Another sad farewell

We heard this week that my dearly loved Grandmother has died. She was 93 and still sharp as a tack, but a stroke and a chest infection finally took her from us, quietly and peacefully in hospital with loving family around her.
We were actually on a family holiday at my Mum's house and with my sister's family when we got the news, so there was a time to grieve together and tell a few stories about this feisty woman who lives on in us.
I'm travelling to the UK on Tuesday to be at the funeral and help with some of those practical matters that death necessitates, as well as to represent this arm of the family gathered in these islands by taking written messages from the Great Grandchildren, sea-polished stones gathered at Mowhanau beach and decorated in bright colours by each of us, and a piece of polished stone from my brother.

You Take It With You When You Go

Yes yes, I know.

Forgot to set the alarm, pressure of work, something came up etc. I'm always striving to be more regular, but you know how it is. Not much of a blog that only gets updated every four months, and I look with envy at favourite blogs that are updated several times a week, or even a day ! Then again, what else are these people doing ? Favourites at present include www.drawn.ca and http://cynical-c.com/index.html Have a look some time (not now) and marvel at what blogs should be like.

In the meantime open a bottle, put the kettle on, hit the Delete button, or do whatever you do when you settle back to read the latest old chat from New Zealand, then read on...

Minutiae is what has pretty-well dominated our lives this past few months (with brief respites in the form of Carole's brother and family arriving for their NZ tour, and a visit from our good friend Sally from Nelson, who pruned and replanted the garden, fitted cedar blinds in the living room, put up pictures, talked sense and generally straightened the place out). The honeymoon period is over for us and the quest for income and social contact continue at a tortoise pace. I hadn't realised you couldn't build Rome in a day (or six months) and the osmosis of making new friends and contacts creeps at a petty pace. It's not to say we haven't made progress; the house renovations are nearly complete and we both have some gainful employment, the children are settled in school, we're finding our way around and my study is developing that 'lived-in' look that some of you would recognise if you saw it....

New Zealand is actively encouraging immigration at the moment. The tax base here is too small and we need more working population to spread the load of running the economy a little wider. At the same time there are strict controls on who can come in and what you can qualify to do when you get here. This is the problem Carole has had with her Early Childhood work. In New Zealand there is a specific qualification for this, called the Early Childhood Education certificate. Despite having seven years experience at the cutting edge of early childhood education in Scotland, and despite there being a desperate shortage of competent and qualified early childhood educators in New Zealand (the papers are full of ads for them), Carole finds herself defined as an unqualified 'auxiliary' in early childhood centres because her post-graduate teaching degree is not recognised by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and her seven years experience is discounted as irrelevant in the process of converting qualifications. It's been a frustrating and demoralising seven months of dealing with bureaucrats who seem to have travelled through a time vortex from the 1950s.

Ironically Carole has now been offered a job as a University lecturer, teaching ... the Early Childhood Education certificate !

The Pope died after several months of steady deterioration and obvious pain and frustration, and I was sad about it. I didn't actually know the Pope, by the way, but he was part of a familiar landscape and I guess the sadness is as much about the continual passing of my own life. He was appointed (anointed ?) Pope the year before I exported myself to the UK and he's been a constant fixture like the Queen is, and even Margaret Thatcher was for all those terrible years. Champagne flowed the day she resigned (where were you ?) but in March the news was full of the tears and prayers of Catholics and others saying farewell to John-Paul. Farewell, old man. We will not see your like again.

Death touched us a couple of months ago when a dear friend from Edinburgh mailed to tell me her little nephew had died in some pointless freak accident and I was deeply sad that I couldn't jump in the car and make the short trip from Peebles to offer hugs and bumbling support or make tea or something.

I continue to teach my little class of gifted children once a week, now in a school not far from here. The class is a quirky group of individuals, and the school is a busy friendly humourous place with lots going on and a good community atmosphere. This week we were working on Paper Engineering - a subject close to my heart as you know - and what I don't now know about polyhedral shapes, fractals, cutting and pasting, and relative strengths of cardboard just isn't worth knowing. Bridges next week, then stop-motion animation. Meanwhile our hall bookcases are filling up with origamic cut-outs, geodesic shapes and working models of things. Once again the internet provides.

Sara and Simon are busy next door as I type this, wrestling with the Incredibles computer game and periodically falling into disputes over the number of minutes each has been 'on'.

It's winter here, with night-time temperatures falling to three degrees last week but the days generally around fifteen. Apparently British immigrants often find the winters here colder at first because New Zealand houses seldom have central heating. In the winter it feels colder and damper inside the house, towels don't dry and windows get misted up. Our house is of relatively solid construction; wooden framed with a veneer of brick and tile, so it heats up quite well using oil-filled electric heaters that look a bit like central heating radiators, but on wheels. Houses here are generally made of wood, and covered with wooden weatherboards attached horizontally. When we first visited New Zealand together we flew into Wellington airport and Carole, looking out the window, commented that the landscape seemed to be covered in garden sheds. It does look like that when you're used to a built landscape fashioned from brick and stone. A sense of impermanence and fragility.

My other job (returning to me for another paragraph) takes me all around Auckland to offices and businesses where I train office staff in how to use software, install new stuff and troubleshoot installations that have gone wrong. It's proving to be most enjoyable and is giving me a cab-driver's knowledge of Auckland's streets (and thus opening yet another career path) as well as daily contact with a wide range of people. My other-other job teaching drama is developing through a weekly evening class (currently on stop-motion animation) and providing drama workshops to schools. It's a nice portfolio of jobs. Who knows where it will lead ?

There's a general election looming in New Zealand, probably in September, and the campaigning has already started. There are two major parties here; Labour and National, and a plethora of smaller parties ranging from the fairly significant New Zealand First party (unofficially known as the Winston Peters First party, after its charismatic leader) to the fairly insignificant ACT party, which is forecast to die out in the next election. The difference in New Zealand is that elections are decided using a proportional representation system rather than first-past-the-post, so the fairly significant minor parties (ie Mr Peters) often find themselves holding the balance of power. Winston is widely predicted to be the 'king-maker' in this next election, with the bestowing of his handful of seats deciding who is Government and who Opposition. National (read Conservative) and Labour (read Blairite in a dress, without the Bush factor) are level-pegging in the polls and it seems to be anyone's game, though I suspect there's a give-Labour-a-bloody-nose element to National's support (their leader, Don Brash, has as much charisma as Aussie PM John Howard). The spider in the corner is the newly formed Maori Party - the only overtly race-based party in New Zealand (unless Greens are a race) - which could well take a chunk of Labour's vote for itself and thus bring Brash in by the back door. To be honest I'm a bit puzzled by the whole thing and I need that guy with the ears to appear on TV and explain it all to me. Instead TV One has a heavy set man with a bizarre beard (what is it with political reporters ?) which distracts me too much to take him seriously.

An old old friend got in touch recently, having tracked me down through the OldFriends website here, and we chatted on the phone in much the same way as we used to when we were both 15. We were at secondary school together and shared one of those inexplicable (and, luckily, short-lived) interests in spotting and collecting serial numbers from modes of transport. Thankfully we encountered no trains on our daily trip to school (a lifetime's sentence could have begun) so we catalogued trolley buses. These electric buses were connected to the overhead power lines by means of two long sprung poles attached to the roof. They are graceful machines, moving with a mournful but purposeful groaning sound which rises and falls in pitch with the speed they travel. Occasionally the poles would spring off the overhead power lines with a loud electric crack, and often blue sparks, and the driver would grumpily stomp to the back end of the bus and manoeuvre the poles back on to the wires with pulley ropes.

Alastair (for that is his name) now runs a photography business in Wellington, remotely operating a camera which sits atop a long vertical pole attached to the back of his truck, taking 'aerial' photos of buildings, parks, schools or whatever else comes his way. It's a brilliant idea and I've considered taking it up myself, with Alastair's help. We're still talking about it (amongst other things) though there are considerable obstacles to it all.

The British and Irish Lions are here at the moment and rugby dominates the headlines. Along with the rugby team and its entourage has come several thousand supporters, and to coincide with this many New Zealand companies are mounting high-profile recruitment drives. As I mentioned earlier, New Zealand is keen to attract immigration into its small workforce, and history shows that - on average - 10% of the supporters accompanying visiting British sports teams return to New Zealand within a year to settle ! It's an extraordinary statistic and proves that nothing sells New Zealand as a place to live better than seeing the place, even for a brief holiday. IT companies are particularly prominent in the campaign as there's a huge shortage of IT professionals here. Things are promising for pharmacists too, apparently. Do you know any ?

Yes yes, Douglas, I hear you cry, this is all very well, but what music are you listening to at the moment ? OK. On my Musicmatch playlist at the moment is .. just booting it up .. won't take a minute .. ah, here it is: The Devlins, Mazzy Star, Joy Division, Oasis, The Monks of Silos, Blink 182. What does that say about me ? No idea.

Reading ? Smiley's People by John le Carre (a bit of an uphill walk, I have to say).

Films ? Best I saw recently were Mystic River and In My Father's Den.

We had a mid-winter break with family and friends this past weekend over at Manukau Heads, near Huia. This is on the West side of Auckland, leaving the city and driving through the hills and down a dirt track to a peninsula that sits at the mouth of the mighty Manukau Harbour, the larger of Auckland's two harbours. On one side of the beach is the harbour straits, and on the other side is the Tasman Sea. There’s an old lodge house there by the beach which they rent out to groups, with bedrooms, a big sitting/dining room with a snooker table and open fire, industrial strength kitchen and thoroughly modern shower block. It’s a short walk to the peninsula; a black sand beach strewn with tiny white ramshorn shells and wind-patterned with lighter brown sand. Along the beach is a series of caves opening into the cliff face. It’s a dramatic landscape, surrounded by jutting hills and a regenerating kauri forest. Living in a city now we seldom venture beyond its boundaries and it was reassuring to find we could be truly in the wilds only an hour from home.

The photos show you something of the landscape.

What's your news ?

Nights Are Fair Drawin' In

For the second time in six months the nights are starting to draw in and the evenings have a cool edge. There's not exactly a whiff of Arctic snow in the air but it's a hint that Autumn is loading up its cart with rain clouds, sacks of leaves and morning mists and preparing to head this way. However today I'm looking out of my study window at dappled sunlight under the deck and bunches of grapes hanging from the burgeoning vine, starting to look edible. The days have averaged 21 degrees over the past four weeks and its hardly rained. The children are becoming accustomed to coming home from school, throwing on their bathing togs and heading down to the beach for a tumble in the waves before tea.

Familiar objects arrived this month in the stack of boxes we sent by ship; pictures, ornaments, toys, clothes. They were a reminder of what small and unexpected things can make us feel at home; I have a framed print by Elizabeth Morris of a man walking his dog in a beech forest, purchased at Broughton Gallery in my first year of teaching. There's a sense of continuity and endorsement in seeing it on the wall here. Similarly with my New Yorker cartoon of the dog standing at the gates of heaven asking "Is there any chance I could get my testicles back ?". Actually I thought about that cartoon when we paid off the mortgage for Edderston Road. Funny old world isn't it.

Carole and I continue to scratch around for work; she's working two days a week at a local Early Childhood centre and doing supply work in several others, and I'm teaching one day a week with a charitable trust that provides education for gifted children. I've also started my drama classes under the name StageDoor (website www.stagedoor.co.nz), with small numbers and potential for growth when the colder weather arrives.

"Gifted children ?"
Yes, I didn't think you'd let that one go by. Resisting the soap box, let me refer you to www.georgeparkyncentre.org for more info. I encountered a good number of gifted children in my time teaching in Scotland but I quickly discovered that 'giftedness' was a quality that dare not speak its name. You could be below average in a bewildering multitude of ways, but don't presume to be above it. It's different here. Discuss.

I've finally got our home computer network running (took six hours; don't get me started..) and we've had a couple of webcam chats with Carole's parents. It reminds me of the telephone calls I had with family here when I was first in the UK, where the line had an odd echo, like speaking into a big metal pipe, and the signal only went one way at a time. It meant adopting a two-way radio style of talking, avoiding speaking or making any sound whilst the other person was talking, lest you clip what they said. The web-chats have been similar, disappointingly, though perhaps we've been unlucky with bandwidth. Nevertheless I've love to try it out with other friends and family, so let me know if you have a webcam and a broadband connection, and we can look at ghostly images of each other saying 'say that again ?' etc.

Telephony is transformed nowadays from those early 'booked' calls, and talking across the world is not expensive. The next big thing in communications is voice-over-IP, where voice traffic is transmitted over the internet rather than via telephone providers' equipment. One such system is Skype (www.skype.com) which allows us to chat on the 'phone' for free via the internet. Check it out and let me know if you have it. (If you want to talk to me, that is)

Billy Connolly's World Tour of New Zealand has started showing here on a Sunday night; one of the few bright spots on the television viewing list. So far it's been a bit hit-and-miss with spectacular South Island scenery and some good jokes juxtaposed with toe-curling political correctness (why does he do it ?), but hopefully it'll improve. Other TV high points are an old series of Spooks which has started on Wednesday nights and that Trevor Eve series about the old murder cases. You know the one. Otherwise New Zealand TV is pretty dire despite the fabulous salaries paid to newsreaders. We're tempted to get Sky, but I'll have to get another job first (reading the news), and I sometimes find myself listening to Radio Four on the internet, though the twelve hour time difference makes this slightly bizarre.

The other day, driving through some western suburb of Auckland, I saw a front garden completely taken up with a satellite dish the same height as the house. Desperate measures to receive European porn channels, or a devotee of BBC2 ? Who knows. Someone without a life anyway. At least all this has weaned the children off the Cartoon Network, and given them more time for computer games...

Actually I saw Judy Baillie in the fruit and vegetable shop the other day. She was buying onions and corn on the cob. Thought you'd like to know.

We've been meeting some fellow new arrivals recently, mostly from UK and South Africa. It's interesting to compare notes on the experience of arrival and slow settlement, and the reasons people came. Many Brits are self-styled refugees from aspects of British life; some, like us, have a returning Kiwi to blame; and others are just adventurers looking for (and finding) a better lifestyle. Someone told me it takes six months for British immigrants to unclench their buttocks, so April could be a turning point for us, whereas South Africans seem to dive head-first into New Zealand's relaxed and open society.

Talking to another Kiwi-returnee yesterday (she was away 16 years) we discovered we both miss the depth of history that surrounds everyday life in Britain. New Zealand has a very shallow history of human settlement dating back about 900 years, and a recorded history of just 150 years. The first settlers were Maori people from East Polynesia, and they were joined later by European settlers, and more recently by many Asian settlers. An 'old' building here is one built before 1940, but almost certainly after 1900. There's no Hadrian's Wall or Edinburgh Castle to remind you of a deep human continuity, but neither are there stern ranks of stone buildings telling you it's always been this way and nothing can change.

There is no concept of 'ancient' human history here, and that has a profound effect on the prevailing culture. Arguments rage over whether being here earlier means you belong here more (sadly Northern Ireland and Kosovo show us where this thinking leads) and what ongoing immigration policy should be. What gives us our sense of roots ? Who belongs ? Who make the best citizens ? There are clenched buttocks all round on these questions in New Zealand; snarling armies of advocates, their heads full of certainties and mantras, circling each other in the darkness. Historical records and aspirational revisions merge to support claim and counter-claim. The din could keep you awake at night.

On the other hand New Zealanders are not generally bound by history or solid architecture to certain courses of events or ways of thinking. There is a fluidity and an openness to change and experiment that is refreshing after living in the Scottish Borders for fifteen years. I'm rediscovering and enjoying the optimism of this society, and the quiet pride there is in being a New Zealander.

Having said all that, I still miss the old buildings, the ruins, the detritus left by thousands of generations of people who lived on the same soil over millennia. Other things ? We all miss seeing and spending time with friends and family in the UK of course; the comfortability of our Peebles 'network' and the reassurance of shared habits and routines. But would I be anywhere else just now ?

No.

When the boat comes in

The phrases 'it's on the boat' and 'when the boat arrives' have become commonplace here in recent weeks.

Before leaving Peebles we packed up a whole heap of items we just couldn't do without (Lego, poetry books, food mixer, Beanies, you know the kind of thing) into tea chests* and despatched them through our removal company to be 'shipped' to our new home.

'Shipping' has always been mysterious to me; one of those slightly romantic sounding activities that other, richer, people did with their goods and chattles (chattels ?) and which involved horses and groups of men at docksides and wooden crates stuffed with straw. (Wait til you Freudians get to work on that last sentence). There's much more common knowledge about it over here because just about everything except people arrives in New Zealand by ship. Sit on Takapuna Beach for a couple of hours and you see two or three of the things sail past into Auckland Harbour, all laden with containers full of cars, electrical goods, food, raw materials and tea chests* of people's junk.

Well, on the 14th of January our boat finally came in and with it all those precious items we've done without all these months. It will be like Christmas all over again once the agriculture ministry have finished checking it for foreign muck, though goodness knows where we'll put it all.

* Yes, yes, you're wondering what a tea chest is aren't you. When the shipping company mentioned tea chests I pictured sturdy plywood crates framed in teak or mahogany and smelling of Lapsang Souchong, and the cardboard boxes they delivered were a deep disappointment. I blame reading too many Tintin books as a child.

It's now nearly Burns Night (tut tut, that time already, nights fair drawin' in etc etc) and we've been away on a Tiki Tour of the North Island for the past two weeks. Tiki Touring involves travelling about New Zealand from tourist destination to tourist destination, getting an overview of the country. It's not exactly 'Doing Europe' but you get the idea. Nowadays there's a more refined version of tiki touring called Rings Touring wherein you travel around the different locations used in the Lord Of The Rings films. We didn't do this, opting instead for the high profile and time-tested attractions.

New Zealand is a country of natural wonders, and we've visited limestone caverns, boiling mud pools, volcanoes, wild west coast beaches with black sand piled high with driftwood, native bush, and taken a paddle steamer trip up a river where lumps of pumice stone float downstream from the central plateau. I grew up with this stuff, but it never ceases to amaze.

Driving around New Zealand is a pleasure after the roads of Britain. Although there are no motorways except around the approaches to Wellington and Auckland, the traffic is light and the scenery wonderful. Having said that, the roads must often come second to the landscape and so they twist and turn around the mountains and squeeze through ravines, changing suddenly from wide and flat to steep and unpredictable. Our air-conditioned Honda Odyssey is nice to travel in but it's not in a hurry on these precipitous hills, so we meandered from place to place, stopping frequently to look at the view and take the air. The maximum speed on New Zealand roads is 100kph, but the average is more like 80kph so it takes time to get around. We got as far as Wellington this time, visiting the extraordinary Te Papa Museum (the Museum of New Zealand) on the harbourside and catching up with family on both sides.

Now back in Auckland we have resumed the serious business of finding useful employment and getting the kids ready for the new school year which begins on February 1st. Bureaucracy and petty officialdom continue to hamper our respective searches for work in the education sector here, despite the widespread view that New Zealand has a serious labour shortage and a dearth of teachers. Don't get me started on petty officials with a little power....

I'm also working on getting my first drama sessions up and running, and this looks promising. Theatre is a big thing in New Zealand, with a wide diversity of people and material about. There are several areas where I think my brand of theatre work fits in, and that feels optimistic.

'But what about the supermarkets ?' I hear you cry. I know, I know. I promised to tell you about them didn't I. Our local supermarket on Hauraki Corner is the New World, one of a national chain of similar size and range to the Co-op stores. Once inside there's little to distinguish it from a store in the UK (except Co-op stores always seem to have milk on the floor somewhere - have you noticed that ?) but for the bigger range of fruit and veges (kiwifruit by the bucket, sweet kumara, puha, plus tamarillos and feijoas in season.) and initially unfamiliar brand names. Food's cheaper than the UK too, as are most things. At the checkout your bags are always packed for you, and on the couple of occasions I've forgotten this I've had a puzzled and slightly offended look from the packer.

Going further afield we find bigger stores such as Food Town, Countdown, Pak'n'Save and Woolworths (this latter seems to have no connection in kind to the UK version, though in the end they're probably all owned by Walmart or Virgin or something. The UK Woolworths is one of those stores you can't define except by listing what it sells, but here it's like Tesco). It seems a lot of supermarket chains for a population only two-thirds that of Scotland until you start looking more closely. Food Town's own brand is called Signature, but a recent whizz round Countdown in Birkenhead for milk and bread (and $100 of other stuff that just fell into the trolley) revealed Signature brand goods there too. Huh ? The answer to this most perplexing mystery is that there are only two supermarket companies but multiple shopfronts. You can visit Food Town and pay higher prices to walk on lino floors and choose from a wider range, or go to Pak'n'Save where the floors are polished concrete, the stuff's stacked high in the original bulk boxes but you pay less for the same goods. It puts the Peebles Somerfield/Safeway divide in perspective, though it doesn't divide the populus into Us and Them quite so distinctly.

What does divide the populus distinctly is the choice of daily newspaper, but here it's about geography rather than politics. Each regional centre (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin) has its own newspaper. They are, respectively, The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion Post, The Press and the Otago Daily Times. Like the supermarkets they serve the same basic fodder in different wrappers, but New Zealand is fiercely regional and local news features big on the front pages. It's a whole country of the Press And Journal or the PN and every day one paper's big lead story is the other papers' North East Man Lost At Sea. Woe betide he who openly carries the Dom Post in downtown Auckland, or the Herald in Wellington.

Arriving at a petrol station outside Wellington last week I filled the car and went in to pay, picking up a paper as I walked to the counter. The surly proprietor totted up the petrol and the paper on his till, then looked again at the paper.
"Oh" he said, stopping, and I wondered what new disaster was chronicled on the front page. He looked up at me.
"This is the Herald" he said, concerned.
I looked back. "Yes."
A pause. Dust settled.
"Is that the one you want ?"
"Yes"
Silence. A long look.
"Most people buy the Post"
"Oh" I said.
Time passed. He continued to look at me with an expectant air.
"That's fifty-six twenty." he said eventually
I paid and returned to the car, the man's eyes watching me all the way, and he was still looking out the window as we drove back on to the main highway and away down the road to Wellington. Several days later, returning North I avoided looking at the garage as we passed, lest he was still there, perhaps waiting for me.

To get a feel of New Zealand's news scene have a look at www.stuff.co.nz It's a pretty good digest of what's happening here.

It's Saturday night and we've just returned from a stroll along the beach. I can hear the kids upstairs having supper and a glass of wine awaits. I heard on the BBC World Service the other night that someone's worked out that January 24th is the most depressing day of the year in the UK. Apparently this is a mathematical calculation involving hours of sunlight, temperature, average bank balances, distances from holidays and so on. Sounds like a good reason for the whole country to take up the Burns Night tradition. So my thoughts are with you all as you approach the nadir of the annual cycle over there; wrap up warm, turn all the lights on and raise a glass. Here's tae us !

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.