Among the Lilliputians no more

Interesting portrait of my recent time in New Zealand I thought.

Only they’re not miniature Mittel European soldiers tying me down. They’re all guys in modern day dress who would never get a job offer overseas, and if they did they wouldn’t have the chutzpah to take it. Many of them have occupied the same niche in the New Zealand media forever, and are hanging onto their jobs for grim life. A random sampling, and not that this guy has ever done me any harm: but it tells you something that the breakfast Deejay for BFM, the well-known local student radio station, is a guy in his 40s. He reached the glass ceiling of opportunity for himself in Auckland a long time back. The best of luck to him by the way, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with it. These are just the breaks of staying on an underpopulated couple of islands so far down south they make Sydney, Australia look like the throbbing centre of it all.

The hour of my departure approacheth. (Continues…)

Soon I leave the vapid, white-shoe, car-salesman paradise that is Auckland for a few days in my dear, sweet home-town of Christchurch. A place I may one day retire. I see myself as the local windbag, cadging drinks at the bar of the Christchurch Club. I’m looking forward to my visit in a few days anyway. Then I leave New Zealand proper on the 1st of December.

But what nice emails I’ve been getting, encouraging me not to let this opportunity slide. Sample: “”Take the job in Beirut! The women are extraordinary, it’s warm {yet has skiing}, and there’s tons of money to be made there once you work out how it all hangs together and make some connections. They’re great traders – get to know them and they’ll cut you in. The Lebanese taught the Jews how to do business 3,000 years ago. The Lebanese are the Phoenicians, the people who invented the oldest-known alphabet and brought the attention of the Ancient Near East to the existence of the Atlantic.”

This from Mark, a Cambridge educated writer and philogist who I know from my days in Budapest. Or this astute observation from Quentin, a childhood friend who shuttles back and forth between New York and Christchurch – which is a study in contrasts – while he runs a pharmaceutical software company: “”Budapest, Buenos Aires, Beirut… one begins to see somewhat of a trend in the names here.”

Strange how these patterns of life are revealed over time… I’ll keep you posted as more reveal themselves, with my now regular updates, Jet-Set Hobo fans.