Long Hand

Long hand.

I am returning to writing in it. Today I decided to pick up my pen again.  To write long hand.

Long hand is the long, slow way.  The long way round.  Travel for the sake of travel.  Journeying for enjoyment.  Taking time.  The long hand of the clock moves slowest, but marks the greatest measure of time.  So long hand can be the long way to the purest, most reasoned, most considered, most deeply felt words.

Writing long hand forces us to take care of the journey, to take our time, to look at the view, to slow down.

This morning I noticed how untidy my writing was and realised that I was trying to write long hand as fast as I am used to typing.  Impossible!  So writing long hand takes on new meaning.  As I write with a pen I'm thinking about the way I'm forming my letters and words.  Thinking about ink pens and calligraphy.  Perhaps, in a time when most of us clack away on our keyboards, long hand will return to the revered art form it once was.

For years I kept a specially bound plain page notebook into which I carefully copied the poems I'd written that I felt merited keeping for history - to show my children and grandchildren.  A fresh page for each poem, carefully lettered in real old-fashioned ink.  To me I suppose it was a way of honouring my own words, or the words that had honoured me by appearing in that particular order, organisation, understanding.  The long way.

I think our words, poems in particular, arrive via the long way round, even though sometimes they seem to appear as if by magic.  They have travelled, brewed.  A loved one does not appear magically in 'arrivals' at the airport!  Sometimes we write the journey, sometimes it's a long and arduous one we are keen to discard - how quickly do we leap in the shower after a long haul flight.  At other times it's all about the journey and it is this that we show to our reader, rather than the arrival itself.

However words arrive, they have journeyed, the long way round, to be here.

Giving our words, or the words of others, the honour of being written in long hand is, I think, an art form that will not be lost or forgotten, but rediscovered, studied and cherished.

When I grow up, I want to be a scribe.

(c) Naomi Madelin 2011


For more on writing, see my blog post here

Chapter 2 DIDAKOI DREAMING : Part 1

The next two days were lost in a blur of jet lag and sleep.  Somewhere amongst it all was a vague recognition that things were not as they should have been in the weather department.  The sun was high in the sky on the first morning when I rose in our city centre hotel and threw open the doors to the balcony to be met by a chill breeze and the sight of an empty swimming pool.

“I thought it was supposed to be hot here.”  I moaned to a groggy James.

“Ergly og gog,” he replied, so I shut myself in the bathroom for a long, hot, shower.

Things continued in this vein for several days, both with the bad weather and the incoherent comments.  It transpired that Auckland was experiencing a ‘bad summer’, that the sun was in hiding and that our jet lag wasn’t going to be over any time soon.  While James slept late, I suffered from nausea and a persistent sense of dizziness – as though everything was spinning in the wrong direction, which I supposed it was.  Like the water in the hotel’s luxurious bath that James and I watched being sucked down the plug hole the wrong way, I deduced that the tides in our seventy-percent water bodies must be on the turn – not the most scientific of theories but one that appealed even to the more scientifically-oriented James.

When we’d caught up on enough sleep that we felt it was safe to drive, we piled our weighty belongings into tinny hire car.  We were headed for the West Coast and the little settlement of Karekare, there to lodge with James’s sister in the house she had been building from the shell of a barn for the past four years.  It took a little while to leave the city and I was sure there hadn’t been so much traffic the last time I’d been in Auckland, although the congestion was nothing compared to London streets, or the streets of other major cities and towns I had visited around the world for that matter.  Nonetheless, traffic was the mark of the city and the general feeling I’d had that I didn’t want to live in Auckland grew stronger.  Eventually we left the single-storey sprawl of suburbia behind us and threaded our way west through the bush.  Karekare lies forty kilometres west of Auckland city over the often-misty, bush-clad Waitakere Ranges, which steal your breath at every turn.   Wildly winding roads steer a magical tour up and down between trees, ferns and falls oozing with green.  The forest is much like that which amazed me when I walked through Abel Tasman National Park – dinosaurs would not be out of place.  Although the Waitakere Ranges are a Forest Park this does not preclude habitation, and modern homes flash steel and glass through gaps in the canopy, while up dank and enticing tree-tunnels, homely wooden shacks and hand-built follies hide.  Five hundred metres at their peak, the Ranges cut the west coast off from the city of Auckland in a most satisfactory manner and afford frequent broad views of the central business district and Waitemata Harbour to the east.    With every bend we turned, the lump in my throat, that hadn’t really left since the arrivals lounge, grew.   Each revealed more wonders, the glorious green never ending.  By the time we descended toward the ocean and Karekare after forty minutes or so of driving, I was choked with emotion.  A few tears wound their way down my overwhelmed face as the sea hove into view. The ‘village’ has no shops, not even a post box, and most homes are invisible, nestled cosily among the trees.  From the road steep driveways and endless steps wind their secret way up the hillside to heavenly abodes.  All around black volcanic cliffs thrust from red earth, towering over beach and bush, dwarfing humankind and putting us firmly in our place.  Bush clings wherever it can, and valleys and ravines thrive with flora and fauna.  In December, Pohutakawa trees flame with crimson blossoms and Toetoe, a native grass similar to Pampas, ripples in the wind.  Behind is the ever-present music of the fierce West Wind Drift crashing and scouring black rock and pounding dark sand.  Part of me was desperate to explore this unusual fairytale, but with the car rammed with our things and fatigue overwhelming us again, we headed straight to Jacqui’s place to unload, eat and sleep.

Next morning I woke early and immediately felt the need for a walk. James was sound asleep in our cushion-bed on Jacqui’s bare chipboard floor.  I dressed quietly, took my fountain pen and writing pad and slipped out.  My intention was to walk to the beach, but en route I was waylaid by a sign to a waterfall; a high cascade that I had seen from the road the day before.  I turned right off the steep tarmac-ed lane and trod my way carefully down the earth path.  Within seconds I was transformed into Eve discovering Paradise.  Could everything that I was seeing and hearing be real?  The variety of plant life, the overhead canopy and thriving under-layers, the song of exotic birds and dance of light on leaves was too, too perfect.  Surely this was a botanical garden meticulously planted by someone with a passion for detail?  When the path opened beneath the shelter of huge, twisted and spreading trees that backed a rocky beach where a green pool lapped at the bottom of the plunging falls, I laughed.  A bench and table beckoned at the water’s edge - the place, the moment, seemed made just for me.   The landscape of Karekare is dramatic and extreme, as is the sea, but as I sat absorbing the atmosphere I felt Mother Nature protecting me, nestling me between her ample bosoms, delivering her gift in the simplest and purest of forms.  I was supremely content just to sit.  To think.  To breathe.  A mother and her ducklings scratched fearlessly around my feet and all was right with the world.   I don’t believe you’ve seen New Zealand until you’ve experienced Karekare.  But then, you can say that about so many places in New Zealand, and that was exactly why I was here.

Chapter 1 DISCOVERY: Part 9

Our copious bags picked from the conveyor, we bundled our trolleys in a daze to  immigration, only to be faced with a long queue; a confused and slow-moving posse it would take an age to process.  We dutifully stood in line, perched wearily on our luggage wondering whether our friend Bridget would be waiting in the lounge to meet us.

Looking about, James spied a shorter queue, but this one was marked ‘Residents Only.’

“Hang on,” he exclaimed “Aren’t we Residents?”

I dragged myself from my trolley stupor and looked up.

“Hmm?”  James pointed. I looked.  “Oh!” I agreed, “Maybe… Wow!” 

I was suddenly awake, thrilled at the thought that I might already be classed as a New Zealander.  Fatigue melted away as, leaving me in charge of the copious luggage, James ducked under the ropes and approached an airport employee.  His huge smile told me all I needed to know and we wheeled our belongings merrily over, casting superior looks at the line of tourists behind us.  The desk clerk cheerily took our passports.

“Welcome to New Zealand,” she said in that familiar tone that I recalled from my first trip - as though we were old friends longed for, or the plumber finally come to fix the ever-dripping tap.  James and I looked at each other and smiled deep smiles, smiles that started in our bones and welled up in our eyes.  It was right that we should be here. New Zealand was where we were meant to be.  We were satisfied.  

Without ado we whizzed through “Nothing to Declare” and out into the hall and the warm embrace of a grinning Bridget.  In the temperate New Zealand evening the lump in my throat turned to tears that trickled down the sides of my nose.  I knew exactly why I was crying – I was home again.  The three years since I’d left through this very building suddenly seemed like a dream.  All that had mattered and all that had filled my thoughts was New Zealand.  And it was the land itself that made me feel this way; the earth under my feet, the vitality of the raw landscape, the tangible energy of life here.  I was dimly aware that I was expecting a lot from my new country, that it, and I, had a lot to live up to, but I was too tired to let that worry me.  Right now I just wanted a strong drink and a comfortable bed.  We had done it.  We had moved to New Zealand.  But the reality wouldn’t sink in for a long time yet.

Chapter 1 DISCOVERY: Part 8

The weeks that followed were filled with nervous energy.  As soon as I heard the mail drop into the lobby three floors below, I’d run down the stairs, hoping against hope for an envelope with “New Zealand Immigration Service” stamped on the front.  The days were spent chasing up bits of missing paperwork required for sale of the flat; though we had a buyer the process was proving to be protracted and painful.  I made lists of what we would and wouldn’t take with us and took my little silver Vespa on trips to bits of London I thought I ought to see before I left.

A month later James and I were worried. We’d been promised a letter from New Zealand House within two weeks letting us know what was happening and who our case officer was:  Nothing had arrived.  Ever since we’d moved into my Lambeth flat our post had been being stolen at various points in the delivery system, something that we’d been unable to resolve with the post office in spite of James’s tireless efforts.  Now we were convinced that our promised letter had been pilfered.  Telephoning was an option, but a friend had cautioned us that the immigration service did not appreciate phone calls, and that to call would be to risk having our application put to the bottom of the pile.  So we bit our nails and waited.

Then one Saturday morning in October as we lazed in bed after our customary Friday night out clubbing we heard the post drop in the lobby.  Neither James nor I are morning people, especially after a party, but hope had our adrenaline pumping and he leapt out of bed, threw on a dressing gown and galloped down the stairs.  Something had to arrive sooner or later, why not today?  The way he was singing as he raced back up told me there was news.  He threw an envelope down baring the NZIS logo and I took a sharp intake of breath before tearing it open, heart in mouth.

“We are writing with regard to your application for residence which was accepted for consideration on 21 August, 2002.” I read, “We are pleased to inform you that your application for a residence visa for New Zealand has been approved in principle.”  

There was a tangible silence while we took it in.  I read it again, skimming quickly through the rest of the letter that outlined the fees we needed to pay and the money we should deposit into a New Zealand bank account – things we were already prepared for.


“Oh my god.”  I hardly dared smile.

“What does it mean though?  Is that it?  Are we in?” asked James, not wanting to be let down when he discovered he’d been fooled.  We read it through again, slowly and carefully, just to be sure.  There were no loopholes, nothing unexpected.  We stared at each other for a moment, smiles daring to creep up our cheeks,


“We’ve got it!” we exclaimed breathlessly; hugging hard and bouncing up and down on the bed.

“As long as we can get this bloody flat sale through.”  I added as a gloom-filled caveat.

But we couldn’t believe it.  It had only been two months since I’d taken the paperwork in; they were efficient, these Kiwis.  I immediately liked them even more.


From that point on I became solely focussed on our move and the new life I was going to have in New Zealand.  I made more lists, got quotes from shipping agents and hounded my solicitor and the council about the desperately slow flat sale.  New Zealand House provided us with all the information we needed and I set up an account with a New Zealand bank, ready to receive the money from the flat when it was finally sold.  Nothing was going to stop me getting to New Zealand now and I wanted to be there for Christmas.


When my solicitor called two weeks later to say that finally everything was in place to exchange and complete the sale, I couldn’t feel relieved.  Not yet.  The British system is such that until you ‘exchange’, usually just a few weeks from your moving date at most, nothing has been signed by either party, no money has changed hands and either side can pull out at any time.  We didn’t dare book flights to New Zealand, just in case.  Then, on a blustery November day, the shipping agents arrived to help us pack and wrap the furniture in heavy brown paper.  We were moving out - exactly six months to the day since we’d agreed on the sale.  Countless trips up and down the wide stairs of our old Victorian building later and the removal van pulled away into the night.  I slung my leg over the seat of James’s scooter and pressed myself into his back.

“Okay.”  I said simply, and as we moved off down damp, dark London streets.  I didn’t give the house so much as a backwards glance.

Chapter 1 DISCOVERY: Part 7

It was the year two thousand and the economy was taking a dive, companies were being taken over left, right and centre and redundancies were rife. James’s small investment bank was bought out by a larger one; suddenly he found himself jobless. Furnished with a little spare cash and a lot of spare time it made sense for him to take a holiday.

“Would you mind if I went and visited my sister in New Zealand for a few weeks?” he asked. This sensible woman had gone travelling fifteen years previously, turned up in New Zealand and had never left.

“Mind? No, I think it’s a fabulous idea. Then you might understand what I’m going on about!”

It was perfect. James’s sister was ten years his senior. Their father’s air force job had meant that the family moved around a lot and the children were placed in boarding schools. James and Jacqui had only really spent time together in the holidays and her memories of James were of a brattish younger brother, while his of her were of a grumpy, teenaged sister. Now that they were both adults, he was keen to meet her and strike up a new relationship on better terms. This trip would give him the chance to spend time with Jacqui and see a bit of my beloved New Zealand as well. If James didn’t fall in love with New Zealand, I doubted I’d fall in love with James. His holiday would decide whether a move to New Zealand would be alone, or as a couple. Before his trip was half way through, James called to pass his judgement.

“Let’s do it,” he said, his voice brimming with enthusiasm “It’s amazing here.”

On his return our relationship seemed closer than ever. I’d really missed him – I couldn’t remember missing anyone before, I just wasn’t that kind of person; it took me by surprise. Added to that, James had experienced something of what I had been droning on about for months, and our mutual understanding ran deep. We confessed our feelings to each other and started talking excitedly about the move we would make, together. I downloaded information from the Internet and found out what we needed to do to emigrate. There were seemingly endless forms to complete and whole books explaining the immigration system. We could either apply for working visas that would allow us two years in New Zealand to consider our future, or we could go the whole hog and emigrate straight off. On my part there was no question, I wanted to be a fully-fledged New Zealander as soon as possible. I knew absolutely that I wanted to live there forever, I didn’t want to fuss about with working visas or anything else, I wanted residency. James was never in love with England, he wanted out and for good, so the decision was made.

Never the best at filling in forms, they sat and gathered dust while we talked and dreamed about what we might do if our residency application was approved, and made contingency plans in case it wasn’t. Every other week when work was getting me down, something that was happening with increasing frequency, I’d dig out the paperwork and fill in a little bit more.

As my thirtieth birthday loomed, I began to think longer and harder about immigration to New Zealand. The assessment system awarded points based on a number of things, one of which was age. I sat down and worked out that if I didn’t apply before I was thirty, I wouldn’t have enough points to get in. Together we knuckled down and filled in our forms, with me ever nagging James to get his done. Almost daily I checked the New Zealand Immigration Service website to make sure I was up to date on requirements and what I saw there one day made me nervous. Eligibility for immigration was determined on points scored against various categories such as age, education, work record and how much money you had. The pass mark had remained at twenty-four for years, but this week it had suddenly been put up to twenty-six and they’d changed all the forms. We had to start again.

With a groan I printed off piles of paperwork and we diligently pored over the information. Somehow more than two years had passed since I’d returned from my trip, since I’d met James, and since he’d moved into my flat. Friends we’d told of our plans had left the country themselves for a year in warmer climes, returned and asked us how our own trip had been. We began to feel like frauds when we had to explain that we hadn’t actually been anywhere – though we were at great pains to emphasise that we weren’t planning a trip, but a move. Then I was given a shove that forced me to act. The fledgling company I’d been working for folded and I was suddenly unemployed. Usually this wouldn’t bother me; I’d worked on contract for years before I went travelling and never had trouble finding work. But over the past two years I’d grown to hate the environment of the corporate office – it didn’t matter what the subject matter. Office politics and inflated egos turned my stomach and I knew that now I was free of it, I simply could not return to the corporate world. The fact of the matter was that I didn’t give a monkey’s for someone else’s business and I trying to force myself to just made me miserable. Perhaps I was just too self-absorbed for that sort of thing. Perhaps it was a deep-seated feeling that I had more to offer the world than attending endless meetings, producing fancy pie charts and reports that proved that all my ducks were in a row, that I could sing from the same hymn sheet and toe the corporate line. Whatever the reason, I’d hit rock bottom in the city with a sudden thud. My business life was confined to the history books and its absence left a yawning gap. I had to do something new. I had to move to New Zealand.

The first thing I did was to put the flat on the market, assured by the estate agent that there would be no trouble selling it. I hoped he was right. Violent crime in the area seemed to be escalating; an increasing number of requests for witnesses to indecent assaults, kidnappings and shootings appeared on yellow police boards by the side of the roads and on the nearby common. It made us all the more keen to move, but it wasn’t a great advertisement for the area. I tried to put my worry aside and turned my attention to my future career. Six months before someone had recommended a book-based course to me aimed at rekindling creativity and I went to a bookshop and bought a copy. Ever since I’d left college I’d harboured a desire to work in creative areas – to write and act. Acting had been my passion since I was twelve, I’d studied drama and theatre studies for my degree and I’d written stories and poetry ever since I could pick up a pencil; until Life and London had taken over. New Zealand would be different, I told myself, there I would do only what appealed to me, what rang true, I would not become another corporate clone; I would be different. The book helped – I began to feel the creative juices flowing through my veins again, I felt more active, lively and alive. Finally in August two thousand and two, with a sense of ceremony and portent, I took our application for immigration into New Zealand House on the Haymarket in the centre of London.

Chapter 1 DISCOVERY: Part 1

Coldly damp and greyish yellow, my skin in the mirror of the cramped lavatory space seemed to me to epitomise the life I’d left behind. It had that pulpy quality that skin deprived of fresh air and daylight soon assumes, as though if touched it would come away in my fingers. Stale, dull, flacid and fragile. I stared at green eyes that stared straight back at me, darkly ringed and saying nothing.

Food, deposited in moulded trays at regulated intervals held no appeal. I forced it down for something to do. An unusual panic, claustrophobia fuelled by a lack of sleep, pecked somewhere at the back of my sanity. Daydreams of a liquid forest path swept by a cool ocean breeze mocked me. I paced up and down the narrow aisles again and again. To and from the toilet, to the tap to fill my paper cup with flat water, to stare out of a different square of window at the same endless cloudscape.

Finally the plane began to descend and I looked wearily at James in the seat next to me.

“Thank God,” he groaned, and we stared blindly out as we came in to land, too lobotomised to notice the heavy grey and pervasive damp of what was supposed to be a New Zealand summers’ day. Our plane touched down neatly and taxied to an uneventful stop just like a million planes in a thousand airports all around the world. Planes full of people arriving somewhere new for a few weeks, a few days, or simply passing on through seeing nothing more than the inside of yet another airport.

For James and me though, it was a milestone. For two years we’d talked of little else; packing up, shipping out of England for good. For my part the plan had occupied my mind far longer, ever since I’d happened upon New Zealand during a round-the-world holiday, since I’d spent two months falling madly in love with a land eleven thousand, four hundred and fourteen miles away from the place of my birth.

I wanted to have a moment. I wanted to fall from the bottom step of the plane like the Pope and kiss the ground of my new land. I wanted to speak that wonderful line from Shakespeare’s Richard the Second, ‘I weep for joy to stand upon my kingdom once again…’ I’d imagined my return, how I would feel, what I might say. But you rarely get to walk down the steps of an aircraft these days and after a total of twenty-five hours locked in a pressurized container, I felt more like a vacuum-packed ham than a Shakespearean actor. No doubt my flying companions and I smelt as ripe when the seal was released and we piled out into the relatively fresh air-conditioning of Auckland International Airport with four hundred sighs of relief.

It really was relief, too. Any sense of excitement eluded me although the emotion I hoped I’d left with my farewells at Heathrow ached in my throat. I’d thought so much about this moment and here I was. It didn’t feel real. How could it possibly be real?

About this blog

I've set up this blog as a place to share my writing.

In the first instance this will be a 'chunk by chunk' posting of my book 'Jumping Off The Edge Of The World'.

In 1999 I threw in the towel on a relationship and my job and blew the deposit I'd saved for a flat in London on a trip around the world. During that journey I travelled through New Zealand, and when I left I knew that I had to live there.

In 2002, dragging my boyfriend with me (he didn't actually mind too much), I left life as I knew it in the UK behind, quit the rat race and moved to New Zealand to see what life would bring.

'Jumping Off The Edge Of The World' is a thirty-something city girl's experience of starting all over again at the other side of the globe. It's honest, entertaining, educational and a a jolly good read.

If you've ever considered running away and joining the circus, emigrating to a new country or you just like travel books, then this is a good place to come.

Enjoy.