Eigene - Own

I arrived in Auckland two months ago with three bags: a small to medium-sized Berghaus backpack, an average-sized Columbia rucksack, and a Cole’s supermarket plastic carrier containing a half-eaten, full-sized foot-long sandwich. The contents of the latter had to be scoffed down within minutes of landing before New Zealand’s bio-security agents busted me. I envisaged them slapping on the cuffs and renditioning me to Morocco for some ugly snack-based questioning. They couldn’t give a shit about an impending anthrax attack, but if you’re bringing in plant matter - even in the form of salad leaves - you’d better watch your back. You should see the Kiwi version of 24 where Jeck Biwwer (my worst ever textual interpretation of the local accent) spends the day chasing a French tourist who didn’t declare his recent hiking in Switzerland! Nightmare! Jeck soon catches up with him, but only after snapping his neck like a rustic baguette does he find the tainted boots are gone! And so on. Grippingly convoluted stuff. Anyway, to get back on point, everything I had this side of the planet was inside those three bags, approximately 18kgs in total. That’s maybe three stones. Or forty-two pounds. Or three hundred spazloobs. Now after almost nine weeks and feeling relatively settled here, I’ve begun to build up a collection of stuff that’ll almost certainly have to be ditched in ten months when my visa‘s up. A speaker system for my iPod, a printer, books, DVDs, clothes and of course my amazing Egyptian cotton bedding with 500 threads per 10cm squared. It’s sad to think an increasing amount of the stuff I own is destined to part company in less than a year. It’s like a lonely soul buying a terminally ill Labrador retriever. Up to its death/my departure, it/the things will make life a lot more bearable, the joys and comfort brought hopefully exceeding the inevitable sadness and sorrow of saying goodbye. Especially to those Egyptian cotton sheets. Jesus, (it is December so it’s far less blasphemous) nothing can rescue this piece from the shroud of doggy-death downer I just evoked. More depressing still is that god awful (Christmas - not blasphemous) Owen Wilson film Marley and Me is now lodged firmly in my immediate conscious. But I’ve ranted to death about that previously (Mit Dem Schwanz Wedeln - 28/4/09) so will instead simply do the happy dance. Along with plotting when, where and how.