South Island Journey

This period of blogging doesn’t relate to Island Time of Life, which was my one year retirement blog. I posted it through 2014 and stopped at the end of the year. If I could figure how to get myself a new blog on the same site, then I would. But until then, here goes with my second blog.

South Island Journey describes my travels over a five week period around the a South Island of New Zealand. Partly it’s an attempt to get my hand in at some travel writing. But more importantly for me, it’s a reflection on family, for I will be going places that are of significance to my family history and the places will 

Catching Up

I seem to have stopped writing my blog. Guess it’s because I’m settling into this way of life and it doesn’t feel strange anymore. I probably have figured out what I’m doing with this early phase of (non)retirement. I’m sharpening my pencils for a new orientation towards what I do (what some people might call work). I’ve got too many projects on the boil so sometimes progress is maddeningly slow, but nevertheless there is progress.
There’s one lot of work around ageing research. I’ve finished drafting my long overdue report on the Lothian Birth Cohort 1921 study and now I’m writing up journal articles from it. A certain amount of academic reskilling has been required here and I’ve made myself familiar with two referencing systems, one the university is encouraging and the other, EndNote, what all my colleagues seem to use. They swap across, so it doesn’t really matter that I’m using EndNote for ageing and the other for women’s studies. Journal articles were never my favourite writing genre but now I have a commitment to doing them with the Scottish folk, so I’m just chipping away and progress is being made. The other ageing research project is the LiLACs NZ longitudinal study and I’m expecting to develop a research portfolio here and also to get a half day or day’s paid work helping with writing and editing their Ministry reports next year. I think the ageing research will be a future source of paid work, a good topic for an oldie to get involved in as the whole area is expanding fast and they are – perhaps – less likely to discriminate against oldies. So, there could be some teaching or Board work, or maybe a year’s fulltime work somewhere, or maybe I’ll get research funding. This work has me spending two days a week off island, and that seems like a good balance.
The other strand of projects is women’s studies, and the convenor job is quite occupying, but have probably got it down to one or two days a week now. It’s very satisfying as a lot is happening. I’ve also taken over the lead in preparing the book that Pat initiated of Margot’s selected writings. It’s time consuming too, of course, and Naomi Mitchison has had to be deferred until that’s finished.
It’s all a bit mad, but probably two days a week on oldies, three days a week on women’s studies.
Not so different from how I used to live in academia, in terms of project balance, but no teaching (well, organising women’s studies events is kind of like teaching) or graduate students or dealing full-on with bloody institutions (my University of Auckland Honorary position doesn’t hit me up against the bureaucracy particularly). One of my best graduate students has now made Professor, so I’m well behind, but in a curious way I think I’m working towards reclaiming academic status in a patient, measured way.
Doing the Margot book has had me looking back over the ’80s onwards and I feel I’ve spread my talents, rather – although there are many things I’m pleased I’ve done, from the long view they look rather uncoordinated, and of course ending up in research management wasn’t exactly a plus (although I loved the Chief Scientist Office job and the living in Scotland/travelling opportunities that came with it – it was like having 8 sabbaticals in a row! (ie half year ones).
I have to conclude that I’m easily bored and like having my finger in a lot of pies! The workload I have is bonkers and should be rationalised but I just want to work harder rather than give up things. It was a confidence boost to actually get the Lothian report finished as it’s major piece of work and required dedication towards the end. Strong achievement motivation, don’t know where it comes from exactly, but retirement has allowed me to move in my own directions after 6 years of assisting other researchers, 6 years before that of government constraints, the Waikato experience ending in tears…..and all of them fantastic jobs that I shaped to my own interests as much as I could….but this is different, it is way less stressful working on my own and not trying to earn a living! I just rest when I feel tired, work when I don’t feel tired, neglect house and garden when I want a good run at my projects….

Indy politics

Well, the news is sure hotting up. Scottish independence vote draws near – on Thursday – and we should hear the outcome Friday night New Zealand time. Then it’s our election Saturday. I’ve already voted Labour in a polling booth at our wonderful new library and I’m keeping up my fitness delivering Labour Party pamphlets, but that doesn’t meaning I don’t keep assessing things.

The Guardian had a fascinating editorial which I put on my Facebook page. It was supporting the no Indy vote which was disappointing. However, it said that the Indy campaign had led to a much better level of political discussion than any election campaign, with a focus on how Scotland wants to be and how much they don’t like UK politics, ie mainly English politics inflicted on them. That most political campaigns are now sloganeering rather than stimulating good discussion.

The Guardian also said that most Western countries have to deal with widening inequalities, certainly the case in NZ. I went to a local meet the candidates event with a focus on inequality. I find Labour frustrating because for all the issues they will come out with what feels like an election bribe, or just one policy promise, eg capital gains tax, up the minimum wage. All well and good, but not fundamental, and often the Nats match them with a policy along the same lines, usually not such a good one, of course.

So that’s why Laila Harre and Internet Mana have been so exciting (don’t know why the Greens fail to excite, perhaps I’m just not an enthusiastic greenie type.) they tackle the big issues, their policies are not just little fix-it ones. I followed the privacy Moment of Truth expo live from the Town Hall last night. I wouldn’t have said that this was an issue I was all that interested in but now I am. I can just see the Key govt wading slackly into corruption. Greenwald said John Key,s a trader, he always has bargaining chips. Yes, not principles. So he’ll sell out to the US not for personal gain, not that kind of corruption, but as a trade. But I have the horrible feeling that some of this stuff got past Helen Clark too.

So what I want to see is Kiwi debate like the Scottish Indy. We are indy but trading it away carelessly. Anyway, I hope Five Eyes enjoys this blog, probably my only reader. And roll on anew Scotland and a new Kiwi govt…and if it doesn’t happen, at least the level of debate has gone up a notch.

Revolving Door

In the mental health business returning to an institution repeatedly after discharge used to be called the revolving door. People were not fixed properly the first time, discharged too early and that is why they returned. This was an absurd notion given the fluctuating nature of mental distress. Anyhow, maybe I’m doing retirement’s revolving door. I’m back with the university as an Honorary Research Fellow and I’m on my way right now to get fitted up with desk, door openers, computer, expectations and so on.

Someone asked me what I would get out of it when I told her that I was going back to the university for a no pay position. I rather lamely said that it’s good to have an institutional affiliation when you write academic papers. So I’m going to all this trouble, schlepping out to Tamaki by ferry, train and a couple of 15min walks – a two hour trip altogether, four hour round trip – just to legitimise myself, give myself the stamp if institutional authority?

I don’t think that’s it. There’s some unfinished business, that’s true, it’s good to spend the last phase of my career on the academic staff not the professional staff (until recently known by the more lowly term, general staff), as the latter was really a detour. So it’s a question of legitimising identity perhaps? I’m an academic again. And note the use of the term career. I may have embraced retirement, at least for a year, but clearly I don’t see my career as finishing.

Also, there’s the involvement in the longitudinal study of ageing which gives me colleagues and nicely complements my Lothian Birth Cohort study role. And will give me a little pocket money from time to time and continuity with ageing research post LBC.

There are university resources, too, as a staff member, though perhaps I have access to most of what I need with my permanent library card.

But it all calls for a rethink. I notice I’m getting reluctant now to say I’m retired, especially as my work falls into a pattern more and I’m working harder.

An Adrian Mole Day

I’m having an Adrian Mole day. No, there aren’t any problems with Pandora types so it’s not a romance issue. Today I’m wondering why some people are cross with me (somebody in particular is very cross!) instead of admiring my steadfast and true qualities. Naturally, I’m the hero of my own life, and it’s a bit of a challenge keeping the morale up when receiving e-mail schtick. There’s a backstory to this, of course, but discretion is the better part of valour. I shall work on retaining that heroic feeling that keeps me battling on.

Hola!

And to follow up on yesterday, when I arrived home I used my Hola app on Chrome to magically transport my devices to the UK. On the BBC I saw a wonderful short piece on WW1 medicine hosted by a British Muslim woman doctor, which gave me more context for Auntie Cal’s work. And then I happened on the live broadcast from BBC covering the centenary. The overall coverage was excellent, with Huw Davies aided by the Canadian woman historian who was at Wellington Readers and Writers, as well as Juliet Nicholson who had written some good books on women’s wartime lives.

The downside was the Commonwealth service at the Glasgow Cathedral, attended by Prince Charles in all his Ruritanian medal glory, David Cameron looking jowly and gloomy to be in a Scottish Presbyterian environment, Alex Salmond looking gloomy because of the Britishness of the ceremony and he wasn’t a speaker, our very own GG Sir Jerry Matapaere (who did a good interview beforehand and who was a speaker). Kate Adie looking rather energetic.

But it was all so terribly last days of the Empire bullshit. All about courage, heroism, duty, service, noble grief. Couldn’t believe were no Germans invited or other representatives of “the other side”. No references to conchies or dissidents. It was absolutely ghastly. Plenty to criticise about how NZ tackles this but at least they’re not so bad as the Brits!

WW1 Centenary

It’s 100 years today since Britain declared war on Germany, with New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries quickly following suit. I’m on the ferry heading off Island to Devonport, a seaside Auckland village, where there will be a candlelit vigil for peace.

I’m very interested in the centenary and have written about the issue of how women should commemorate WW1, noting that the quite generous NZ government funding for centenary projects has almost all gone to men and projects focusing on heroes and memorials. Sure, there has been a lot of talk about the pointlessness and unbelievable destructiveness of that war, but women tend to be almost completely overlooked. Let’s hear it for Kiwi author Robin Hyde who wrote our greatest WW1 novel, Passport to Hell, and who said that wars make men contemptuous towards women as women have little scope for acts of bravery in conflicts.

I was ready to be interested because of my writing project on Naomi Mitchison, the Scottish writer, who was a young woman in WW1 and like so many feminists, became a pacifist in the interwar years. My book focuses on her WW2 experience, but my reading has primed an interest in the earlier war.

This has led to a project on my great-Auntie Cal, a WW1 army nurse who served in Egypt and France. I recalled a story about her sending her war medals back when the RSA wouldn’t let the nurses march on Anzac Day. So I emailed my brothers and cousins for information and did some online research as well. I got some beautifully described memories from the family – we all loved her – and snippets from the research, including her war record. There are no personal memoirs in any of this, so we don’t hear her voice. But the NZ army nurse experience has been well described by Anna Rogers (NZ) and Peter Fitzsimons (Oz & NZ), as well as in fiction by Maxine Alterio. And of course the British experience of VADs led to the classic Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth. So I can know quite a lot about where Auntie Cal was and what it was like.

I know, by instinct, that my aunt was lesbian in her nature – though most likely not by self-definition, given the era. But I’d never discussed it with my brothers and cousins. When Miriam asked me to give a talk on my aunt at the Charlotte Lesbian Museum I thought, here goes, and emailed the family about my forthcoming “expose”. Of course no one really believed that I was right, but an interesting correspondence and set of silences ensued. Because there wasn’t much info on my great-aunt, in the end I made the focus of my talk “Outing Auntie Cal”, focusing on the family correspondence. It went down quite well with the small audience and I’m thinking of trotting it out again and maybe writing it up. I wonder how the family will take it when I tell them. I have commandeered their words (and there are some very good writers amongst them) and have I made them look unfairly homophobic? Oh well, outing Hilary the opener of family closets. I know for sure my great-aunt would NOT have been amused. But needs must, when creative licence is at stake.

Stormy Weather

The trouble with islands is that, as isolated communtities, when things go wrong they go more wrong. Winter set in during the first week of July with several storms in succession. During the first there was a power cut just as I was about to go to bed. I wasn’t really prepared, it was a cold night and I rely on electricity for heating. I had taken out the near to useless chip heater and replaced it with a much needed pantry. And of course with tank water pumped up to the house by an electric pump, as soon as the power goes there is no water as well as no heating. No hot water either. Well, there is a cylinder full of hot below the house, but it can’t be pumped up to the taps. So, bang and there’s no heat, no drinks, no bath or shower, no water to clean your teeth, no flushing the toilet, no charging up the cellphone. At least I have a landline phone that doesn’t rely on electricity. I went outside in the dark, pouring rain, taking a bucket to fill up from the garden tank. Then tired and fed up, I went to bed early. By morning the power was back on, although not for people down at the beach where the dairy owner was very worried about melting food in their freezer.

A week or so later an even more violent storm was predicted. In the meantime Annie had got me a camping gas stove and Paul had showed me how to load the cylinder. I filled up a thermos of tea in the late afternoon as the wind and rain picked up. And another thermos of hot water for the hot water bottle. I cooked tea early and made sure there was food around that didn’t need heating. I filled a large container in the bath, put a bucket in the toilet, charged up my cellphone and iPad, set out a lot of candles and sure enough, bang and everything went out. Being more prepared was reassuring. The evening was spent reading a library book on the iPad and occasionally listening to the news on my cellphone radio. Cannot get internet through my home provision, reliant on electricity but can get it via cellular links on phone and iPad. I found the Waiheke community Facebook page very reassuring as it was full of news about what was going on, as well as about how people were reacting and coping. Fortunately my house is very sheltered, being part way down a valley, so no trees were coming down. The wind was certainly howling though.

In the morning I was due to catch an early ferry into town as I had a day’s work (broke my resolution already, but only four days in total! Hardly unretiring.) Somehow I couldn’t be bothered with all the fuss, so I rolled out of bed in the dark into my clothes (prepared by candlelight the night before) and drove off showerless and breakfast less. The ferry wasn’t the place to get a cup of tea as it was quite rough and people were grimly huddled together on the smaller boat, the big one having its winter refit. So, breakfast at work, stayed the night at Annie’s and enjoyed power and shower…and the news was that Waiheke was without power right through the day, 24 hours in all for my neighbourhood, even longer for others. We seem to get quite a raw deal compared to Aucklanders even though we’re more reliant on power because of the water situation .

So, a week or two later, yet another storm, this time not too windy and no power cut. But at breakfast time I looked out the kitchen window and was horrified to see water pouring down the driveway and into the carport, overwhelming the drains. Got out there with Annie, who proved a hero with the oar sticking down the drainpipe method of clearing stormwater drains. Alerted my neighbour John that his garage was about to flood, and when we cleared his drain, the extra flow overwhelmed all the good work we’d done with ours. The neighbour from the cottage below drove up on the way to seek help from the council. Water was roaring down from John’s place through my place and flooding him. He’d already dug a temporary drain messily in the lawn right at the corner of my house (Dad’s legacy which Rene had warned me about, garden water tank and laundry built over the boundary at the time when they owned both properties, true Waiheke style.)

We began to realise that our efforts were all ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and moved up the road to tackle the problem of blocked council drains up there and that solved the problem, at least till next time.

All of which makes me realise that I do need to be a rugged islander not a soft city slicker.

Sniffles

My nose has been running like a tap, my throat feels like sandpaper and my head hurts. I must not be far along the deinstitutionalisation process because I’m wondering, what happened to sick leave?

If I was still a professional, I’d have considered taking the day off. I’ve rarely had colds in the last few years – despite living in Edinbrrrrr! – and I guess the decision has rested on how busy I was. Could have worked at home sniffling, or could have dosed up on Night and Day and go into work not looking so obnoxious but feeling rather buzzed in the head.

But at home, with no outside obligations today, I couldn’t figure out how to behave. Invented the Lapsley test – does vacuuming make you feel worse? Answer, yes, it hurt my head. Refining the test for validity – does washing the kitchen floor make you feel worse? Answer, no. Why was I washing the floor? No idea, really, but some impulse towards cleanliness seems to accompany head colds and flu. Perhaps it’s so if things take a turn for the worse, your environment is not depressing.

Taking the day off, when I was at work, allowed me mental space, to catch up with my thoughts, read some nice stuff, puddle around. Now a day off feels alarming as I don’t carry an accumulation of stress as I used to. I’m not time-poor. Oh well, just another step towards reinventing myself. I guess I’ll just potter along taking it easy rather than having the sick/not sick distinction bothering me.

Transitions

Last year I wrote to my friend Heather, an Australian psychologist, telling her about my planned retirement year:

“I forgot to tell you my news. I’ve become Convenor of the Women’s Studies Assn (NZ) which is probably just about a two days a week unpaid job, and so have handed in my notice of retirement, working fulltime till end of January and 2 days a week for another three months. I plan to take a year off paid work to get through my oldies research and start writing my Naomi Mitchison book. Way behind on these projects but the WSA opportunity was too good to miss. So, will be living on Waiheke fulltime. A year of big changes for me, but now I’m at the other end of the transition I knew I was going through – just couldn’t see how it would turn out!”

She replied, with typical Aussie forthrightness, as well as psychological acumen: “I like the way you say you are retiring and then say you’re taking a year off paid work – so maybe the transition hasn’t run its course just yet, in your head at least!”

That brought me up short, because the undercurrents of change that I’d been feeling – and acting on – over the last year had moved me from a sense that something ill-defined was happening to me, towards a clear plan that I’d put into action. That was the transition, wasn’t it?

Last year I had put together a workshop on women psychologists and our identity as we grow older, for one of our occasional Aussie-Kiwi women and psychology get togethers. In my personal intro, I noted, “I’m going through a transition period in my life which has to do with getting older and also involves a bit of identity trouble and threat.” In preparing, I had taken a look at the literature on transition, and had come across something Heather had put together with her colleagues, for the Australian Psychological Society, which contained a useful definition: “Transitions are major life changes which are lasting in their effects, take place over a relatively short period of time, and affect the assumptions that individuals hold about the world and their place in it.” That seemed to fit the bill for me, so when I wrote to Heather after our conference, told her my plan of action and declared my transition over, I was startled at her response. After all, it was she who had defined transitions as taking place over a relatively short period of time, and I knew my transition had been going on for up to a year before I decided to retire.

But she was right, it’s not over at all. One transition follows another. What I was grappling with last year was an emerging decision about the future that welled up from the depths, alongside an increasing focus on how to put it together and what it would mean for me personally and professionally. Now, the decision to “retire for a year” taken, the plan is being realised, and that involves huge changes in lifestyle at psychological, practical, professional and financial levels. This blog is a way to record and deal with these transitions – and I’m increasingly recognising that they’re plural. Heather may have been right about the “relatively short period of time” in her definition, but then one transition leads to another and they blend into one another, making for some kind of sequential churn. I think it’s called life!

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