like time – only more so …
Archive for May, 2006
Call of the sea …
May 29th
When we were kids my parents used to take us (I have two younger brothers and an elder sister) to the British coast. At that time we all lived in Hertfordshire and so we used to visit the Norfolk coast (it being the nearest stretch of coastline), usually Wells-next-the-sea (however did they think up that name) and Hunstanton. I have vivid memories of our holidays there, but I don’t recall any of them being pleasant. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t beaten by our parents or anything, it’s just that, the Norfolk coast, sitting as it does on the North Sea, is usually bloody windy and, if our holidays were anything to go by, cold and wet too. We passed a lot of time by fishing for crabs off the harbour wall with those funny little orange twine-lines with the metal weight on them.
Fortunately my parents also liked Cornwall and it was here, without a doubt, that I first fell in love with the coast and the ocean. I remember the novelty of feeling warm on a beach and swimming (relatively) warm water. We also holidayed in Swanage (pebbly beach as I recall and bloody cold) and, for a couple of years, in Brittany in France.
When I was about 10 years old I did an Outward Bound course at a place called Rhowniar in North Wales, not far south of Barmouth. I absolutely loved it – it was there that I got to try this amazing thing called surf-canoeing. It was cold, bloody windy and rained nearly constantly, but I was hooked. Later on, when I was starting my Geography degree (later abandoned in favour of English and journalism) I did a field study in Barmouth. I remember sitting in the bay window of the little B&B we were staying in, with the warm summer sea air blowing in.
I came to surfing quite late on. Well, bloody late on if I’m being honest. When Liz and I first started going away together, prior to the arrival of our son Jack, we always headed for Cornwall. But the first time we went there, we stayed in this hotel overlooking the River Gannel which flows into Crantock beach and Liz said I ought to give surfing a try. So I did. And I loved it. I was no ‘natural’, but the feeling of riding on those waves was something else.
Every holiday and weekend away we went to Cornwall. We made friends down there and loved it out of season just as much as in. We even seriously considered moving there – to Truro to be precise (equally close to both north and south Cornwall coasts) but it wasn’t possible. Property down there cost a hell of a lot and it seemed like the only people moving in were the elderly and retired and the only people moving out were the young in search of work and better prospects. If Liz hadn’t decided that she would, after all, quite like to live in Australia then we could well have been down there now. Probably not.
I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about living a short drive from some spectacular coastline.
Shipping
May 27th
Everything seems to be ticking along with the house sale, solicitor thinks we’ll get a date for exchange this week. So to fill the time I’ve been chasing up the shipping. We’re not going the container route as we simply aren’t taking enough stuff to justify it, so we’re sending a partial load with Excess International. However – we do need access to our computers pretty much as soon as we arrive (as they’re our livelihood) and so we had planned to send them air freight.
So I phoned Excess to get an up-to-date quote (the last one having been carried out in August 05) and we were quoted £1500 for the boxes of stuff by ship and another £938 for the computer stuff by air. Phew. That’s a lot of money.
Day or two later I mention the air freight to Liz and she said it seemed very pricey too and came up with a most excellent alternative. Instead of wasting nearly a thousand quid shipping our PCs out, why not spend the cash on another laptop (we already have one very good Vaio), transfer all the important stuff onto it and take it with us in the hand luggage. This way, we have computers as soon as we arrive and a brand new laptop into the bargain. So I called Excess and asked how much extra it’d cost to ship the PCs with the rest of the stuff – the answer – £15!!!! It was a no brainer. Time to buy a laptop.
I had a good look around, visited the various sites, but began my search on eBuyer who have always provided us excellent value for money and service. The first laptop I turned up was a Vaio which fulfilled all our requirements and (bonus!) was another Sony. I spent the next three or four days looking at alternatives but always ended up coming back to the Vaio.
I really object to the way some of these companies operate, but it’s Dell that piss me off the most. I visited the site, clicked on the ‘Notebooks’ section and decided the Inspiron 640m looked like a good choice, so I clicked on it. You get in there and it says (in red letters) £689 including VAT and shipping. Great, I thought, think we have a winner. So I clicked on the ‘Customise and buy’ button and ‘abracadabra’ the price mystically transformed into £842! What the fuck? I scrolled down the list, but there wasn’t a single option in there that you could ‘downgrade’ or remove that would have lowered the price! What the hell is the point of that? All they ended up doing was pissing me off!
I also had a good hard look at the new Intel based Macbook laptops. I genuinely love OSX, I think it’s a stunning operating system, but the fact is that those Macbooks with or without an Intel CPU and with or without the ability to dual-boot XP and OSX just don’t represent good value for money. They have too little in the way of RAM, small hard drives and that nasty on-board Intel 900 series graphics chipset. So it looks like it’ll be a while longer before I become a Mac owner.
In the end Liz got pissed off with me and said ‘Would you buy the bloody Vaio’. So I did. I plumped for the Vaio FE21B, which is Centrino Duo based, comes with an 80Gb hard drive, 1Gb of RAM, a 256Mb GeForce 7400 graphics card and all the trimmings. I also bought a Targus backpack and a 250Gb MyBook external drive to hold all my ‘stuff’. It’ll be here on Wednesday. Like all good geeks I can’t wait for the ceremonial unpacking of the new gizmo.
Where to lay my hat …
May 19th
Well, the big discussion in the Tedinson household this week has been where to live. We have an advantage over many soon-to-be-expats in that we know the area we’re moving to pretty well, because we’ve been visiting for a few years now. We have several options open to us and it’s probably going to cause problems between me and the missus.
The first option is the town my parents live in. It’s a little place called Broughton, which is situated on the Princes Highway about 110Km south of Sydney. It’s a very nice town, heavily reliant on tourism, with a couple of cracking pubs along the main high street and all the essentials (chemist, banks, IGA, bakers, petrol station, bottle shop, video shop, newsagent) close at hand. It also has a large number of cafes and restaurants and several very good hotels. The local public school has a very good reputation and we would be delighted for Jack to attend there. The downsides to the town are very few, but probably the biggest is that whilst it’s no Oz-Eastbourne, there’s a high proportion of retired people there. We’re also not sure about living in such close proximity to my parents – we could all end up getting pissed off with each other. Whatever happens we’ll be staying with my parents in Broughton for the first few months and Jack will attend the school there.
Broughton, looking North up the Princes Highway
The second option, and my personal favourite is Sandy Point, which is a lovely little town right on the coast. It has a genuinely nice feel to it and a real buzz that I simply didn’t get in many of the other towns. It has a great surfing beach, in the form of Werri and is handy for 7 Mile Beach. It has a good selection of shops, including IGA, chemists, bottle shop, petrol station etc, along with one of the best surf shops in NSW, a superb woodfired pizza restaurant and loads of other cafes and restaurants. The problem with Sandy Point is a side effect of it being such a nice place – property here costs a lot more than Broughton. The town’s split in two by the high street and property on the beach side of the road, with ocean views typically sells for about $100K more than property on the other side. This doesn’t actually bother us, because we preferred the housing in places like the Sandy Wha Estate.
Sandy Point and Werri beach
The third option is Barefoot Bay. The first time we visited this area we drove through town, said ‘no way’, and headed straight out again. After seeing places like Sandy Point and Broughton it was a bit of change in direction. Barefoot Bay is much more of a local’s town, in the sense that it isn’t all about tourism, although obviously that plays its part, but more where the people working in the area actually live. It does have a strip of shops, but it’s nothing much to write home about. What it does have going for it is that property here is a hell of a lot cheaper than either Broughton or Sandy Point – our dollar will go a lot further. $400K in Shoalhaven will buy us a very nice 4 bedroom house in a good sized block. What we have to decide is whether we could live happily there or whether we’d just be moving there because we could afford a larger home.
Barefoot Bay from the air showing its position on the river
The wildcard is Surftown. This is a much larger town (population about 22K) than the three I mentioned above (all around the 6K mark). It’s slightly closer to Sydney (90 minute drive), is situated on the mainline train route into the city and is handy for the Southern Highlands, Canberra and Wollongong. It’s a very popular tourist spot for Sydney-siders, has five great beaches, a busy harbour, a lighthouse, a blow-hole, a leisure centre and a very large selection of shops, cafes and restaurants. Property in the centre of town is very expensive – upwards of $500K for a good sized house on a decent block. Surftown Downs to the north is a large housing area with little in the way of shops etc and whilst we could afford to live there, it didn’t float our boat. Surftown Heights to the south looks like a far better prospect.
Surftown shops
So those are our options. I’m trying to keep a clear mind about them all and I firmly believe that when we start looking properly, one house will make its presence known to us. We love the whole South Coast area, found the locals to be both welcoming and interesting and can’t wait to start putting down some roots in the area. Roll on July.
The one, the only, 7 Mile beach …
My theory about unhappy expats…
May 16th
Whenever you see a thread on this site (in the Australia section, don’t really venture much further so couldn’t comment) about where people are moving to, you usually get responses like Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne or Sydney. In other words, it seems like the vast majority of people are moving to a city in Australia. This makes no sense to me and, I think, explains why a lot of people are unhappy about their move down under.
I’ve lived and worked in some pretty big cities over the years, including a six year stint in London and six months in New York city. All cities have their good points, but they also (by dint of being a mass of humanity crammed into a relatively small space) have plenty of issues. I know there are loads of statistics on this sort of thing but I strongly believe they’re all much the same. The fact is, that if you live in a very large built-up area, you are going to experience (possibly first-hand) plenty of crime.
So – the question is this: why is it that all these expats, most of whom have probably never lived in a city in their lives, decide to live slap-bang-wallop in the middle of one in Australia? And more importantly, why do they get all up themselves when that city turns out to have exactly the same problems as every other flipping city on the planet? And why do they then blame that on ‘Australia’ and retreat back to the UK to live, no doubt, IN A TOWN!
Personally speaking, I left city life behind a long time ago and I have no desire whatsoever to try it again. I’ve lived in smallish towns for the last decade or so and I’ve experienced virtually no crime whatsoever. My parents have lived in a smallish town in Australia for the last decade and have experienced virtually no crime whatsoever. If you need the work that only a city can provide then you should prepare yourself for these problems now and accept them as a part of the fabric of city life, just as they are in New York, London, Paris, Madrid and Tokyo – or live further out and commute.
Clearing out …
May 15th
Does it ever end? Today we had a mass clear-out of the garage. I’d been using it as a kind of temporary storage area for stuff so we could show the house off to full effect, but it was looking very full as so we had a good four hour blitz at it today. We junked a load more stuff, filled the trailer up and pressure-washed the Dog Bag and my bike. I can hardly believe it, but you could almost fit a car in there now. Yesterday, Liz tackled Jack’s room and he was really good about the whole thing, letting us chuck away a load of his knackered/bits missing toys and bag and box a load of other okay stuff for the charity shop. Eight weeks and counting …