevitably missed the annual gathering of hacks from one of my previous careers.

An old friend and colleague from those days (thanks M) sent me a link to a collection of photos taken a couple of days ago in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub on Fleet Street in London. There are faces in there that I haven't seen for almost ten years, and it shows.

Bloody hell... life moves fast. Terrifyingly fast.