So This Is Where All The 37s Get To

It always rains in New Windsor.

Look I’m sorry, but it does. Well all right, it always does on Fridays then.

I know this from the bitter experience of having regularly finished my radio show, splashed across the road, sat down on a wet bench at an exposed bus stop, and miserably tried to body-shield Mr Hippy’s cassette-radio from joining me in my dilution.

Since I got back from the UK last September though, things have been a bit different.

Yes, the powers that be have erected a shelter. It’s wonderful – after I’d dropped the latest cassette off tonight, I waited in perfect dryness as I froze. (N.B. It may not actually have been raining tonight, but since it always rains in New Windsor, it therefore continues to do so in my memory.) (That’s right – it actually is raining in my heart.)

(Sorry Buddy)

Tonight I had company though.

A guy called Albatross approached the bus shelter and sat down. (All right that’s not his name, I changed it for this okay?) So I asked Albatross what he was doing here in New Zealand. (He was from overseas.)

He’d met a Kiwi girl, it hadn’t worked out, and then she’d had his kid. Recognising his responsibility, he’d come out here to do whatever he could. That meant visiting them when he could, and watching his Working Holiday Visa tick away until the day when the law would require him to leave them again, for at least another year.

As our bus wound it’s way down to Symonds Street, we chatted about this and that, and he told me that several people had questioned the wisdom of his impossible decision, and that he really couldn’t forsee any possible right outcome.

Anyway, as I got up to depart the bus at my stop, I wanted to encourage him, so I looked him straight in the eye and said something like “Whatever anybody else says, I think you’re doing the right thing for the right reasons, and it will all work out for you.”

As he looked away from me out the window, I could hear the relief in his voice. “Thank you. I really need to hear that a bit more often.”