The Dark Ages

When we go on holiday to NZ I'll gain great pleasure from various little things, many of which I hadn't expected to have to go cold turkey on when we moved here.

I can't wait to go to a supermarket and buy readymade falafel mix. (WA business opportunity anyone?) I am going to buy a Cookie Crumble and eat it without laughing; here they are called Golden Gaytime. Then I am going to buy WINE at that supermarket like a proper grownup! I'm going to go into another shop and assume it has EFTPOS - and for once, it will. By leaving Australia for nearly a month I hope to get our monthly bank fees down to less than our monthly alcohol spend...for the first time since moving here. I’ll go to a petrol station, put the fuel nozzle in the tank, click the wee latch and fill the tank "no hands". (Can you still do that in NZ? Can't here. Like so many other things it is "a safety issue".) My children can't wait to get back to the land of hydroslides and challenging playgrounds. We all want to sit on grass, or anywhere outside for that matter, without being used as a food source for a myriad of little creatures. I can't wait to get some pleasant, free exercise - something I find impossible here at this time of the year.

But there is one thing I miss more than marmite, affordable icecream, affordable fish and chips, affordable wet fish, proper-sized long blacks, school pools, fast internet, drivers who know how to merge, having a choice of potato varieties, decent second hand shops and meeting other people who understand why green waste going to landfill is a problem ... all put together.

That photo at the top of this post was taken out my front window at 4am yesterday. By 5am the world is fully light and by 6am it is time to slap the sunscreen on. 

Here is that same scene last night at 7.40pm.

That's right. Pitch black.  Sigh.  WA doesn't have daylight saving and I am firmly in the "This is a tragedy" camp.  The only arguement I can get out of people who don't want it is "Just because the Eastern States have it, it doesn't mean we have to too" which makes me think about proper grownups again ... and people who have cut off their noses. 

So when I'm in NZ the thing I'm looking forward to most (apart from seeing friends and family of course) is getting some of that pleasant, free exercise in the form of walks or swims ... in the evenings.