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

There is a particular flavour to the months between October and February in London. The light goes early. The Tube smells faintly of damp wool. People start saying “well, it's the run-up to Christmas” in mid-October as if that explains everything, which, fair enough, it sort of does. I find I either disappear into a duvet for the whole stretch and emerge in March slightly paler than I went in, or I spend the entire thing on planes. This year I did the second one.

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

The World Cup Ecstasy.  Or not.

First things first. The All Blacks beat Australia in the Rugby World Cup final. The day itself was excellent — we went down to the Richmond fan zone with a group of friends and Josh's dad, who had the time of his life surrounded by Kiwis behaving exactly the way Kiwis behave when this kind of thing happens. Cheering, swearing, hugging strangers, reverently watching Richie's last test. It was one of those afternoons where the rugby is the rugby but the joy is what's around it.

And then we left the fan zone and got on a Tube and went home, and the strangest thing happened, which is that London just… carried on. As though it was a normal Saturday night. There was no fanfare. No closed-off streets. No spontaneous waiata in Trafalgar Square. The pubs were busy because they're always busy. The bus drivers had no idea anything had occurred.

I keep thinking about Auckland in 2011, after we won at Eden Park. The whole CBD lost its mind that night. It was impossible to get into anywhere worth going — every bar had a queue down the street, every pub was three-deep at the bar, the Viaduct was carnage. I ended up at Bungalow 8 in the small hours, riding the kind of national high that you only really get when ten per cent of your country's population is awake at the same time celebrating the same thing. I will admit, freely and for the record, that I also ended up shagging my work colleague that night. As celebration. Needs must.

Compare that to 2015. We won. London shrugged. Josh and I went home and celebrated quietly, which is, I have decided, also a perfectly valid way to mark a World Cup win. Just different. There is a particular muted feeling to having won something enormous in a country that doesn't quite realise you've won it, and I haven't worked out yet whether it's a relief or a small loss. Possibly both.

Berlin, Take Two: The Capstone Edition

In late October, Capstone took the whole team to Berlin for a weekend of “team bonding,” which in the property recruitment industry means “drinking together in another city for tax-deductible reasons.” This was my second Berlin trip in five months — Josh and I had stumbled into Pride weekend back in June — and I will say, the city is just as magnificent the second time.

Saturday was a guided walking tour, properly led, properly informative, our guide a small German man with very expressive eyebrows. We did the big sights, drank coffee in cold sun, ate pretzels the size of my face. The night was less educational. We ended up at Matrix, which is a Berlin nightclub of the type I am still slightly old-fashioned enough to find faintly intimidating, where one of my colleagues passed out at the table at around 2am and we had to take turns checking he was still breathing. He was. He was, in fact, having the loveliest sleep of his life.

Sunday morning we did the Trabbi experience, which is a tour where you drive yourself around East Berlin in a vintage Trabant in convoy. They have the turning circle of a wheelie bin and the engine note of a hairdryer. The whole exercise was hugely undignified, and I loved it.

Capstone, Six Months In

On which note — I'm starting to find my feet at Capstone. I've now made my first few placements, all three of my first candidates were female PMs, and watching them step into the right roles at companies I'd identified for them is genuinely one of the most satisfying things I have done in my career so far.

There's something about pairing the right person with the right company — not the most senior, not the highest paid, the right one — that feels less like sales and more like matchmaking. I will not pretend I'm any good at the cold calls yet. I am, however, less scared of the phone than I was in September.

The downside is the floating salary. Recruitment is a basic-plus-commission model, and the commission is lumpy, and I have learned the hard way that some months you ride high and some months you eat into your credit card with the resigned expression of a person who has done this before and will do it again. I am told this evens out over a year. I am still in my first year and watching very carefully.

I have also been picking up an enormous amount of detail about the Project and Development Management space — who works where, who used to work where, who is about to leave where to go where else. The amount of intelligence you absorb just by ringing twenty PMs a day is genuinely staggering. And I keep hearing about MIPIM, the property industry's annual jolly in Cannes, which by all accounts is a four-day event in which approximately three hours are spent on actual property and the rest is spent getting on the piss on the Croisette. I am very much going to need to attend one of these one day. For research.

Krakow, Briefly

Friday 4 December, a group of us flew Stansted-Krakow on the late flight — me, Josh, and a small Kiwi crew. Two nights, properly compressed.

Saturday was the Christmas markets, which were genuinely magnificent. They had a Christmas tree the size of a small office building. We wandered through Stare Miasto eating things on sticks and drinking things in cardboard cups, ended up in a small restaurant tucked off the main square, ordered too much, and watched the city's Christmas lights blur with the cold against the windows. Krakow is properly beautiful. It is also properly, properly cold — the kind of cold that gets into your fillings.

Sunday morning we did Auschwitz. I am not going to write about Auschwitz. I am not equipped to write about Auschwitz, and the people who can write well about it have already written. I will say only that we spent the morning there, mostly in silence, and then the afternoon flying back to London, also mostly in silence, and that something settles in your chest after a place like that which doesn't entirely lift for several days.

Christmas, Cologne, Prague, and a Pork Knuckle

The genuinely lovely news of last year's Christmas was that my entire family came to the UK to spend it with us. I cannot describe what it is like to have all four of them — Mum, Dad, Nat, Christina — in the same time zone as me for the first time since I left home. We spent Christmas Day with Josh's family in Kent, which was its own small miracle of two whānau folding into one for the day: roast everything, board games that got competitive in the way they only do when you've added wine, a family quiz that Christina won, because Christina always wins.

There was a small drama on Boxing Day. I'd taken my family back to Clapham for one final London night with us before we all flew to Europe, and Mum left her handbag at Josh's parents' place. Josh, who had stayed in Kent for the day, was — to put it mildly — not over the moon about being asked to bring it back into central London on Boxing Day, on the basis that he had quite reasonably not signed up for an unscheduled drive to W6 to deliver lost property. There was a tense phone call. There was a sigh you could have heard from Dover. There was, eventually, the handbag, returned. We laugh about it now. We did not laugh about it then.

On the 27th, the family caught the Eurostar to Cologne. We did the Christmas markets (post-peak by then, but still glorious), the cathedral (genuinely staggering when you stand at the foot of it), glühwein out of porcelain mugs you keep as souvenirs, the Hohenzollern bridge with all its love-locks. Then on to Prague for five nights, where the city quietly took my breath away. Prague is, I think, the most beautiful city I have ever stood in. Old Town Square in cold December light, the astronomical clock, the Charles Bridge in low fog at six in the morning. Somebody check on me; I might not be okay.

Josh joined us on the 30th, and we spent New Year's Eve on Charles Bridge in actual snow, which is a sentence I will be repeating at dinner parties for the rest of my life. The fireworks were the slight catch — Prague's old town is densely built and the noise bounces off everything, so what should have been a charming display sounded uncomfortably like the city was being shelled. I held a glass of something warm and tried to look calm.

On 2 January, after a guided tour of Prague Castle in the morning, we came down into town for lunch and I had pork knuckle. Pork knuckle. I will say this once and clearly: do not, under any circumstances, eat pork knuckle in Prague in January and then proceed to have another small argument with your boyfriend (this one about being too focused on my family and not enough on him, which, fair, was probably true) and then go to bed.

I was hit by the most spectacular food poisoning of my life. I have learned several things from the experience. The first is that when you are dehydrated, you sip water; you do not gulp it, because if you gulp it, it does not stay down, and the visual that produces is not one you would like to perform in front of your boyfriend. The second is that my Dad, bless him, will run from one Prague pharmacy to another at 7am to find anti-nausea tablets and Sprite for his eldest daughter. The third is that I have not eaten pork knuckle since and I do not intend to. We flew back to London on the 4th, me approximately the colour of a Granny Smith apple, and I went straight to bed for thirty-six hours.

Suffolk, Briefly

Last weekend of January, Josh and I drove up to Ipswich to see Michelle and Adam's new house. They've bought it — which feels like the most grown-up thing anyone in our circle has done so far — and it was lovely to see what someone's home looks like when they own the walls. Adam, in his enthusiasm, had ripped up the carpet on the stairs hoping to find good period timber underneath, only to discover that the previous owner had laid the carpet over an industrial-strength adhesive that had melted directly onto the wood and would now require, in technical terms, a miracle. He showed us the stairs with the cheerful pride of a man who has not yet realised the size of his project. We did not have the heart to tell him.

They have also, gloriously, got a rescue dog. She is small, beautiful, and trembles at almost everything, in the way that rescue dogs sometimes do until they remember they're safe. We sat on the floor of Michelle's living room and let her sniff us, and after about twenty minutes she put her chin on my knee, and I have rarely been more honoured. One day, when she's settled, the cuddles are going to be incredible.

And then back down the A12 on Sunday night, into the last week of work before Brazil.

Onwards

So that's where we've been. A win that didn't quite land, a Berlin that did, a Krakow that punched harder than I expected, a Christmas with the people I love most in the world, a New Year I will think about for the rest of my life, and a Suffolk weekend with a small trembling dog who is the new love of my life.

Next week, I'm writing about Brazil.

Settle in.

Katie x