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.