Bag in a Bag in a Bag (and other bags)

Last night I had a dream that my aeroplane seat was lacking a television and, as a result, the air hostess offered to do something about it. I was praying for an upgrade, but she led me through to a big television lounge. Not thinking anything unusual about this, I said that no, this still wasn't acceptable, and she smiled and I had a feeling that finally she was going to upgrade me. She led me through various seating and then through an open-air cafe (which was pretty windy, being ten thousand feet up in the air) and onwards passed the open air swimming pool, where we had to go down the slide to get through into first class (by this point in my dream I was beginning to think that this was all a little unusual).

We never made it as I woke up. I panicked about my tickets and had to get out of bed at goodness-knows-what-o'clock and check that the time on them was 21:45 and not 09:45. I lay in bed wondering what sort of things you must have to say to be upgraded and resolved that, actually, being me that I would never employ any of the tactics that I was conjouring up (which became more and more bizarre as the state of half-awake-half-asleep seemed to tilt towards the latter) and that I was resigned to cattle class for the rest of my days, or at least certainly on this flight.

I phoned Air New Zealand in a last ditch attempt to find someone who knew what the hell they were talking about and would actually consider being quite nice to me.

I struck gold.

The lovely Kiwi on the end of the phone was my saviour, my knight in shining armour. He told me that yes, we could take hand luggage and even had some witty banter about the woman who'd grounded a plane in the US due to hand cream (now, it divulges, something to do with claustrophobia). He was wonderful. I could have kissed him. He even told me to have a lovely journey home.

So, in order to combat all scenarios, I have spent a considerable amount of thought process in designing my baggage. This, from the WebStress, is quite unusual as my boyfriend and I usually travel everywhere with our belongings thrown randomly in the car in a variety of Tesco carrier bags.

I have one hard laptop carry on case, complete with PC and a minimum amount of items to get me through a flight and not detained, all in their own separate plastic bags 'just in case'. I have one soft suitcase, designed so that if I am denied my carry on I can simply put the entire case in my suitcase and zip it up (all rather like a caravan interior), with only minor readjustments. My original laptop bag contains the excess clothes and will also go in the hold.

My bags are currently laid out on the bed and I have been staring at them in wonderment that I managed to produce such inginuity all by myself (with only one short phone call to my parents just to check baggage allowance). I almost want to take a picture.

So, here goes.

Packed and Prepped

Yesterday's blog, as my sister suggested, was perhaps a little unhinged.

Yesterday was without doubt the toughest day I've had here so far - at the end of the holiday but without actually going home.

My emotions increased in a rather wobbly upwards spiral until they reached their peak yesterday evening when I collapsed into a big teary mess. However two large glasses and an immense amount of bread and rice later, I was feeling a bit better and we'd done a significant amount of time - past, present and future - dissecting to make me focus less on the change I was about to experience and more on the bigger picture.

My boyfriend told me last night how much it had meant to him that I came out to see him and how much he has loved having me here. Probably a really obvious thing but it made me realise why I'm going through all this, why in those moments when I think 'what's in my boyfriend's training for me?', in those selfish dark lonely moments when I can't seem to rationalise what I'm getting out of my boyfriend training and being apart from me for 18 months.

What I'm getting out of all this is my boyfriend's happiness.

Before I came out things were difficult. He'd experienced a fire and living in accommodation that is only mildly more desirable than a leaky tent in the middle of winter. His training was extremely tough. We couldn't phone, skype or email regularly.

Now I am leaving him in beautiful new accommodation with an en suite shower, internet and telephone in his room (no excuse!), the ability to make beans on toast in his room, surrounded by good people and flying a lot.

He said to me last night that he felt sure we were over the worst. I disagreed, because we've said that time and time again during the course of his application and his move out here. But then I know he's right. I was just scared of trusting that.

My time here has flown and dragged, in waves. I've done my best to try to not just wait or kill time until I see him, and I feel proud of my achievements. I've done things I never would have considered, I've travelled an awful lot alone, something that I never wanted to do but it was a case of see it alone or don't see it.

This past month is a million strands of memory that are tangled at the moment, all in one big New Zealand knot. It is sat at the top of my throat and at the forefront of my mind. Yesterday I failed spectacularly to control it and hold it back.

He will be home soon and we will begin the rest of our last day. And I feel - at this moment - okay. My emotions did their very best in attempting to ruin my evening (and my make up) last night before I managed to subdue them with alcohol and my boyfriend soothed them with telling me how happy he'd been having me here.

That's what's important. Not that I'm going, but that I came out and I made him happy.

I have had a wonderful time here. I have seen beautiful things and between us we have been a part of memories that photographs and thoughts will trigger an extraction of that string for many years to come. We have found ourselves back together.

So beneath all the worry and the fear and the aching, there it is. That's what it's all about.

Homeward Bound

Tomorrow I head back to the UK.

I have been trying to put into words for days the nonsensical tangled mess that is the train of thought in my head. And finding all manner of distractions to avoid it at the same time.

When my boyfriend left for New Zealand in April, it ended three months of saying goodbye and the closing of a year of not knowing and of endless reams of inconclusive conversations on our future. We had two choices that weren’t our choices at all but someone else’s: He would be sent to New Zealand to start eighteen months of training, or he wouldn’t.

We spun endless stories of an alternative life, of a house and a mortgage and a dog. We put so much into making it not a plan B, just an alternative plan A, so that it would never be a failure or a fall back but simply different from the first plan.

We talked about that plan, that alternative path the other day. What if-

I always knew this was the right plan though, if he got the opportunity. The hardest route for me but the only solution. Not that it would have been the only solution, of course, if we hadn’t been given that option. But hindsight is a wonderful thing and can be blissfully hypocritical without any repercussions.

He has just left for the airport and I am alone again.

I have got so used to these goodbyes where he goes out for the day and I occupy myself, reading, writing, webbing, exploring. I have got used to him coming back on an evening. I have got used to the little things: making him a cup of tea, making his sandwiches, cooking him dinner. Somewhere near domestic bliss while having to share a kitchen with a dozen or so other trainees, fighting through the testosterone fuelled air. I have got used to seeing him when I wake up in the morning and when I go to sleep at night. I have got used to waking up in the night and not trying to coax myself back to sleep in the fierce way I have been familiar with since he’s been gone. It isn’t wasted time: he’s there.

Up until last Thursday, the days were passing fluidly, I was busy, my mind was occupied with productivity and I was using time the best way I could. The day he left I promised myself I wouldn’t wish this time away, I wouldn’t want him home, I wouldn’t want me there, only in the time it should be. I needed to harness this time and make it mine, control it so I knew this was my life and when he came home he would be a pilot and I would have achieved; I would have stories to tell too.

We had a meal planned, our first after days of him working through the evening and flying in the early hours of the following morning. Friday, though, he didn’t have a flight. We’d decided to go out and sample/endure the local nightlife of the neighbouring town (which I think may actually be a city, but as the esteemed title of ‘township’ is bestowed on housing colonies of just 4 upwards, the Kiwis seem to work on a slightly different scale to us).

I was extremely excited. But my boyfriend returned for the airport just as the news of the terror plans broke on New Zealand television – the early hours of the UK’s Thursday morning. And then everything changed.

As the partner of a future pilot, it has been pretty hard to avoid all things air-transport related over the last year. I know a lot more than I would like, but understand even less. I have caught parts of numerous disaster and ‘airport life’ documentaries than I ever wanted to. And in less than a week I was to be heading back to the UK – on a plane. So this news, despite being half way around the other side of the world, was not going to be forced out of my mind lightly.

From that moment on things changed. The mostly confused and occasionally wildly inaccurate news filtered from the UK and out of the mouths of the Kiwi news presenters leaving a somewhat fragmented picture.

When we heard the news, when it begun to sink in, I can’t describe the series of emotions I endured. There were thousands of people in a desperate situation all over the world, stranded or trying to get to their loved ones or facing boarding a plane with children and nothing to entertain them with. But all I could think about was going home – how I would face the 26 hour journey, having said goodbye to my boyfriend, with nothing.

Looking back, I dealt with the whole thing terribly. My boyfriend and my parents endured a lot of attempting-to-calm-me conversations. Conversations of the future of his career, the future of the airline industry, the threat of future attacks, the attacks that were prevented filtered through us again and again until they became over discussed and exhausted and then the news would change again and another fire would be lit and another dialogue fuelled.

And with every conversation I was reminded constantly that I was going home.

The situation is now improving in the UK. I have had excited text messages from my family every time another piece of hand luggage news has been unveiled. Things are as back to normal as is humanly possible in such a short space of time.

Not, it seems, for Air New Zealand however.

Prior to the hand luggage restrictions being relaxed on Tuesday in the UK, I had phoned Air New Zealand to discover what the score was this side of the world. See through plastic bags all round, although I was extremely excited to find they were permitting me to take a book, ear plugs and an eye mask, so things would at least be bearable.

But on finding out about the news in the UK, I excitedly called Air New Zealand, to ensure that I could, indeed, take my trusty backpack on board in hand luggage.

The woman that I spoke to obviously had so far not encountered a customer inquiring over such matters, or at least had not been able to solve their query effectively. She shuffled off to find her manager, leaving me on hold listening to the wonders of first class travel with Air New Zealand (apparently they have a relaxing Ottoman and a comfortable bed), and returned reading off a piece of paper that said that they were still opting for the unstylish and disruptive see through plastic bag with minimal accessories (none of which were electrical) route, rather than the more desirable laptop bag one that BAA were opting for.

She told me that these instructions she was reeling off were the same as for the UK. I battled with her furiously that they were not and that I was reading the information off the BAA’s website, but fact was obviously not going to penetrate her rather scratchy self and, after a rather heated debate, I recoiled. She then told me we were allowed to check in two pieces of luggage at 23kg, instead of the 27kg limit for one bag a previous employee had told me (she mocked me when I told her this and said ‘we’ve NEVER allowed such a limit! 27! Never!’).

I hung up the phone feeling deflated and promptly burst into tears so that my boyfriend had great difficulty in deriving what on earth had happened through my overblown sobs. I called my dad in search of a ‘DadSolutionTM’ and he duly provided one which didn’t have me wailing ‘no that won’t work because’.

As packing my laptop in my soft suitcase is probably a bad idea as putting a china dog inside and expecting it to arrive in one piece or attempting to claim on the shattered objects through the insurance company, my laptop wasn’t going in the hold without some serious TLC and, possibly, an armour plated cover just to make sure. So instead I am fashioning some sort of solution with a combination of bags, one of which is to be purchased at The Warehouse (‘where everyone gets a bargain’ so here’s hoping) tonight.

This is going to severely piss me off tomorrow if I turn up, plastic bag in one hand, embedded laptop in the other, to find that everyone else is merrily carrying on hand luggage a plenty. So I suspect I shall call Air New Zealand again and hopefully not talk to Incorrect27kgMan or MockingWoman and will probably get a completely different set of ludicrous instructions for my journey home.

I would be slightly less worried about the boredom I am to endure without my 41 songs if Air New Zealand’s televisual delights were slightly less than crap. On the journey over, the entire system had to be rebooted after a problem occurred on one terminal (which may or may not have been mine) and that quickly spread through cattle class and then through to first class when they finally decided to reboot the entire system (yes, run on Windows I discovered) and we were without entertainment for 45 minutes. This was a long time, but luckily I was about ready for a nap. I met a couple the other day who’d travelled over amidst all this plastic-bag-ness with Air New Zealand and their televisions just hadn’t worked. Apparently the new systems are only in place on half of their long haul aircrafts, and it seems that only two screens in the fleet function effectively at any one time.

In contrast to my miserable whitterings, I am aware of the need for an increased level of security in the UK’s airports which, from talking to many people on the subject, are amongst the slackest in the world. On entering Auckland I had my luggage rescanned and my entire suitcase searched (before it was returned to me padlocked with no sign of a key). From what I have derived from the BBC news website and from News 24 (having abandoned all hope of extracting anything useful or up to date from local news reports) I am amazed at the work that has been done by MI5 and I welcome increased security, despite the lack of convenience it may inflict on passengers. I am quite happy to trade inconvenience for increased safety; I’d just like a bit of uniformity on the whole thing (and between staff at Air New Zealand perhaps).

So, tomorrow I go home.

I am terrified. I am terrified of leaving him.

As the week has gone on, the ratio of worry about travel and worry about leaving my boyfriend has radically altered. I have stopped sleeping properly, through the day my productivity levels have dropped in correspondence with my lack of concentration and flightiness and therefore I am just left with the simple thoughts, the ones that are too overpowering to control and too overwhelming to deal with. I have spent time just sitting trying not to think but having no choice to do anything but, being too tired and too messy to extract anything of any use.

Before: he needed to go. He needed to start this, for both of us. We’d had too much of the waiting, too much of the waiting to say goodbye and for this to all begin. We weren’t coping in so many ways and we needed some relief.

Now though. Now I have spent a month realising how much I love my boyfriend and how much I need him. Only to start yet another normality, get used to another way of life.

Two and a half months is nothing, they say. That is what I have before he returns.

Wet and not exactly wild

On my return from the South Island, I thought some time without horrific amounts of travelling were involved so I settled in for a few days at my boyfriend's accommodation attempting yet another redesign of my poorly attended portfolio and developing some tutorials.

The days have flown by and productivity, at least from the point of view of my tutorial development, has been high. My portfolio is still in its poor neglected state, having tried several redesigns, all of which I considered to be awful much before I'd got to the first rollover.

After a fairly flat day yesterday, I decided today would be a Doing Stuff day and it was high time I got back in the driving seat of Pulsar the Hire Car and tackled the New Zealand countryside once more in search of beautiful things to not take pictures of and opportune moments of me with various not-quite-visible backdrops to take pictures of instead.

I was able to tear my boyfriend away from whatever complicated learning process he was enduring to come and join me on my adventure (he has been writing confusing and offensive equations on large pieces of paper that I presume he intends to put on the wall and I have more fuel to add to the ever increasing fire of the fact that he is now officially a plane geek, only differing from a train spotter in the fact that he can fly one).

Our destination was severely hindered by the fact that it started raining at around midnight last night and has not yet stopped. And I'm not talking your average rain. I'm talking rain that, even as a Cornish gal who has lived between two moors since she was 8 and has seen more downpours than I imagine most people get to experience in a life time, I find offensive.

Most people, when I told them I was coming out to New Zealand in July and was staying here for a month in the middle of winter, told me I was stupid. I agreed. Departing the sweltering heat of the UK's first heat wave in god knows how long to go to a town that has been described to me as the Kiwi equivalent of Slough (add a touch of middle America and you're not far off) in their equivalent of November was, indeed, stupid. However, where boyfriend is, girlfriend must travel to and I was quite happy with the notion of simply seeing him, everything else would come second, including what to actually do with my time.

While the first few days were fairly sodden, the weather over the past few weeks has been at worst dry and at best absolutely amazing, with temperatures of 16 degrees +. In hindsight, if the weather had been bad over the last couple of weeks I would either have had a novel by now or attempted suicide. But I experienced an amazing week of WebStress adventures in the North and then headed down to the South Island just as the rain began to pour up here and had just begun to blossom in the South. Jammy is one word that no one ever describes me as, but I felt it. Especially when the day after I arrived back the weather was so bad in the South they had to close the airport that I'd flown from the night previously.

So I knew it was coming. My boyfriend's frequent checking of the weather reports indicated that it was coming and that flying was definitely going to be canned (I refuse to actually call him a pilot until he can fly in anything other than dry, clear, sunny climates).

I had in my first two days here exhausted all the activities in the local town, and in one morning completed everything that was suitable.

But I'd got an activity up my sleeve. My Wet Weather Alternative. The single activity that didn't involve looking at anything beautiful (the visibility wasn't much past my elbow in some of the rain), taking part in an outdoor activity, or generally being outside.

So we set off. An hour's drive to the Waitomo gloworm caves and a 45 minute guided tour. Not too long that my boyfriend would start to panic without his reading materials (he actually brought some in the car but didn't read them so I'll overlook that) and long enough for me to get my explorer fix. After all, Pulsar was running up the money meter and was itching to get out on the open roads.

The rain increased. Rivers were near bank-breaking point, fields were starting to flood.

We arrived at the Black Water Rafting building, 2km before the caves themselves. As we entered the building, signs were being slapped over each and every cave 'closed due to flooding'. This wasn't something I'd considered. Perfect undercover WWA I'd thought. Liable to flooding in the same wet weather had not crossed my mind.

This didn't instil us with confidence, but we asked the woman at the checkout who said that the glowworm caves should still be open, for a while at least.

So my boyfriend put pedal to the metal (as fast as I would let him which probably isn't anything like the speed he would have been happy cruising at) and we headed for the caves.

On arrival, the streams of water cascading down the sides of the carpark and the water penetrating every part of my clothing after thirty seconds of exposure, made me think that this possibly wasn't the best idea.

We arrived at the booth, happy to tackle a reduced tour for half the price as the boat ride had been flooded out. We had to see something at least.

However on overhearing that, while we would get a chance to see the glowworm cave yes, seeing the glowworms were another matter. No boat ride = no glowworms.

We admitted defeat and got back in the car for the long drive home, rain hammering down on the car as we drove.

I was by this point in a rather large sulk. The time that my boyfriend has to spend with me when he isn't working is extremely limited and extremely precious. We were just about to conclude wasting two and a half hours of it.

We were both pretty miserable so we thought we'd eat to cheer ourselves up and break up the return journey.

So we passed through Unmemorable Town #1. Everything was closed apart from KFC, McDonalds and Subway. Not good at the best of times for a vegetarian, even worse for a vegetarian who's struggling to digest dairy products on a day to day basis.

Unmemorable Town #2 passed us by, again with nothing open but KFC, McDonalds and Subway.

I was grumpy, my boyfriend was tired and the radio was choosing this opportune moment to pick all the very worst of New Zealand rock music and play it consecutively. And the pressure headaches that I have had fairly consistently since being here (another ailment of the not-very-well-built-WebStress) increased so much that I was even more grumpy than I would have been (I am a not particularly portable, and rather vocal barometer).

So now I'm back where I was a few hours ago, the rain is still lashing down, my boyfriend is asleep and will soon have to rise and continue the work that he has to do (which will go on all evening, our trade off of him coming out this afternoon was him working this evening) and we only have 4 teabags left and about half a teaspoon full of soya milk.

New Zealand in the rain, like most places, sucks. I have decided to spend the afternoon drinking warm Ribenas until the sugar rush kicks in (always good for entertainment and/or productivity) or just admit defeat and get back into bed.

Time Travel

Being 11 hours ahead of the UK is something I don't think, in my time here, I'll ever quite grasp.

At least my boyfriend is operating in the same time zone as me now (and he doesn't have the excuse of extortionately priced text messages as an excuse for not texting me and now has to text me or at least come up with a new excuse) which is beneficial for our relationship, if confusing for everyone else in the UK. When I am trying to explain what I've done when, or where I'll be for a phone call, there are usually reams of 'so is that your morning or mine' and subsequent confusions until it is ironed out (something that me and my boyfriend just about managed before I left the UK, often through just not agreeing a time).

My grandad this morning (his Wednesday evening) asked me if I could tell him the lottery results, as I was 11 hours ahead (I think he was kidding...). My friend back in the UK has just told me that I am like Michael J Fox without the Delorean (and, sadly, the hoverboard).

I don't really like it though, all this time travel. As my boyfriend is spectacularly poor with texting, my phone stays silent for the majority of the day and text responses to questions that I'd forgotten I'd asked to my family and friends drift in half a day later.

The time difference is nothing in comparison to the seasonal difference. Try as I might I can't think of one good reason for having winter in August and summer in December. For me, the only thing that drives me through the long winter months is the celebrations around Christmas.

Here, the children have a two week holiday in the middle of July when its cold, wet, windy and miserable and don't even have a reason to sprinkle glitter onto cards smothered in PritStick. They wade their way through the long winter months without a warm mince pie to comfort them and they don’t have a tree to decorate or a new toy to break by the fire as the winds howl and the rain lashes down outside. And then summer arrives accompanied by Christmas and people are happy, sunburnt and gorged on good food and presents all at once.

No, I’m sold on the whole Christmas in winter thing. I wouldn’t go far as to say that this way was just pain wrong (it is of course, but its geographically influenced and they can’t do a lot about it) but there’s not much right with it from where I’m standing.

A barbeque for Christmas dinner is all very well but you just can’t eat as much in the heat. And who wants to wear a bikini instead of an comforting, enormous, stomach-hiding jumper in the post Christmas-Fill?

The WebStress goes south

In a fit of independence (for which I am not wonderfully well known) I decided to book a break to the South Island to stay with the parents of my friends.

So on Monday my boyfriend dropped me off at the local airport.

Now I haven’t done much flying full stop and have never before flown domestically. I knew things were going to be slightly different from the normal sweat-inducing check in procedure when my e-ticket instructed I produce some form of ID, one of which listed was a credit card.

In the UK a credit card, in my experience, counts for absolutely nothing by way of proving your identity. I may be the proud owner of a Tesco Platinum credit card with an unsettlingly large limit on it (which has accrued a fair old whack of club card vouchers which have, in turn, been transformed into alcohol. Brilliant) but as ID a note from my mum would probably be more effective.

I took my passport anyway, being as over cautious as a UK citizen probably is in trying to prove who they are. I also had my drivers license and my credit card as backup, just in case.

Domestic check ins, at least in this example, are not particularly thorough, to say the least. The check in girl didn’t even want to see either of the two identical copies of the e-ticket I’d printed out (just in case one spontaneously combusted I imagine, I’m not always sure of my over cautious logic. Actually its probably more likely that I would spill some foodstuff or beverage over one copy, so the other is stored a safe distance from the first). And she used the words ‘cool bananas’.

The building that houses domestic and international departures appears to be made partially out of chipboard (an alternative to the usual wood or corrugated iron that seems to hold most of the houses up). They are either doing a lot of building work at the airport or have adapted the same semi-permanent, flat-pack popup book approach of the rest of the houses in the area that look like they were made out of a kit from Ikea in about half an hour and can be demolished just as quickly.

In a part of the world prone to earthquakes I am continually surprised by the lack of stability places seem to have, all the shops appear to look like warehouses (and have names as such – Stationary Warehouse, Tools Warehouse, The Warehouse…) and my Lego constructions (that I made a long time ago *ahem*) looked more sturdy than a lot of the houses. But maybe they’ve got the right idea – the same Glastonbury Tent theory that I’ve adopted of recent years: Buy one from Asda for £15, spend the weekend with water slowly seeping through the canvas onto your sleeping bag, clothes and face, leave it standing when you leave for either some poor lost, off their face festival goer to sleep in or someone to fall into (last year it was Yorkshire Lass’s bloke) and get a new one the next year. No personal attachment and the correct amount of unbent tent pegs every time.

I explored my gate (number 3 of 4) to find out that all 3 gates appeared to be through one door onto some tarmac. So I waited for the departure board to announce boarding. Until I realised the departure board was actually a TV showing a teletext screen of the airport’s arrivals and departures.

Eventually, some lovely Air New Zealand lass announced our departure and we traipsed over to the aeroplane.

The flight was beautiful and I took several hundred photographs (or so it must have seemed to my boyfriend last night when I was saying ‘look here’s one out of the window of the sky’, ‘here’s another one but don’t those clouds look like a ploughed field?’, ‘here’s some mountains from the sky’ etc) and I was beginning to feel suitably smug at my own jet setting independence.

And then the Captain announced that it was going to be a little bumpy.

That was pilot speak, I interpreted in hindsight, for ‘hold on to your hats guys, this is going to be one hell of a turbulent ride’.

The next hour I spent gripping on to the seat as we were tossed about the beautiful sky (that I was beginning to find less tranquil by the minute) as the winds hit the plane like small children violently attacking a piñata. I looked at other passengers, as terror gripped hold of my facial muscles and spread through my already tense body, to see if anyone else shared my fear. No one seemed to notice. One passenger was even smiling (maybe it was a physical representation of hysteria). I on the other hand was feeling like I was going to be seeing the chocolate chip biscuit and cup of tea they had so kindly treated me to very soon.

Luckily my return journey, after a beautiful few days exploring a tiny fraction of the South Island, was a little less eventful. I didn’t quite manage ‘relaxed’ but I conquered ‘petrified’ fairly reasonably considering the circumstances.

I have two weeks until I fly again which should hopefully allow me just enough time to erase any remnants of terror floating around my brain before I go through the whole thing again (if only I could be prescriptive over what I remember and swap memories of fear for song lyrics or intelligent ‘after dinner’ facts).