We arrived in London on April Fool’s Day 2001, just before my 24th birthday. We’d stopped in Indonesia and Thailand on the way, wetting our feet in the world outside New Zealand, Matt picking up giardia and shedding 11 kilos on the way.
With just a couple of years’ work under our belts following the carousel of parties, lectures, empty bottles and cigarette butts that was university, we’d made the decision to swap hemispheres. We sorted the necessary visas, obtained passports and spent several months of Fridays being injected with vaccines. Our Friday nights erased by a post-vaccination alcohol ban, we partied on Thursdays, turning up to our appointments delicate and stinking of booze.
We arrived in London on a cold grey day after a 12-hour flight on one of the few remaining planes that had a smoking section. We’d received no advance warning and, in shock, had summoned a flight attendant to get the lowdown. No, she assured us (admirably with a straight face), we were in fact in the non-smoking section – the smoking section ended at row 50; we were seated in row 51.
Believe me, only the hardcore actually choose to travel on a smoking flight and we were surrounded by passengers who lit up the moment we reached altitude and the non-smoking light flicked off, and continued smoking their filterless-strongest-of-the-stenchy-strongest cigarettes they could lay their nicotine-stained fingers on all the way from Bangkok to London. We had to build little tents under our complimentary blankets to stop our eyes from watering and our throats from seizing up.
Believe me, only the hardcore actually choose to travel on a smoking flight and we were surrounded by passengers who lit up the moment we reached altitude and the non-smoking light flicked off, and continued smoking their filterless-strongest-of-the-stenchy-strongest cigarettes they could lay their nicotine-stained fingers on all the way from Bangkok to London. We had to build little tents under our complimentary blankets to stop our eyes from watering and our throats from seizing up.
We stayed with my best friend in the recesses of North London in a small terrace house with ten flatmates in a neighbourhood full of Turks and 16-year-olds pushing prams and smoking cigarettes. It had been a travellers’ flat for 30 years and by the end of that year it would be condemned and torn down.
Fortunately the best friend was shagging her flatmate so she gave us her room while we found our own flat. We hated the neighbourhood and after visiting a friend who lived just down the road from The Westbourne in Notting Hill, we knew where we wanted to call home. We found a flat close to Kensington Gardens with some friends where we spent that first hot stormy summer watching jet-streams, drinking pints, going to clubs and house parties and wandering home wide-eyed at dawn.
Nearly ten years and four flats later, we’re gradually prising ourselves out of The Don in readiness to return to a New Zealand that probably no longer exists. This blog will chart that journey – our exit, the slow route home, our arrival and our attempt to do the inevitable yet philosophically impossible: this is our shot at going back home.
