Blog 0: so long

As the poet and philosopher Post Malone once said, I'm no good at goodbyes. I've called this Blog 0, as my travels begin tomorrow, though it feels like I have been leaving all week. This starts what I hope to be a series of weekly instalments, until I either run out of interesting things to say, or the discipline to say them on time.

I’m all packed – check-in, cello and carry-on. I’ve been playing a strange kind of ‘packing Tinder’ for the past few days: yes to those shoes, no to these ones. This shirt is the kind you’d take home to meet your mum, that one definitely isn’t: swipe left.

Tomorrow’s journey takes me from Canberra to Sydney, then on to Wellington. I haven’t been back to New Zealand in over 4 years- a couple of earnest-though-ill-timed efforts having been stymied by lockdowns and border closures.

For all that Canberra has been a wonderful place to live, it lacks (through no fault of its own) two key environmental elements that Wellington has in abundance: the sea, and the wind. I’m looking forward to both. People laugh when I say I miss the Wellington wind. It is reassuring to me; it carries the promise of change and renewal. If you don’t like the weather, don’t worry- the wind will blow something else through in a moment. If it’s a lovely day: make the most of it before it runs away.

The goodbyes have been hard, everyone has been so relentlessly nice. I maintain that most of them are ‘see you agains’ but I guess we’ll have to see. I have Frost’s words wringing in my ears: “…Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back…” more as motivation to prove him wrong than as sad acquiescence to Manichean dualities and predeterminism.

Onwards!