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.