Day: September 6, 2007

Arriving at Auckland international airport at 5pm on a weekday afternoon, the first thing that struck me, after the hustle and bustle of Sydney, was the shere tranquility. There was a rather small town air to the place – not dissimilar from Stornaway Airport, on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, from which I took the first flight on a Wednesday morning in June last year. Auckland airport is somehow more refined, evidence of a richer economy than that of Lewis, but just as quiet, and inexplicably Local.

There is a quality to the light here. The Maori courtesy bus driver was very down to earth, friendly, polite without being subservient or wishing me a “nice day,” somehow just genuinely helpful and pleasant without being in any sense my inferior – so refreshing an attitude, that I really took to him and was very amenable to anything he suggested. He thought I might be better sitting on the bench waiting for 10 minutes than getting into the van and indeed I sat there, soaking up the atmosphere, looking at the sky and at the trees, in the strange but homely atmosphere that I can only attribute to the light….. and perhaps the stillness…. and the odd calm in the air that is a quality not of silence but of gentle sounds that do not invade one’s consciousness.

I fell in love with the place immediately.

Of course once we were underway, and heading into New Zealand’s one big city (if 1 million inhabitants constitutes a ‘big city’ in today’s world) the traffic began to accumulate – it was rush hour after all – but with a few deft turns and short cuts the driver made short work of getting me to my hotel, disturbing me from my revery with the request to drop me at the front door, rather than at the back. Apparently one is usually dropped around the back, where the vehicles can turn. The front was fine by me, and I felt immediately welcome by all the staff, and the room is lovely. I haven’t had such a good room since I was in Ireland – at the IFIP conference in Limerick – with a lounge as well as bedroom and en suite. This room incorporates a small kitchen, too, and when I return from the Bay of Islands for my three day stay here I shall definitely be cooking! I love good food, and I love to cook it as well as to dine out on it, and I like nothing better than to buy local produce and prepare it according to whatever idea I may have of how the locals do it.

Such a good room, for what – at the exchange rate I was fortunate enough to get, during the recent stock market wobble – was just £80 per night. The cost of living here is much lower than in the UK. Certainly the salaries are likely to be lower too, but as a tourist with a UK income, I shall be well off here.

Here’s the first entry for my downunder trip for September 2007. I have flown from Manchester to London, then London to Sydney, where I met up with Sean Bridges, a friend of 20 yrs standing, known to the world as Bikeboy – one of the best street performers in the world. In a quirk of fate he was returning from a month’s tour of Canada, with a few days stopover in the UK to see his son, and landed 7mins after me in Sydney! (George Bush arrived on Airforce One a couple of hours later!) Sean has just bought a new house and is yet to move in so, after meeting up with his Australian girlfriend Brianna we went to the Bondi Beach steak restaurant (Sean’s favourite eatery) and then stayed at cheap hotel together. The following day (yesterday) was a tour of Sydney courtesy of Sean and finally checking in to Wake-Up, Sydney’s best backpacker hostel, full of young people and activity and fun, while Sean drove off to Adelaide for his next gig.

At Wake-Up I spent what time I was able to, online, liaising with my lodger at home trying to correct the one big mistake of my pre-planning : I have forgotten to bring my driving licence! The card is something I used to always keep in my wallet. However my house was burgled at the beginning of August (hence the decision to bring forward my house-moving plans) and amongst the items stolen was my wallet. So everything of value has ended up in a cashbox since – including my new replacement driving licence. I am reminded of a journey to Spain in 2004 with my former business partner, who on that occasion was the one to forget his driving licence. I only had mine, I confess, because I always used to keep it in my wallet! Now I am victim of the same mistake. So my lodger has smashed his way into the cashbox for me, and scanned the card and paper licence and uploaded them via ftp to a temporary folder from where I have downloaded them, all in the hope that I can convince AVIS to let me hire a car tomorrow morning. He has also taken them down into Manchester’s Trafford Business Park and put them in a FedEx envelope that will arrive at my hotel on Monday next week. So if AVIS are not happy, at least I will be able to hire the car on Monday, and will have to get the coach up to the Bay of Islands for the weekend. Oh what fun. It is all part of the strange ID game that today’s increasingly small world presents us with. Papers! Papers! One must have one’s papers!

There are in fact a good number of reasons why this sort of thing should become more and more biometric – it is after all ME who has a licence to drive, and I should not have my holiday ruined because I do not have a piece of paper with me to prove it! Biometric identity management can indeed become increasingly non-invasive, picking up on one’s movements without the need for lengthy queues at passport control. A simple sub-cutaneous RFID tag could carry particular details for credit and access and licensing without the need for cumbersome paperwork. On the other hand, what a nightmarish scenario of ubiquitous computing surveillance of our every move? Big Brother would indeed then be watching us – all the time. The trade-off between the convenience and invasion of the world-travelling public for the purpose of security continues to be a thorny issue. Yet somehow the idea that it is the paperwork that travels and gains access seems contrary to the real issue – the paperwork is there to identify the individual. Identity fraud is a massively growing problem the world over, and Identity Management a growing arena of academic interest in the Information Systems field – I have a Masters student writing his dissertation on the subject at the moment, in fact – an Armenian, no less.

The lesson for now, I guess, is that we are still very heavily dependent upon our paperwork, and the need to keep it with us!