Well that wasn't any fun

Moving house is horrible at the best of times, even when you are only helping someone else do it, but this was quite exceptionally bad, so I'm not going to dwell on the details of it too much here.

As an indication of a certain source of irritation, though, and because the commentaters to the post below convinced me that normal rules of respect for ones elders don't apply on a blog, here are three things my mother came out with when meeting me off the plane (in her defense, due to a delayed flight, it was 2 o'clock in the morning and neither of us was at our best).

"Your hair looks... different."
"Yes. It's a new cut."
"Do you like it?"
"Yes."
"Well I suppose that's all that matters."

"Is that all you brought with you to wear? We have a proper winter here in Christchurch, you know, not like Australia." (This set the tone of the next week, where she kept stepping into the role of "host to the ignorant Australian tourist", continually forgetting that I lived in Christchurch for three times longer than she has.)

And, running her fingers through my hair: "Do you need to borrow some shampoo when we get home? When did you last wash your hair?"

So that gives you an idea of one source of unpleasantness in the trip -- not at all unexpected, and not really very that serious, but just irritating enough to make things seem even worse than they really were. And I wanted so much to be all sympathetic and helpful, since my mother's life has really turned to custard this year, but I found my reservoirs of sympathy dried up all too quickly and I whenever I wasn't concentrating hard on being nice, I turned back into a sullen fourteen-year-old.

Then there was the general horribleness of moving house. Especially since it kept reminding me that we will probably have to be doing this ourselves within the next year sometime.

And then, and then, as if that wasn't enough, I came down with the virus that everyone in the whole of New Zealand currently seems to have, which has for the past four days has filled my lungs with mucus, taken away my voice, and left me unable to walk more than 10 steps without sitting down to rest. The only good thing about it was that the accompanying fever meant that I felt warm for the first time in the whole 10 days I was there. Curse people who think that large wooden houses with enormous glass windows, wooden floors and no insulation are the right sort of architecture at a latitude of 43 degrees South.

But I'm back. And I've had a hot bath, and slept a lot under my own snuggly warm duvet, and eaten a good dinner cooked by Geekman, and I'm almost feeling ready to leave for the conference I have to go to in Brisbane this weekend.

Just as soon as I work out how I can present my talk (and chair the ninety million talks of the two-day workshop I am running) without a voice.