A Cup, Some Cities, and a Pork Knuckle I Will Never Forgive

There is a particular quality to the months between October and February in London. The light goes early. The trains smell of damp wool. People begin saying “it’s the run-up to Christmas” from mid-October as though that explains everything, which, fair enough, it sort of does. I either disappear into a duvet for the whole stretch and emerge in March slightly paler, or I spend it on planes. This year: planes.

So before the post I actually want to write — which is Brazil, and which is coming — here is everything else that happened between September’s post and last month’s flight to Rio. As briefly as I can manage. Which is, historically, not very briefly at all.

London Blinks

The All Blacks beat Australia in the World Cup final on a Saturday afternoon in late October. We went to the Richmond fan zone with a group of friends, which was excellent — loud, warm, the particular joy of a crowd full of people for whom this matters deeply and who have no inhibitions about demonstrating it. The drive home was fine. We got back and opened something decent and watched the post-match and went to bed at a reasonable hour.

And then on Sunday morning London just… carried on. No fanfare. No closed streets. The bus drivers were unaware that anything had occurred. The pubs were busy, as they always are. Nowhere was three-deep at the bar for reasons related to New Zealand rugby. It was, to all external appearances, a normal Sunday.

I’ve been thinking about Auckland in 2011 ever since. We were three years into Henley Road by then, properly embedded, and the city went completely and joyfully mad that night. The Viaduct was carnage. Every bar in the CBD had a queue down the street. There was a particular electricity to being in a city where the whole population was awake at the same time feeling the same thing, and it lasted for days. You’d catch it in the supermarket, on the ferry, at the petrol station. The whole country at once.

This time: the living room. Me and Richard on the sofa. Gemma in full All Blacks kit — she’d been in it since noon, on the basis that superstition cannot be scheduled — sitting cross-legged on the floor with a cushion she periodically covered her face with during the tense bits and then lowered when she’d confirmed nothing catastrophic had happened. New Zealand won 34–17. She stood up, said “right,” in a tone of professional satisfaction, and went to put the kettle on.

I watched her go and thought: this is what it looks like to be a Kiwi in England when something like this happens. You feel it fully, and then you make tea, because there’s nobody to run into the street with.

I understand that feeling now in a way I didn’t in 2011. It’s not a lesser feeling. It’s just a quieter one.

Berlin, Round Two: The Agency Edition

Late October, the boutique agency took the whole team to Berlin for the weekend. Team bonding, they called it, which in property recruitment means drinking together in another city for plausibly tax-deductible reasons. My second Berlin in five months — Richard’s conference was in June — and I’ll say without reservation: the city holds up.

Saturday was a guided walking tour, our guide a small German man with extraordinarily expressive eyebrows who delivered the history of the Wall with the clipped authority of someone who has given this tour four hundred times and found it no less significant on the four hundredth. Excellent coffee in cold sun. Pretzels the size of my face. The night was considerably less educational. We ended up at Matrix, a Berlin nightclub of the sort that I am, at forty, just old-fashioned enough to find faintly vertiginous, and one of my colleagues fell peacefully asleep at the table at around 2am with the composed dignity of a man who had decided he was done with the evening and had simply acted on it. We checked on him periodically. He was absolutely fine. He was, if anything, having the best time at the table.

Sunday morning: the Trabant convoy. You drive yourself around East Berlin in vintage Trabants, in convoy, which sounds charming and is in practice magnificently undignified because the Trabant has the turning circle of a wheelie bin and the engine note of a hairdryer having a breakdown. I loved every minute of it.

Home Sunday evening. Monday morning desk. The cycle continues.

The Recruitment Desk, Six Months On

While I’m here: six months in at the boutique agency, a brief report for the record.

I’ve made my first several placements. The matchmaking element — putting the right person in the right role, not the biggest title, not the highest fee, the right fit — is turning out to suit something in me that I hadn’t anticipated. I ring project managers all day and I understand what they’re telling me, and I understand what the firms want even when they don’t articulate it well, and the gap between those two things is where I’m actually useful. That’s a reasonable thing to discover about yourself at forty.

The commission remains lumpy. I’ve stopped being surprised by the lumpy months and started simply banking the good ones with the focused efficiency of someone who has learned this lesson the hard way. Progress.

I keep hearing about MIPIM. Everyone in property recruitment keeps hearing about MIPIM. It’s the industry’s annual conference in Cannes, which by all accounts involves approximately three hours of actual property and four days of the Croisette. I am putting it on the list. For research.

Krakow Christmas Markets

Immy’s idea, as the best things often are. She’d read something about the Kraków Christmas markets in October and texted the same afternoon: “Friday 4th December, long weekend, Miles and I are going, you and Richard should come.” We looked at each other and booked within the hour. This is the correct response to Immy’s ideas.

Four of us on a late Stansted flight Friday, landed in the cold — and Kraków in December is cold in the way that is not metaphorical, the kind that gets into your back teeth and stays there. Saturday was the Christmas markets, which were genuinely magnificent: a Christmas tree the size of a small office building in the main square, Stare Miasto lit up and glowing, things on sticks and things in cups and a small restaurant tucked off the square where we ordered comprehensively too much and watched the frost build on the windows from the inside. Immy had a running architectural and historical commentary that covered most of the city’s significant buildings, delivered not as a lecture but as the natural overflow of someone who finds things genuinely interesting. Miles and Richard, to their credit, kept up.

Sunday morning, the four of us went to Auschwitz.

I’m not going to write about Auschwitz at length. I don’t think I’m the right person to do it and I’m not sure a blog post is the right container for it. We spent the morning there, mostly in silence, and the afternoon flying home, also mostly in silence, and something settles in your chest after a place like that which doesn’t lift for days. What I’ll say is that going with people you love, and being able to sit quietly together on a plane afterwards without needing to fill it with anything, is the right way to go.

The Year Everyone Came

Christmas 2015 was the first Christmas where everyone was in the same country at the same time, and I mean everyone: my parents, who flew over from their winter in Portugal; Tom and Sarah; John and Priya; Richard’s family in Surrey; and us. Multiple Christmases across multiple days, which is either a logistical challenge or a gift depending on your disposition and how you feel about spending a lot of time in cars.

Christmas Day itself with Richard’s family in Surrey, which was warm and generous and involved a family quiz in which John was insufferably competitive and then insufferably victorious, in that order, and will apparently be referencing his win until the quiz heat death of the universe. Gemma won the tiebreaker. She was pleased about this in a way she pretended was casual and which very clearly wasn’t.

There was a small drama on Boxing Day that has since become family mythology. My mother left her handbag at Richard’s parents’ house, which we  discovered approximately forty minutes after arriving home. Richard, who had spent the day in Surrey and was by this point in his tracksuit and committed to an evening of doing nothing, was asked to get back in the car and drive it to us.

He did not say no. What he did was go very quiet in the particular way that means a great deal without saying any of it, and then he put his shoes back on, and he drove it to us, and when he got back I made him an extremely good cup of tea and we didn’t mention it again. We mention it now, often, at my mother’s expense. She finds this fair.

Gemma spent Christmas oscillating between England and Auckland in her head in a way that I’ve learned to recognise and not to name. She was happy — she was genuinely happy, I’m not projecting; she’d had a good term and she likes Tom and John’s company, and Sarah and Priya are both warm enough to pull a fifteen-year-old into the adult conversation without making a performance of it. But at Christmas lunch she went quiet for a minute in the way she does, and I knew she was thinking about Auckland, about the Henley Road or Milton Road kitchen, about Christmases that were hot and outside and probably happening right now on the other side of the world without her. I didn’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. You just make sure there’s enough on the table and trust the day to do its work.

Cologne, Prague, the New Year, and the Incident

On the 27th my parents caught the Eurostar to Cologne.  After dropping Gemma at John and Priya’s house for the New Year week (adopting a teenager for a few days will certainly crystallise their recent thoughts about having children),  Richard and I headed to meet my parents in Cologne. The Cologne Christmas markets were past their peak but still glorious — the cathedral is one of those buildings that simply should not fit in a city, two Gothic towers of completely unreasonable ambition jammed into a medieval street plan — and we drank Glühwein from the porcelain mugs they let you keep, which is the single greatest innovation in the history of European Christmas markets and I will hear no argument.

Then Prague for five nights, which I was not prepared for. I knew Prague was beautiful in the abstract way you know things about places you haven’t visited. Standing in Old Town Square in cold December light, with the astronomical clock doing its hourly routine and my parents on either side of me and Tom saying something that made everyone laugh, I thought: this might be the most beautiful city I’ve ever stood in. I’m still not sure I was wrong. The Charles Bridge at six in the morning with the fog coming off the river. The castle on the hill. The particular quality of the light at four in the afternoon.

Richard had needed to stay behind in Cologne for a few extra days for some kind of mini work crisis, and joined us on the 30th. We saw in the New Year on Charles Bridge in actual snow, which is a sentence I will be producing at dinner tables for the rest of my life. The fireworks were the one catch — Prague’s old town is all stone and everything bounces, so what ought to have been a charming display sounded alarmingly like an urban artillery exercise. I stood on Charles Bridge in the snow clutching a warm drink and trying to look like someone who was not extremely startled by every single one.

On the 2nd of January, after a Prague Castle tour, we had lunch. I ordered the pork knuckle.

I will say this precisely once: do not eat a large piece of pork in Central Europe in January and go directly to bed, particularly if you have also just had a conversation with your husband in which he reasonably pointed out that you’d been consumed by your family for five days and had occasionally appeared to forget he was there. He was right. I acknowledged it. We cleared the air. It was fine.

Then the pork knuckle found me.

I will spare you the detail. I will simply tell you that my father ran between Prague pharmacies at 7am locating anti-nausea tablets and Sprite for his daughter, because he is that kind of father. That Richard was patient in the manner of someone married long enough to handle this situation without making it worse or funnier than it already is. That I was approximately the colour of old celery for the entire flight home on the 4th. That I went straight to bed when we got back and stayed there for thirty-six hours.

I have not eaten pork knuckle since. I do not intend to.

January: Suffolk and Horsham

Work took me to Ipswich in the last week of January — a client visit, a development company I’d been managing a search for, whose project director wanted a proper conversation rather than a phone call. I drove up on a Thursday and back on the Friday, and the drive gave me the specific low-key pleasure of leaving home and arriving somewhere with different air. Flat, wide, the quality of the light off the fields. A good lunch. A productive afternoon. The particular satisfaction of a client relationship that’s actually working.

The following weekend I went round to Mum and Dad’s. No occasion, no birthday — just the quiet accumulation of weeks at the grindstone that makes you need a nostalgic Saturday in your parents’ kitchen. Mum made the lemon cake. We’d done a proper session on it earlier this year — me watching, her teaching, half of it instinctive and impossible to write down — and she made it again, just because she felt like it, and we ate it in the kitchen with tea while Dad made noises about going for a walk that never materialised.

Claire came on Sunday afternoon. She and David have booked a holiday — a Greek island, which she described with the mild bewilderment of someone who has been organising everyone else’s logistics for so long that making a decision for her own pleasure has become a slightly foreign exercise. Two hours of tea and Claire’s particular brand of Horsham news, delivered with such warmth and specificity that I came away knowing more about three streets in West Sussex than I do about most of London. Then back on the road on Sunday evening, into the last week before Brazil.

Where We Are

So. A World Cup win that felt different this side of the world, and a fifteen-year-old who processed it by making tea. Two Berlins in five months, one of which involved a Trabant and questionable life choices at 2am. Kraków, which was more than I expected. A Christmas with everyone I love in the same country, which I hadn’t had since 1997. New Year on a bridge in the snow. A pork knuckle that I will carry as a cautionary tale for the rest of my life. And a Horsham weekend that reset something quietly, the way those weekends always do.

Next post: Brazil. I mean it this time.