Posts by Paul Campbell
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Whenever I visited London I always envied the kiwis I knew there - living in the SF Bay Area (late 80s, 90s) we were so effectively cut off from NZ that we'd meet perhaps one kiwi a year - usually someone manning a ski lift at Tahoe - meeting actual kiwis living near us was so rare I think it only happened 2-3 times in 20 years. Flying home on a trip every few years we'd sit in the departure lounge and eavesdrop luxuriating in the kiwi accents around us.
But in London every pub seemed to have a kiwi bar tender, our old friends had an extended kiwi social circle, many of whom we already knew
(BTW this is also why National Radio was such a treat when it appeared on the 'net)
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But surely quantum physicists just have to pull the old superposition trick and they can be everywhere at once .....
which great because it means he can live and work in different places .... until you find out about all the other wives ....
BTW - the trick to moving back is to set a deadline and tell everyone - do it enough and you can't back down - we told everyone when my eldest was born that we'd move back to NZ when he hit high school ..... eventually that was 3 years away, then 2, then we had to do it .... -
he was just like that back in 1981 when I last had anything to do with him too ....
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A friend from Sydney offers this image of the dust storm ....
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Well - I'm screwed, probably permanently - in NZ everyone thinks I'm american, in the US they think I'm english or occasionally south african or australian - there's nowhere on the planet I don't have an accent - I'm old enough now that will probably always be true
Well nowhere english speaking anyway - in Taiwan where I am this week I'm told I have an easy to understand accent (when I don't speak too fast)
(so you hear that expats - move home before it's too late unless you want to work in the english dept at the uni and are cultivating that faux oxford accent ....)
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I read PA (and Russell on usenet before that) while I lived overseas - for that connection to back home - on line news papers seemed to be hard to read - not enough context for a lot of stories (I did listen to nat radio on line for a while but it was shut down).
After 20 years we decided to move home - mostly for our kids - washing up in NZ in 2004 - we're very glad we did, things have worked out well for all of us (but sadly with my continuing 'merkin accent no one thinks I'm really a kiwi any more).
Moving back home is so much harder than we thought it would be - selling up your life and moving with no definite future is hard - it took us over a year between when we started packing and finished unpacking.
For the current expats: one thing about all the bad stuff in the NZ media - remember in NZ they publish EVERYTHING - in Oakland where I used to live there were a couple of hundred murders a year - most never made the paper unless they were particularly gory or involved someone famous - NZ still has little enough crime that it all gets covered.
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No one ever thinks of the candlestick maker.
Well between carbon footprint compliance and lighting efficiency regulations .....
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As a kid the bus to town was 4d (3c) - a movie was 9d (7c) - I got 6d (5c) a week pocket money - 1d mixed sweets gave me maybe a bag of 10.
On the other hand in primary school we had to be able to do calculations in LSD, tons/pounds/ounces, miles/furlongs/yards/feet/inches - no calculators, long division ruled - why on earth we didn't shift to the metric system when the french did I have no idea (goddamned Nelson, if he'd lost the world would have been a better place)
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I wonder if it had to be an Anglican cathedral, or would a catholic one do?
(Dunedin got its cathedral by stealth - the good Presbyterians who ran the town didn't go in for cathedrals and were surprised one day to suddenly discover one being built in the Octagon)
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Joe: yes you do
Actually we might have had a chip shop too - my parents didn't do that much - I think I went out to a sit down dinner with my family once before I left home (my uncle's 21st - he really did get a key). Cars and supermarkets have made a big difference to the way we conduct our lives.