Rude awakenings

One nice thing about living in Scotland is having the post delivered to your door every morning. Somehow being there when the mail arrives is more exciting, hearing it fall on the floor inside the front door and gauging by the sound what delights have been delivered. But in order for this to happen, someone has to let the postie into the building. We seem to have been woken from our peaceful unemployed slumber more than our fair share of times by the drone of the buzzer (16 flats in the building, we've been here 19 days so far - of which only 16 were mail delivery days - and yet we've had 5 wake-up calls).

But sometimes nice things are a result - it's not all incomprehensible letters from the Dept for Work & Pensions telling me that because I had not "signed on" for the jobseekers allowance they had already advised me I wasn't eligible for, I would not be getting any more of the jobseekers allowance that I had never received anyway. Huh?

Yesterday I got to unwrap (and unwrap, and unwrap, for it was a many-layered thing) a birthday parcel brimming with goodies from home - including The Listener and other mags, chocolates from Mangawhai, socks with toes to wear with my jandals (a word of advice, don't ever type "socks with toes" into Google), kiwi and sheep fridge magnets, a kete (woven flax bag) adorned with paua, a merino top in baby blue and a corrugated iron pukeko. It was enough to make a girl teary and homesick (in a nice kind of way). Actually, this parcel had arrived days in advance, because, inexplicably, it takes less time to send a parcel or letter from Auckland to Edinburgh (3 days) than from Auckland to Wellington.

It was sort of strange to be having a birthday all the way over here, far from many friends and whanau. But it did feel quite good to reflect on the action-packed year (got married, left job, left Wellington, left NZ, travelled through Africa, landed here, found new place to live, found new job...). It's also with anticipation that I look forward to plenty more new experiences and surprises.