A Year, Apparently.

Right. So it’s been a year and a bit since the last post, which was not the plan. I sat down to write something in the spring and then again in the summer and both times got about three paragraphs in and thought, this needs more space than I’ve got this evening, and then didn’t come back to it. So: here’s the whole thing, the day before Christmas Eve, a glass of something decent at my elbow, the house quiet because Gemma is upstairs packing for Bansko in a manner that can only be described as aggressive.

Sixteen months since we landed. Here’s what happened.

Settling, Properly

The first few months after the September post were mostly logistics, which I won’t bore you with beyond saying that the Horsham house slowly stopped feeling like a building full of other people’s decisions and started feeling like ours. Richard found his rhythm on the train into the City — fifty minutes door to desk, which he maintains is not that much longer than his old commute into the Auckland CBD, a claim which I will readily dispute even though I am well aware of the scattergun frequency that Auckland’s central 274 and 277 bus routes actually had.

Gemma turned fourteen in March — the nineteenth, three weeks before mine, exactly as it’s always been — and started properly settling into Millais. Real friends now, not just people she sees in lessons. A hockey team that takes her seriously. And, almost despite herself, a small but growing tolerance for England, expressed mostly through the absence of complaint rather than anything as generous as enthusiasm.

I will add that both her and Richard have started spending most early Saturday and Sunday mornings together on the couch watching the latest Warrior’s game, which I will absolutely not complain about – I am thrilled that my favourite people have something they can so closely bond over.  Maybe just with not as much yelling pre-8am.

Work: I spent the first part of the year at a working at Foxtons, which was fine and which taught me a great deal about how much England had changed in fifteen years, mostly through the medium of being quietly out-earned by younger colleagues with considerably less experience than me. I won’t dwell on it. By the summer I’d moved to a commercial agency role in the City, which is a better fit and a longer story for another post.

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Budapest, February

Richard and I did Budapest for Valentine’s weekend, which I would recommend to absolutely everyone.

We stayed up near Fisherman’s Bastion — beautiful, though our hotel was directly next to a church whose bells started at 6am with no regard whatsoever for people who’d had a late dinner the night before. We found an extraordinary café near the river, library-themed, a ceiling that was doing its very best impression of the Sistine Chapel, and hot chocolate so thick the spoon stood upright in the cup. I think about that hot chocolate more than is strictly healthy.

The Széchenyi Baths were an experience — freezing outside, slightly dated inside, and sticky underfoot in ways I won’t describe further, all set against architecture so beautiful it almost distracts you from the sticky bit. We also went to a Soviet-era circus, which I’d expected to be charmingly retro and which was actually quite sad — a very elderly elephant balancing on an inflatable ball is not the spectacle anyone is hoping for, and we left at the interval feeling we’d learned something about Eastern European institutional history we hadn’t exactly signed up to learn.

Valentine’s dinner redeemed everything: a tiny place called Carne di Hall, small menu, beef cheek I’m still thinking about, a red wine pairing that quietly recalibrated what I think dinner can be. Richard ordered in what he insisted was passable Hungarian and which the waiter received with the particular grace of someone who has heard a great many British tourists attempt this and has long since stopped expecting accuracy.

Belgrade, March

Sasha and Immy and I did a weekend in Belgrade in March, which I had absolutely no framework for and which turned out to be one of the best girls’ trips I’ve had in years.

Sasha started drinking at the airport, on the principle — her words — that “the holiday begins when you clear security, Nicole, that’s just maths.” Immy and I arrived in Belgrade considerably more composed than Sasha, who was by that point operating on a different timezone of cheerfulness entirely. We ate roughly our combined body weight in meat and cheese, walked through an old military fortress with some genuinely enormous guns, wandered through churches that Immy had read about on the flight over and could now explain to us in more detail than the actual information boards, and ended up, somehow, befriending a group of Dutch football fans who’d been at a match where someone had let off a flare in the stands — apparently entirely normal there, and a story that produced approximately the same response from all three of us, which was a kind of stunned English politeness.

The nightlife was something else entirely. I will simply leave that there.

Edinburgh, Autumn

A group of us drove up for the All Blacks against Scotland in the autumn, which turned out to be considerably more stressful than I’d anticipated. I have never seen the All Blacks play that nervously, and I spent most of the second half with my hands over my face, which is not dignified at forty but is, I’ve found, an accurate representation of how I now feel about close rugby involving New Zealand.

I sat next to a very cheerful Glaswegian man who informed me he was a football fan rather than a rugby man and had come along for the atmosphere, and who asked me, at regular and increasing intervals as the game tightened, to explain the rules and confirm whether New Zealand were supposed to be winning. Under calmer circumstances I think we’d have got on famously. Under those circumstances I was not equipped to be anyone’s rugby tutor.

The stop in Newcastle on the way up was its own small revelation — negative temperatures, men in mesh tops, young women in dresses that defied physics and the season, everyone radiating the specific delight of a Friday night in the North East regardless of what the thermometer was doing. Geordie warmth, I’ve decided, is a genuine and measurable phenomenon, and the South could stand to import some of it.

Tunisia, September

Richard and I had a week in Hammamet in September — the Radisson, which felt, even on the package-holiday end of things, impossibly glamorous after fifteen years of New Zealand holidays that mostly involved a tent and a chilly bin.

We did a quad bike excursion with the hotel one afternoon, which revealed a meaningful gap in our respective abilities. Richard was off immediately, fast and confident, clearly channelling something from a part of his personality I don’t often see in a suit. I made it about four hundred metres before stalling completely in a deep sand drift and having to be extracted by the tour guide with a patience that suggested I was not the first British wife of the week to need this particular service. Richard circled back at one point to check on me, took in the situation — me, sitting in the sand, quad bike at a slight angle, guide approaching with the weary good humour of a man who does this twice a day — and very wisely said nothing and rode off again. We still laugh about this. I laugh about it more than he does.

The Natural History Museum, October

A smaller thing, but I want to record it: Gemma and I went to the Science and Natural History Museums on a half-term Tuesday, ostensibly because she had a school project and needed to look at something for it, and we ended up spending three hours in the dinosaur hall and I was, despite being forty, exactly as excited as I was the one time I went as a seven-year-old. The diplodocus. The triceratops. Gemma, who is fourteen and was theoretically too old for any of this, stood in front of the T-Rex for a long time and then said, “okay, this is actually really cool,” which from a fourteen-year-old is roughly equivalent to a standing ovation. We had lunch afterwards and she told me, unprompted, about a girl at Millais who’d invited her to a sleepover. First one. I tried very hard not to make a big deal of it, and mostly succeeded.

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Bansko

And now: forty-eight hours from now, a group of us are flying to Bulgaria for a week’s skiing. I have skied approximately never. Richard has skied slightly more than approximately never, which in this context counts as expertise. Gemma is treating the whole thing as a personal training camp and has been doing some sort of stretching routine in the sitting room for the past three evenings that I’ve chosen not to ask about.

New country. New year, nearly. First time on skis for at least one of us.

What could go wrong.

Merry Christmas, by the way. I nearly forgot to say that, which feels like exactly the kind of thing this year has been.