Open Writing

At the beginning of March 2005, as we descended over the expanse of snow formerly known as Greater Manchester, our old friend Hindsight was starting to whisper, “You know, you went too soon. You should have waited a year, spaced it out more evenly.” Maybe we did, but we’d already booked everything before we received news of a certain important event that I’m sure would have delayed our departure. So it was that, in the merry month of May, Cody Michael, a.k.a. grandson no. 3, was born. – and we wouldn’t be seeing anything of him in the flesh, not for a very, very long time.

When we emerged, shivering, from the airport terminal, the whole plan effectively went onto the back burner – and the gas was turned off at the mains. Well, not quite the whole plan: the “night watchman” remained on duty. We’d noticed that, between our two trips to New Zealand, the house prices had crept up – not by a huge amount, but enough to warn us that we shouldn’t be daft with our brass.

On the domestic front we were hoping, I like to think not unreasonably, that all the things that worked now would carry on working, and see us through until we finally departed. Mind you, if we’d wished that on the day I retired, our hopes would have been well and truly scuppered already. You see, on the morning of the first day of the rest of my life, whilst Pam was off somewhere getting herself preened, I was overtaken by a minor fit of zeal. I decided to take the vac. round. That turned out to be a Bad Move – within two minutes there it was, lying on the carpet, smoke curling lazily out of its innards, as dead as a dodo. Still, we could hope for no further such mishaps, unless of course they were covered by our insurance.

Within a few months of formulating that aspiration, we’d had to replace, inter alia, the coffee maker, the computer, and the even the fridge/freezer, which had – somewhat perversely, in my opinion – decided to behave more like an oven than a fridge. Naturally, none of these WAS covered by the insurance, and neither did it end there. In June, the car – yes, the b****y car! – joined the roll of dishonour. Expecting that it would carry on being as reliable as it had been for the last umpteen years, we put it in for its annual MOT test. Another expectation bit the dust.

The garage estimated the MOT work at over £600, excluding another major fault that had been found. With one of those characteristic sharp intakes of breath betwixt slitted dentures, the garage man said, "We know what the fault is, but we don't know what’s causing it - it'll need a BIT MORE work to find that out." Right, I thought, that's a few hours at some extortionate rate to locate the cause, plus parts and labour to fix it, plus VAT. That'll probably come to something like four times what the car's worth, and the only guarantee we’ll have is that it would do much the same, or worse, to us again in 12 months' time.

In an attempt to cut our losses, we opted to dip into our emigration fund and replace the car. For once, we struck lucky, picking up a Toyota Corolla 1.6 automatic in pretty well mint condition. Although it had done scarcely more than half the mileage of our traitorous Peugeot, it was actually four months OLDER! Anyway, we got it for less than half what we’d budgeted, so you could say we’d a bit of a buffer against any unexpected problems – and at least this “new” motor was far more comfortable for our ageing bums, and came complete with a stack of bells and whistles that we'd never had before.

Of course, it turned out that we needed some of that buffer and, moreover, the list of defunct domestic devices was continuing to expand like a Bill Gates empire (i.e. far too fast and with scant justification). For instance, at one juncture I was busy scanning our (dismayingly large) collection of photographic memories. The throughput steadily declined. When it got too near to next to nowt, I called a halt and investigated.

The problem? Manually adjusting the colour balance was taking longer and longer. Diagnosis? The hardware wasn’t “reading” the photos right. Remedial action? I tried every tip I could lay my hands on. Result? Joy was conspicuous by its utter absence. Solution? New scanner, and – praise be! – the throughput made a gratifyingly large hole in the roof.

In fact, by December we’d started to joke that “everything was going wrong bar the kitchen sink.” Can you guess what happened in January (2006)? Oh, my, you ARE on the ball! It wasn’t just the sink, though – the worktop surround must have been quietly rotting for ages underneath its veneer because, one day, under the intense pressure of being wiped clean, it caved in completely. Patching it up was not an option, since we were hoping one day, maybe soon, to be trying to impress prospective house-buyers. Sorting that lot out cost us quite a bit of dosh, and me a severely ricked shoulder.

However, the worst part of all this waiting – other than being so far from our nearest and dearest – was watching helplessly as our comfy calculations crumbled, like that worktop surround, under the onslaught of events and circumstances completely beyond our control. In addition to the aforementioned drains on our savings, we found ourselves trying to contend with unusually rampant rises in things like utility bills and council tax, and fuel costs in particular seemed to have belatedly joined the Space Race.

Speaking of which, we wished that the house prices in Whangarei would stop behaving like moon-rockets, and the house prices in Brighouse would START doing it. Oh, and we'd have liked the NZ/UK exchange rate to give some thought to moving in the OTHER direction, please! So it was that another “race” seemed to be developing: would we get through the door to New Zealand before mounting financial adversities shoved it shut in our faces?