Like a Longfin Eel

 I'm inside Heathrow now. All cleared for flight and confirmed covid negative. I've been testing 2-3x every week since arrival (daily on weeks when I've been wrecked and paranoid) and not once have I had a positive or equivocal positive test.  When I left work on Friday morning, a third of the anaesthetists were down with it, three of the midwives had been tested overnight after showing up to work with symptoms. One tested positive and went home. The hospital had been winding down resources, closing the covid ward, coincidentally the PCR machine had broken down and there was limited actual testing possible and a fair amount of delays and strain. I went to ED this week and it was grim - I've never seen so many people parked in the hallways and I remember the days of North Shore hospital in the early 2000s.  I feel like when we imagined a wave, we thought of it all like one Taranaki shaped peak, climb up and over to the other side, then done. But its more like waves waves...

None of the routine of loading up the boot, looking at the house, pulling it shut and heading off More like setting off on a one way hike I sat on the doorstep and watched the pine trees opposite wave in the wind, basking in the sun. Have I settled in so much here that home will feel like a foreign adventure?

I'm not sure if writing here is all that bright. I can always not post it. Or unpost it. When I think of what I'm going to miss about the UK probably the overwhelming thing, or perhaps underwhelming thing, is that its okay for me to be queer here. And its not to say that its not okay for people to be queer in NZ, its more that it felt not okay for *me* to be queer in NZ. Which of course is mostly my own baggage, but somehow (and certainly not deliberately), in the 50kg I packed coming here I didn't pack that. Or maybe I did, but I'm not taking it home with me.  The humming stress around that is similar to what it feels like working in a hospital with covid I think? Like, over the years I've made minimal micro adjustments and got on with things. It's no great oppression to go round all day wearing a mask.  When I arrived here there were  rainbow flags  freaking everywhere. I am old enough, and closeted enough to remember catching a glimpse of the flag in the corn...

March 13 Between sets of night shifts  After galoomping the bulk of my stuff to London on the green train (see previous post about how great green trains are), and packing the rest into a school bag sized backpack that strained at the seams. After saying goodbye to the dear Dragon boating crew. After tying up the loose ends from clinic and lab results at work. I went down to Cornwall to farewell folk there. A casual meandering which included helping my mate in Lostwitheal put the ear tags on new lambs, and getting to taste the juice of the peaberries we had harvested.  My housemate suggested going for a walk along the south west coastal path with her folks.  And Cornwall, fantastic, breathing rock, tumultuous sea, solar panel, rich new comers and weathered local, pasty perfection Cornwall - put on a stunner couple of days. 

(Written March 8) I thought it was spring a couple of weeks ago When the first flowers poked out, earlier than usual And people started wandering around Exeter in their shorts A cheerful heralding of climate change But I forgot the green that comes after Spring grass The branches before the buds burst forth Bulbs hidden at the base of trees All very banal to write down But wonderful  When you pause and realise how hard the winter has been The rain can’t dampen it Red mud on our shoes

Dawn on a Train This is the pay off for getting up so early and stomping through the empty streets of Exeter. For crawling out of bed wondering what I was thinking. Speeding backwards through frosty fields. Tea and a packet of crisps. (There’s no tea like a GWR train tea). Mist lifting off the rivlets coursing through the paddocks The Devon flag laid out  I love the feeling of having already arrived to my destination, despite being hours away. Giving over trust to the tracks. To the bare trees and bright sky Cast with birds  The stops gather people And their stories Books and head phones Bags and worries Sun glints plastic cups as a couple raise celebratory  Early Bubbles Spire Terrace houses Allotments Field Shed Station Hills Hills Hills Spire Houses Allotments Field River Frost Wide wet plains It’s like scrolling.  Mindless. The Wiltshire hills rise up The red dirt shifts to white clay Running my eyes over the landscap...

I don’t really know how to describe what happened; there are important aspects of patient confidentiality but also unfathomable layers of physiology and pathology and spirituality. The bullet points are everything and nothing. Twice in January a persons heart stopped in front of me, a team gathered, shocks were given, they survived, they were taken to another hospital place to recover and then they went home. Death then life. Dusky bowel Unblinking eyes The flush of colour The gasp of breath When I slow down enough I get jolts similar to what I recognise is an element of PTSD- but instead of a stabs of fear and pain or sadness, it’s astonishment.  A hyper-awareness of breath.  My own.  Others’.  The colour of warm hands. The capacity to be heard and understood. The capacity to speak. I don’t really know how to describe what happened. We had lost two other people in December. And then there was M, who I last saw leaning over his hospital bed to p...

  "Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go."  Capt. J Cook My last tourist fling in the UK was a long weekend in York where it rained so steadily the river breached the banks in the city. Ten years ago my flatmate at the time insisted that York was the best place to go to in the UK. My war of the roses set was incomplete. Lancaster without York, red rose without white.  So I went on the long train which is like time travel and crash course in regional accents; as we drew north the phrases became richer and less familiar to me. I caught up with my mate O  who thankfully has returned to medicine, in a new job out of London. After I'd seen her in the empty Trafalgar Square, she had been to a handful of anti-lockdown protests. Forefront of my mind was the protests back home , fraying my own sense of kiwi identity.  Over  some truly divine food , we unpacked again what it had all b...

At time of writing this, I made it a full year working in the NHS without getting covid, and am waiting for my final PCR to head home. I genuinely don't know how I missed it. This is a picture from Feb of a couple of mates grinning at me standing in the rain after delivering some groceries on day 5 of their isolation. Apparently I'm a Ninja.

I booked into a cooking course at the river cottage at the End of January; I think I had imagined noodling around a cottage with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall talking about prison yogurt .  Which of course it wasn’t- they had made a cooking school in another beautiful field and I think my feelings on the day were augmented a bit by slight disappointment. But in retrospect it was excellent . I knew I had signed up for vege skills but it wasn’t until mid afternoon that I clocked that it was also vegan and that I wasn’t missing the meat at all (the key? The Maillard reaction).    Before going on the course I popped in to see my friend and her mum in nearby axminster. It was a glorious morning and I think any time I make any of the recipes that day I will recall the warmth of that morning. ____________________________________________________________ Holiness, or The Orange Carer and the Knitter  Driving in east Devon On a frosty morning Empty A35 road Shadows cast acros...

Right now I am sitting in a not entirely unpleasant concrete corner of the pathway between the carpark and Terminal 2. A cockney taxi driver dropped me off about half an hour ago, having regaled me with stories about when he met 'the other' Delia Smith. (He took great pleasure about referring to me as the original, I don't know if he meant that as if I look 80 too or just charming customer always first priority attitude; either way he was great).  A man has just scuffed the cigarettes into a pile with his shoes before laying out his jacket to pray on. A lady on the other side is so frazzled that when she went to light a cigarette she held the flame to her lips.  I went inside to get my pre-flight PCR in a set up that still feels very permanently temporary, tucked into the corner of a rammed check-in hall. I have 4hrs to wait for the result. 8 until I fly.  I know I have a bit of catching up to do. I got crap at writing because I wanted to stop writing about things had any...