January 13, 2010

New Year's resolutions

Number 1: keep a journal.

Actually my first resolution was to stop eating potato chips, but although admirable it doesn't seem profound enough to qualify as a resolution. Rather like Jacob resolving to give up cup-caking. A cup cake is farting into your cupped hand and then scooping it under the other person's nose.

It has been almost 18 months since my last entry and just as long since I even looked at this site. Where has all the narcissism gone.

Let's see........since then I have had Hogmanay in Edinburgh, made a snow man in Green Park, had clotted cream and scones in the Cotswolds, eaten cucumber sandwiches at buckingham palace, and won 20 pounds at Ascot. We went to Rome with the bears, to Scotland to meet all of John's 5 aunties for Christmas, and to Mallorca for Easter which was gritty and not much warmer than London. We spent a bank holiday weekend in Berlin and another in a beautiful old converted barn with blocked chimneys in the Brecon beacons in wales. We went to Dubai and stayed in the Atlantis in 45 degree heat and i ripped my togs going backwards on a waterslide. We went to Oktoberfest in September and went on a rollercoaster after drinking three pints but then we finally got a seat in a beer hall and I had a stein and passed out in our tent and woke up the next morning and was sick in a plastic bag. I went to Budapest with Sarah and Tom and rode one of those buggies around St Margaret's Island and ate delicious goulash to stave off the cold. We went to Marseilles with Mike and Kiran and watched the All Blacks slaughter the French team.

That's only half of it. Life in london is frenetic, gruelling and wonderful. I go back to our little flat in Islington at the end of the day and feel warm and safe. We go to the farmers market behind the town hall on a Sunday and the twinkly old man selling flowers points out that I am late today. We have roast chicken for dinner and John will make the carcass into a stew with stock that the Scottish aunties recommend. We endlessly discuss our options given his redundancy, my visa situation, and our mutual bamboozlement at the seductively smothering trappings of domesticity. I cry a lot, from the intensity of our lives and we both feel vulnerable and fearful and then John suggests plans that wrap around me like a down duvet. I think I am mostly happy if I had time to inhale and exhale and realise that this is what happiness feels like. Achingly alive.

Now I am back in New Zealand. It is the end of our five week holiday and I have spent a week up north with Dad and Robyn, a bit longer in Tauranga and then 8 days on the Gold Coast, some time in Christchurch and Wellington and a wedding in Hawkes Bay. Christmas was somewhat thwarted by polyps in poppa's stomach that look likely to finish him. He is 86 and fierce and I don't like seeing the defeat in his eyes but I am going to drive over to Waikato Hospital now.

John is mid-way to London. Meanwhile a little mouse in Tauranga is running rampant on the kitchen bench eating the fresh bread and leaving shit everywhere.

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