Hot Water

Judie Baillie has recently received a massive salary increase to $800000 per year. The Government is furious apparently because TV One is a SOE but the board didn’t inform them prior to going public and this is in the middle of the post-Paul Holmes shake-up. Anne Hercus offered to resign over the matter but the board chairman declined her offer. It’s opened up a wider debate about …

what’s that ?

Oh come on; keep up. Judie Baillie. You know, the newsreader. Dark hair, about so high ? SOE ? State Owned Enterprise. Where have you been living that you haven’t heard about all this ? Admittedly the Paul Holmes thing had me stumped for a while. A rather ordinary, slightly puffy and lined face looked out agonizingly from the Australian Woman’s Weekly (bear with me here, I happened to notice it while looking at computer magazines) and the headline screamed “Paul speaks out – The real reason why I quit !”. This Paul was a new one on me so I asked innocently “Paul who ?” “Paul Holmes.” “Who’s he ?” A baffled silence. “Well, he’s..Paul Holmes. You know. Paul Holmes. On the TV.” The penny dropped. He’s a Celebrity isn’t he. That’s why I’ve never heard of him. Paul Holmes is so well-known here that people have difficulty explaining who he is, and I’m not even going to try. Apparently Judie Baillie (hope I’ve got the spelling right) is also a given, though personally I can’t see why.

In conversation with people I find I’m often mentally catching up or keeping note of things to find out about later. It’s not just Celebrities but a whole host of cultural references; the easy shorthand of the everyday such as current advertisements, running jokes, politicians, iconic products, the latest piece of political correctness, to which we are still relative strangers. I find there’s a helpful, if slightly condescending, tone adopted by new friends and acquaintances when I look puzzled over some reference to something I’ve never heard of. An explanation for the new boy follows, and the conversation resumes, but this fragile tolerance only lasts about five minutes. It’s best, I think, to look interested and concerned despite having only the most tenuous grasp of the subject matter (and the fact that it makes your face hurt). Fortunately this is a skill I acquired in the UK many years ago. You’d noticed hadn’t you.

The joke here is that if you don’t like Auckland’s weather, wait five minutes. Actually I’m sure I heard the same joke about Peebles many years ago, but it works in both places. We’re currently being lashed by tropical storms that last about seven minutes each, interspersed with bouts of brilliant sunshine. Clouds of steam rise from the roads during these hot interludes, giving a sense of living in the jungle. Locals assure us that this is totally out of character for Auckland, but I grew up in Wellington where people always maintain that the current and continual bad weather is unseasonal and unexpected, so the jury’s out on that one. Growing up in Wellington – or anywhere else outside Auckland for that matter – also means that you grow up believing that Auckland is where the Wild Things Are. It is the root of all evil, a vortex into which unsuspecting young people are drawn from the provinces into a life of drudgery, prostitution and slavery. When I went overseas I discovered this vortex is also known as London. Geography is only one if its aspects. I could go on to the human condition and end up with Joseph Conrad but it’s too early in the morning and too predictable; no, the point is that living in Auckland I discover some baseline truth to the myth about Auckland being a different country, but mostly it’s, well, a myth.

A quarter of New Zealand’s population lives in Auckland. The local population is growing at the rate of 100 people a day, hence the vortex image; a mixture of New Zealand northward drift and the inertia of foreign immigrants, settling in the place where they walked off the plane. Brown’s Bay is known as Little Capetown because many of the substantial number of South African immigrants go there, and Devonport is known as Little England for reasons you can work out. (After spending some time wandering around Devonport I think Little Britain might be more appropriate. Just a little culture-specific joke for the folks back home.) That quarter of the population is still only a million people but New Zealanders are expansive with living space and after a recent weekend break away from Auckland (our first departure from the city since arriving here) Carole and I passed the ‘Welcome to Auckland’ sign 35km from the city centre.

Not that we live in Auckland. Oh no. We live on The Shore, which is over the water from Auckland and a different place altogether. Takapuna is, in fact, a city with its own local authority. Shore residents tend to chime in with the national pastime of tut-tutting over Auckland’s very existence, at least when they’re not at work over there.

Did I mention we’d been away for the weekend ? With a Certain Birthday looming I decided to take Carole away for a weekend’s break in real New Zealand (not Auckland) so we drove down to Tirau in the Waikato district. This is on the edge of the volcanic plateau, with Taupo and Rotorua each about another 35 minutes on from it, and home to the little-known Okoroire Hot Springs Hotel. The name kind of spoils the surprise doesn’t it. The hotel dates from the 1920s and was a traditional huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ affair with grand lounges and dining room to match. It has the same sort of faded grandeur as those hotels dotted around the Roxburgh countryside in the Borders. However it also has the hot springs. A walk through the native bush along a pathway of crushed white shells in the moonlight brings us to a series of corrugated iron ‘enclosures’, within each of which is sunk a large concrete-sided rectangular pool about 6m square. Apparently untouched since the twenties, each pool enclosure has a row of little wooden changing cubicles which are gently crumbling into dust, and concrete steps down into the deliciously hot water. This water is naturally heated underground and flows continuously into the pool, spilling over a lip at the far end and down into the nearby river which thunders just below us. It’s like swimming in a hot bath outdoors, with the huge leaves of the punga ferns hanging over the pool and glow-worms shining their eerie green pinpricks of light from the bush-clad banks. No, it’s not from the brochure, that’s what it was like.

No, silly, we didn’t spend all weekend in the pool. We visited Rotorua and Tauranga, ate some very good food, did a three-hour hike to the Blue Spring near Putararu, and ate some very good food.

So you’re thinking it’s all one long summer’s afternoon in New Zealand, aren’t you. You’re thinking this is all very well, pontificating about difference and having weekend jaunts in hot baths, but where’s the drudge, the Real Life ? Yes, yes. Of course we still wash our clothes, buy breakfast cereal, make packed lunches and vacuum the carpets. But it doesn’t make very interesting reading does it ?

Does it ? Well. Maybe next time I’ll tell you about my trip to the supermarket.

In the meantime have a lovely Christmas holiday. Our kids finished school on Wednesday (12 noon, like it should be) and have seven weeks holiday to enjoy before starting the new school year in February. Jealous ? You will be.

newsletter 2

In Auckland they don’t usually talk about the weather. It’s a given. Well, almost. The exception is the arrival of The Southerly. Look at New Zealand on a map and you’ll see it’s surrounded by lots of sea. Holding your map North side up (are you doing it ?) you can see a vast expanse of sea at New Zealand’s bottom left called the Southern Ocean, which is uninterrupted all the way to Antarctica. This is where The Southerly comes from. Imagine this wind which has had its birth in Antarctica and has headed out North looking for adventure. The Southern Ocean is its playground; a race track with a little group of islands at its far end. You get the idea.
So The Southerly has arrived this weekend. This translates into torrential rain, blustery wind and the thick cloud blanket so familiar to immigrants from Scotland. I include this for all those of you who mailed back complaining about my descriptions of fine weather.

What Aucklanders do talk about all the time is traffic. The north and south sides of Auckland are linked by a bridge called … the Auckland Harbour Bridge, and this grinds to a near-standstill each morning and evening as thousands of commuters move between the city and the North Shore. Possible solutions abound; new bridges, extra lanes, railway bridges, tunnels and so on. I had my first experience of this the other day driving our new car (a Honda Odyssey) through to the airport (on the far side of Auckland) during the rush hour. Grappling with unfamiliar road rules and an automatic transmission I inched my way through the incredibly crowded and convoluted motorway system following the little blue aeroplane signs until they suddenly disappeared at a T-junction. On the 50% probability rule I turned left and immediately I was totally lost on a three lane carriageway where everyone else clearly knew where they were going in a hurry. The lizard cortex took over at this point and I motored randomly down various roads until, like a heavenly beacon, a little blue aeroplane sign appeared. Thereafter I could follow the smell of aviation fuel to my destination and met Mum off her plane with two minutes to spare. Don’t even get me started on the journey home…

You can put the map away now, by the way.

We’re gradually finding our way around. Coming from Peebles it’s quite a revelation to live in a city. Auckland sprawls in every direction but the sea from where we are, and since arriving we haven’t been out of Auckland at all. A ten minute drive to Devonport brings us to the ferry terminal, where fast boats run every fifteen minutes to the city centre. (‘why do they drive over the bridge ?’ I hear you cry. At least you’re paying attention, but I really don’t know. Why don’t you write to the North Shore Times ?) There are vast parks, a lake nearby as well as the sea, and any retail experience we might be looking for (except Ikea… ah well). It’s great for finding opportunities for the kids too, with sailing clubs everywhere and all manner of children’s activities going on in local sports centres, arts and community centres, playing fields and halls, and there are four theatres and three cinemas within fifteen minutes of our house.

OK, OK, enough of the travelogue.

It was great to hear back from some of you after my first little newsletter, and I now have a clear picture of the weather in the UK at the moment. Is anything else happening in the Northern hemisphere ? If I haven’t got back to you yet please be patient. It’s taken a little while to get my new computer suite up and running, but I went and collected my new gleaming black electronic beast the other day, and we’ve now got our broadband connection up and running, so I can sit in front of the screen all day waiting for the e-mails to flood in, as well as accessing the Peeblesshire News website (www.peeblesshirenews.com – it’s a gem) for Scottish local colour.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas at all. I suppose I grew up with this so I’m used to associating Christmas with long holidays, hot weather, snow, robins, winter coats, cold turkey and Norfolk pine trees festooned with coloured lights, but Carole and the children are finding it hard to take seriously. Every year as a kid I knew Christmas was coming because we went to the James Smiths Christmas parade. These are a bit of a New Zealand tradition but the JS was the biggest and best. Lorries, tractors and other agricultural vehicles were (and still are) richly decorated in foil, tinsel and strings of lightbulbs to various different themes. Originally these might have reflected the different departments in the massive James Smiths shop in Lambton Quay but latterly they celebrated events or places around the world. The last of these floats was Santa’s sleigh, snow-covered and dressed in red velvet, deer antlers and fir branches. Santa himself, similarly encased in red velvet and cotton wool and sweating visibly in the summer heat, sat enthroned on this float gamely waving to the hundreds of screaming children who lined the Wellington Streets to see him. Christmas was on its way and suddenly the shops would be full of cards depicting fir forests deep in snow, red robins standing in snowy landscapes, snowmen and children hurling snowballs, wrapping paper covered in snowflakes, holly leaves and fir trees, window displays of overcoat-wrapped models behind white-edged shop windows. As kids we just accepted all this with the usual cheerful bafflement, not having ever seen snow or robins (my brother, visiting Peebles a couple of years ago, was amazed to see his first robin and to discover that it isn’t a fat bird the size of a turkey), or really understanding why Christmas people all wore coats in the summer. Christmas was a festival from some other place. Now, walking through the shops in Birkenhead town centre in our T-shirts, shorts and sandals, I’m amazed to see that all this imagery is still here. A lucky few of you might get a Christmas card from us this year, and it will almost certainly depict all that I’ve described above. The snow spray is in the shops and the plastic robins (size of turkeys) are in the windows. For our kids it’s reminiscent I guess, but Simon asked the other day why there was snow on the Christmas cards. “Will it snow here at Christmas ?” he asked. It was the unanswered question of my childhood.

I will be posting a few pictures of our place once I get my digital camera stuff working again, but I won’t mail out photos with these newsletter e-mails. You can also be treated to pictures of us enjoying the brilliant sunshine, aquamarine seas and sheltering under the palm trees on Takapuna Beach (sorry Catherine, couldn’t resist it). I’m planning to send out a couple more of these wonderfully informative newsletters and after that you can ‘opt in’ if you want to go on reading my ramblings. This is to reassure those of you who are, even now, researching how to block endless round robin spam letters from New Zealand which threaten to outnumber even the Viking Direct mailings in your Inbox. Calm down. It’s not happening. On the other hand if I start on about how many of the kids’ teeth have fallen out please let me know and I’ll pull the plug myself.

Let me know what’s happening with you.