Winning Days

11^th December 2011

In the wee small hours of Monday 24^th October 2011, my feet slowed to a halt somewhere along Commerce Street, downtown Auckland, and I took a moment to survey the scene around me. To my right, a gaggle of shrieking girls in teetering heels and bounteous mascara. To my left, a sweary horde of fist-clenching boys singing pitifully out of tune. Ahead of me, a maze of fidgeting queues stretching out from the doors of every bar and club. And down at my feet, a wretched teenager expunging the beery contents of his stomach impenitently onto the kerbside.

Upon absorbing these sights and sounds, my only thought was that I must have been transported back to Loughborough town centre on the last night out of term before Christmas. On further viewing, however, it became mercifully apparent that I wasn’t experiencing some nightmarish vision of my teenage years, but was indeed still in the Auckland I had come to love for its scarcity of binge-drinking hooliganism over the past 12 months. One tell-tale sign was the comically exaggerated war dance that suddenly broke out amongst the group of shirtless young men in front of me. Another was the overwhelming presence of black clothing, flags and face paint amongst the surrounding revellers. And then there were the forlorn-looking fellows in blue shirts and berets who trudged by looking as though their team had just lost the World Cup final…

It became clear to me then that New Zealand was having a party, a party to end all parties, a party to celebrate the Greatest Day in New Zealand History. I refer, of course, to the day when the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup in their own back yard by a scarcely probable 9-8 score line against the French. For outsiders (of which I am inevitably still one), the sheer momentousness of this achievement was perhaps not immediately apparent. To put it simply though, the notion of New Zealand winning the biggest competition in the sporting calendar, in their own country, by the slenderest of margins, in the dying minutes of the game, with their captain a walking wounded and their star player forced out through injury, and against a team who had notoriously defeated them in the finals of two previous World Cups, was pretty much every Kiwi’s number one fantasy. Not any more. This happened, and not even against the odds, but in a manner that seemed so inevitable that it’s hard to believe God wasn’t colluding on the script with the soon to be re-elected Prime Minister, John Key.

Before and after the final, the New Zealand media talked a lot of guff about this outcome being their “destiny”, and were I not a bitter Pom still irked by England’s dismal exit from the competition two weeks’ previously, I’d probably be employing such hyperbole myself. Even so, it was impossible not to be swept along with the atmosphere on the night, so wild were the celebrations after the final whistle, when a combination of elation at the result and relief that the French (as had seemed likely for most of the game) were not to going ruin their dream again, manifested itself in the form of screams, cheers, fist pumping, hands in the air, table dancing and even nudity (though the less said about the man whose celebration entailed the impromptu removal of his jeans and underwear in the gents toilets, the better). I even found myself exclaiming “yes!!!” with such vigour that even a triple exclamation mark is understating it. Personally, I blame the Kiwi girlfriend.

After a year when an improbable succession of natural and manmade disasters had made New Zealanders rightfully ask themselves, “what have we done to deserve this?”, only the most hard-hearted foreigner would not have taken pleasure in seeing the country celebrate in such a manner – even it did mean that Auckland fleetingly resembled the booze-fuelled apocalypse of a British seaside town. As an immigrant here, I felt particularly privileged to have been able to experience it all first hand. I know several rugby fans back home who would have been mightily envious of me as they watched the game shivering in their dressing gowns and cradling cups of tea first thing in the British morning.

For us, the litany of potential options for watching the final was a bit overwhelming. Packed out sports club or quiet hotel bar? With family or friends? At home or in a central square? In the end, we did what any self-respecting Brit would do and headed for the pub.

I’ve always believed that there’s something perfectly aligned about pubs and live sport. The big screen displays, the jugs of ale, the big bowls of chips slathered with ketchup and mayonnaise… all these things contribute, but really, it’s about those moments of sense-defying euphoria when the scoring of a goal or conversion of a penalty kick results in a colossal outpouring of fist-pumping, hand-clapping, arms aloft emotion that the presence of others seems magnify ten-fold. And of course, the moment of triumph in a game of a World Cup final’s magnitude is all the sweeter.

New Zealand’s elation in the wake of the All Blacks’ sensational victory offered belated proof that Kiwis are every bit as capable of sporting fanaticism as we Brits. This has not always been obvious to me, for while New Zealanders talk about sport – well, rugby – a lot, their demeanour at live games would not always suggest they cared in quite the same way we do. Inevitably, this has as much to do with the different mindsets of football and rugby fans as it does with the cultural divergences between Kiwis and Brits, but New Zealanders themselves will often bemoan the lack of passion displayed by fans at live rugby games. While the crowds at British football matches can be intimidating to the uninitiated, few would argue with the almost religious fervour generated by fans getting behind (or slating) their team. Prior to the Rugby World Cup, by contrast, I found the atmosphere at the lives games I attended to be rather sedate. There was little in the way of singing and chanting; polite applause was more likely than the expletive-ridden tirades I was used to back home; and Mexican waves substituted the torrents of ref-directed abuse that soundtrack your typical footy match.

The locals won’t like me saying it, but some of the best atmospheres generated at the World Cup were at games involving teams other than the All Blacks – and I can testify to that myself after being nearly deafened by boisterous Highlanders at the England v Scotland group match. It was a strange tournament for the hosts in fairness. They knew from the start that they would most likely reach the latter stages of the competition, which meant that it was difficult for fans to get particularly excited by the early games against massively inferior opposition. One colleague of mine, whom I’m sure wouldn’t mind me calling a sports nut, was so unenthused by the prospect of New Zealand vs Japan that he recorded the game to watch back at a more convenient time. By the end of the tournament, the desperation to win had become so unbearable that All Blacks fans were watching games paralysed by nerves and unable to speak or cheer for fear of breaking the spell.

They needn’t have worried, of course. Sport is usually at its best when it’s unpredictable, but while we all knew the All Blacks’ triumph was “nailed on”, the Rugby World Cup of 2011 will still go down as one of my best ever sporting memories – which is saying something coming from a fan of team who played as dismally as England did.

The legacy of the tournament, though, goes way beyond my personal reminiscences and the sickening hangovers that those lairy revellers would have woken up to the morning after the final. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s put New Zealand on the map – I’ll leave the clichés to the hacks – but it’s certainly stirred consciousness of the place elsewhere in the world, and I doubt any travelling fan would have left with a bad word to say about it. Auckland, certainly, has reaped the benefits and has felt like a much grander city since the long-awaited makeovers of the Art Gallery and Wynyard Quarter, both of which were inspired to completion by the onset of the tournament. And the early signs seem to be good for the clutch of new bars, cafes and restaurants that threw their doors open to the influx of World Cup tourists – certainly, the new strip of eating and drinking establishments along the Viaduct were full to the brim when I walked past them on a recent Friday evening.

Ultimately, it’s really up to those of us who continue to live in this city to keep these places going now that the 80,000 tourists have gone home with their scrapbooks of happy memories. The rugby showed the city and the wider country at its best – let’s make sure we keep it that way. After all, it might be quite some time before New Zealand gets to experience such excitement and glory again. The next World Cup is being hosted in England after all…

Jonny

Wicked Game

25^th September 2011

My first live game of rugby was a 6 Nations test between England and Wales at Twickenham in spring 2004. Such was my indifference towards the sport at the time that I wouldn't have known what the 6 Nations was, let alone considered attending a game, were it not for my dad winning a pair of tickets in a work raffle and asking me to be his plus one. My utter absence of interest in rugby stemmed, I think, from my heroically unsporty teenage self being forced to play it for three excruciating years at secondary school, and the bitter memories of chapped winter thighs and ill-fitting gum shields that remained seared on my brain. For all that, trips to London were still something of an event for me in those days, and the game gave me an opportunity to see a side of the capital I hadn’t previously experienced. In short, I wasn’t going to turn the offer down.

As it turned out, my first game of rugby wasn’t bad. Which isn’t to say it was great, or life-changing, but it definitely wasn’t the macho bore-fest I had been expecting. I even found myself cheering when England’s Olly Barclay converted a penalty kick. And something must have sparked in me that white-skied afternoon in South West London, for while my prior interest in rugby had been such that I hadn’t even bothered to get out of bed for England's triumphant 2003 World Cup final, I subsequently began to watch - and even enjoy - the occasional game on the TV. Nevertheless, rugby remained a mere anemone in the context of my passion for football, and I didn’t attend another live game until I arrived in a country where ignoring rugby is as easy as finding a pre-made pack of sandwiches.

Holly warned me early on in our relationship that I was going to have to up my game when it came to knowledge of rugby, particularly if I ever wanted to impress her dad or, indeed, have any sort of meaningful conversation with another male in her home country. And so it has come to pass, for New Zealand, to put it mildly, is rugby bonkers. Here football (or “soccer” as Kiwis call it) is just an itch on the skin of the all-conquering Goliath that is rugby, and any naysayers may as well board the first flight out of Auckland airport, such is the unwavering fervour with which Kiwis discuss, debate and dissect their favourite sport. Inevitably, some of their enthusiasm has begun to wear off after almost a year of being bludgeoned into conversations about it, and I can now honestly say that I can even enjoy watching games that don't involve England.

Of no little encouragement in this has been the arrival here of the Rugby World Cup at a time when the All Blacks are regarded by even the most cynical fan as the finest rugby side on the planet. If it doesn’t happen for them this year, it probably never will. The build-up was in progress even before we arrived in Auckland last spring and had reached fever pitch by early September, when the whole country was counting down the days to the first game, New Zealand vs Tonga, at the national stadium Eden Park. Though I had enjoyed following the previous World Cup in 2007 - not least because England somehow contrived to get all the way to the final for a second tournament running - I can’t say the prospect of being in NZ for the 2011 competition had particularly moved me when I first began to contemplate emigrating over here early last year. To be honest, I was more concerned about missing the excitement of London hosting the 2012 Olympics, not to mention the prospect of getting out of bed at some godforsaken hour to watch the inevitable failure of the England football team at the European Championships next year. Now that I’m here though, and experiencing it all first hand, I know I’m making a lot of my sport-loving friends back home salivatingly envious.

It’s fair to say that New Zealand has done everything it could and more to make this tournament a memorable one, even if the draw has served up some of the greatest mis-matches I’ve ever seen from a competition that purports to be pitting the world’s best teams against one another. Eden Park is a mighty fine stadium, and the addition of a unfeasibly high temporary seating stand at one end has afforded it a sense of scale that befits its hosting of one of the world’s biggest sporting competitions. However, it is not just the venues, which include the stunning glass-roofed Otago Stadium in Dunedin, but the whole country that has embraced the tournament and provided the estimated 80,000 World Cup tourists with a scrapbook-full to write home about.

Auckland, for one, has been transformed in recent weeks. The streets, often grey and humdrum during the cold winter months, have been decked out with a myriad of posters, flags and awnings, with each area of the central city assigned one of the 20 competing nations to support. The first morning that I drove down Ponsonby Road and saw that the street had been turned overnight into a mini-England with St George’s Crosses hanging above every shop window, I was just a little moved.

Most impressive of all is the work that’s been done down by the waterfront. One of the first things that struck me about Auckland when I first came here was how disconnected it felt from the water that surrounds it. Uniquely placed, with bays to the north, south and, a little further out, to the west, you’d imagine from the map that this would be a city at one with its bordering seas, but instead it has so turned inwardly on itself that if you were dumped blind in the middle of the CBD you’d have next to no idea you were only a few minutes’ walk away from the ocean.

In fairness, the downtown harbour area does dazzle in parts. The Viaduct, with its gleaming white apartment blocks and cruise liner architecture, is the perfect setting for a mid-afternoon stroll in the peak of summer, and its winding waterside pathways play host to some of the city’s finest wining and dining establishments. Further along, the stately Ferry Building stands proud as a remembrance of Auckland’s colonial past, while the dirty rainbow of metal crates offloading from docked container ships is nothing if not imposing. But compared to the likes of Sydney and Brighton, cities that embrace and celebrate their closeness to the sea and offer their residents and visitors whole travel guides of seafront shopping, drinking and eating experiences, Auckland has been something of a disappointment.

That could all be about to change though with the opening of the Wynyard Quarter, a formerly derelict area to the west of the Viaduct that has been transformed into a humming patchwork of open spaces, industrial walkways, and high class bars and restaurants. The defunct chemical storage cylinders, far from disrupting the views out over the Waitemata Harbour, lend the area a unique atmosphere, their monolithic silhouettes providing a photographer’s dream as they tower like dark satanic mills above daytripping families and evening revellers alike.

Opened only weeks before the Rugby World Cup, the Wynyard Quarter has gone some way towards restoring some semblance of harmony between the city and its waterfront. It even boasts a heritage tram to carry travellers the almost laughably short distance between the Auckland Fish Market in Freeman’s Bay and the Viaduct. And despite being only an occasional destination for most Aucklanders in the past, the waterfront has come alive spectacularly during the first weeks of the Rugby World Cup. The day of the opening ceremony and first game between the All Blacks and Tonga, it seemed as if the entire city had descended upon it, and from early afternoon, when generous bosses began to let distracted staff out the office early, through to the late evening kick-off, a thick throng of people stretched all the way from the new Wynward Quarter café-housing bubble dome to the purpose-built fan zone centrepiece The Cloud over by the Ferry Building. When I arrived there with a group of work friends around 4 in the afternoon, the sheer mass of people was overwhelming – it was like being back on Oxford Street on the last shopping weekend before Christmas. Worse was the fact that the new strip of bars and restaurants in the Wynyard Quarter was patently not set up for the sudden influx of several thousand ecstatic tourists demanding unending beer. Taking one for the team, I valiantly attached myself to a forebodingly tutting queue and spent the next 45 minutes failing to get served by the under-supported bar staff. When I finally reached the front of the queue, I was told to my despair that I was at a section of the bar where they were only taking table orders. I used to be accustomed to such misery in the UK but after nearly 12 months of hassle-free pint buying, this represented a proverbial kick in the gonads. Fortunately, my powers of negotiation had not been dimmed by a year of being surrounded by people being awfully nice to each other, and following a stern word to the barman, I was able to escape with doubled-up pints for my entire group.

Such incidents were typical of a night when Auckland came close to collapsing under the weight of expectation, but crowd control aside, this was a glorious day in NZ history and when I finally got to stand, pint in hand, and admire the view out to sea surrounded by more people that I ever thought I’d see gathered in one place in New Zealand, and later, when a spectacular firework display exploded out of the Sky Tower and electrified the city skyline, I was grateful to be part of a little piece of history.

Ironically, the rugby itself has somehow seemed like an afterthought in the context of so much else going on in the city, and the fact that most of the tournament’s big guns have so effortlessly trounced the opposition has meant many of the games have been little more than training ground exercises. That could all change this weekend, when I will be lucky enough to witness a real clash of the titans, England v Scotland, at Eden Park. For a long time I’ve felt very far away from home, but now, with the eyes of the world and millions in my home country watching New Zealand on their TV screens, I suddenly feel like I’m at the centre of the universe.

Jonny

The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)

6^th August 2011

Who would have thought that something as ubiquitous in the British Isles as a pint of beer would be so hard to come by in foreign climes? The scarcity of the humble pint in New Zealand is particularly bewildering, not least because this country is teeming with Brits and children of Brits who must surely be thinking the same thing as me when they enter a pub here and are served their beer in a glass that, even to the naked eye, is clearly not pint-sized. It’s not far off, admittedly, but when one has spent their entire adult life drinking their favourite alcoholic beverage in a very specific volume, it is immediately apparent when said beverage is presented to you in a stunted form. It’s the same feeling you get as when you excitedly tear open a seemingly laden packet of crisps only to find that the bag was full of air and there’s barely a mouthful of the advertised contents at the bottom - a feeling of being, as we Poms say, “turned over”.

Such is the infrequency that pints are to be found in NZ pubs that I have been forced to adapt my lifelong bar order to exclude all reference to the desired quantity. I now simply request “a beer” rather than “a pint” for fear of getting strange looks. There doesn’t appear to be a name or word that identifies the slightly-less-than-a-pint-sized glasses that beer is usually served in here. In Australia, I know they call their smaller beer glasses “schooners” but the receptacle closest to a pint that I have encountered here is known as a “pot”. Which to me implies a small ceramic vestibule, and something entirely unsuited to the drinking of beer.

Now I realise some of you are probably thinking that this is all a bit of a fuss over nothing, but the smaller glass size does cause a certain degree of distress for unaccustomed Poms like myself. For a start, it means that you finish your drink a good couple of minutes sooner than you would in the UK, which means a quicker return to the bar, and ultimately more visits to the bar throughout the course of an evening. Which is annoying. It also means you end up spending significantly more on a night out than you would in your typical British pub, even in one of those monstrously overpriced west London gastro-pubs. The average price of a not-quite-a-pint in Auckland is somewhere around the 8 dollar mark, which at the current exchange rate is over 4 British pounds. Suffice to say, that is not a cheap date.

It recently transpired that it’s not just us grumpy Brits who have taken the Kiwi not-quite-a-pint issue to heart. A couple of weeks ago, the New Zealand Herald, Auckland’s leading newspaper, ran an outraged article entitled ‘The great World Cup beer swindle’, which announced to a disbelieving populace that official Rugby World Cup sponsor Heineken had increased beer keg prices whilst at the same time reducing the size of their branded tap beer glasses from 425ml to 400ml. The not-quite-a-pint controversy just became the barely-a-half-pint scandal.

If nothing else, the size of New Zealand beer vestibules helps to illustrate that the drinking culture here is quite different to that of the UK. I have previously remarked on the fact that pubs here are few and far between, with Kiwis more likely to choose bars and restaurants as their preferred out-of-home drinking dens. It’s a trend that I do find slightly strange, because Kiwis do love a good pub. Those that have travelled to the UK often cite the traditional “old man’s pub” as one of the things they miss most when returning to their homeland, and the pubs that have set up here always seem to be doing a roaring trade. Not that New Zealand’s pubs entirely replicate the distinct atmosphere of your English King & Queens and Coach & Horses. As well as the glass sizes, there are a number of other subtle distinctions that mark a Kiwi pub out from the ones I know and love back home. For a start, it is rare indeed to find a pub that serves bags of crisps from behind the bar. This curiously British phenomenon is, of course, a disaster waiting to happen for one’s arteries but when you’ve grown up with it, it’s hard not to feel disappointed when you’re deprived the ability to scoff a packet of steak-flavoured McCoys or bag of scampi fries with your pint of ale. And they haven’t even heard of pork scratchings over here, which, when you find yourself trying to explain the appeal of a bag of hairy freeze-dried pork rind, is probably not all that surprising.

So, if they serve their drinks in sizes that would justify a refund back home, and don’t offer their punters anything in the way of meat-flavoured potato snacks, is there anything that New Zealand pubs do do better than their British counterparts? Well, as it happens, there is. For a start, it is actually possible to walk into a central Auckland pub on a Friday lunchtime and find a free table. It is even probable that you can walk straight up to the bar and get served instantaneously, without any need for standing on tip-toe, dislocating limbs or barging fellow customers out of the way in order to get the barman to take your order. For any British person accustomed to spending entire evenings in the pub standing up and waiting at the bar for up to half an hour to get served, this is the equivalent of watering hole heaven.

Another notable feature of Kiwi pubs is that many of them actually serve their own beers brewed on site, and even those that don’t tend to offer a much broader and more unusual selection of lagers and ales than your average British boozer. There are also fewer in the way of homogenised chains like UK juggernauts Wetherspoons or O’Neils, which, while easy on the wallet, are only slightly more pleasant to spend an evening in than a motorway branch of Burger King. The main chains that they do have here – such as Mac’s brewbars and Monteith’s series of pubs – tend to be specialists in a particular beer brand and do their best to offer unique and interesting drinking experiences for their patrons. The food on offer in these establishments is usually of a decent quality too, with menus often bespoke to the venue and usually much more innovative than the limited burger-based selections you find in England. So even if you can’t buy a bag of smoky bacon crisps to soak up your beer, you are at least guaranteed a non-soggy bowl of fries and mayo.

Strangely, while my perception is that pubs are not very common in New Zealand, when I actually think about it, a lot more come to mind than expected. In Auckland alone, I can reel off a good half dozen where I’d happily spend an evening sitting (not standing) with a group of friends. There’s Ponsonby’s Belgian Beer Café, for example, a poshly-named pub housed within the grandiose walls of an old post office that serves heaving buckets of moules to accompany your Leffe and Stella Artois (yes, they have European beers here too).

There’s College Hill’s Cavalier Tavern, which does a mean lunchtime burger and provides a large outdoor terrace with great views out to the Sky Tower-dominated CBD - perfect for large groups on balmy summer evenings.

There’s downtown’s Northern Steamship, a classy Mac’s Brewbar uniquely decked out with upside-down art deco lampshades, leather couches and towering cylindrical free-standing bookshelves. There’s even an almost-authentic Irish pub called The Clare Inn in Mount Eden with a roaring fire, sport on the TV, and genuine Irish bar staff who call it “The Clurr Inn”.

So what’s missing about NZ pub culture, apart from pints? Well, on reflection, I think it’s probably the concept of “the local”, which is so engrained in British culture that the very expression has come to mean “the nearest boozer”. In the UK we have it good – perhaps too good – with even the smallest rural villages boasting a pub alongside the obligatory post office and shop, and in the big cities you’re rarely more than a 15 minute walk from the nearest drinking establishment. Within staggering distance of my old Maida Vale flat, for instance, it would take a third hand to count the number of pubs within a short walking radius. Not all of them were great, of course, and some of them were downright ‘orrible, but at least you had options. By contrast our new suburb of Epsom, while more than catering for every conceivable takeaway food occasion, doesn’t appear to have any true pubs. The closest ones to our flat are in Mount Eden village, a good twenty minutes’ walk from here.

Given that so much of New Zealand culture can be directly traced back to its British roots, it really is a curious thing that that mainstay of British life, the public house, is not more commonplace than it is here. Perhaps there’s a silent not-quite-a-pint boycott going on. Perhaps the price of beer is forcing Kiwis, particularly in these uncertain economic times, to drink more in the comfort of their own homes, with a 12 pack of beer stubs from the local supermarket currently a frighteningly cheaper option than a round of drinks in the pub. Or maybe it’s that dreaded public transport issue again – after all, a pub crawl is an easy night out in London when you have the Tube to get you home (and sometimes you can even get away with a pub crawl on the Tube), but when you’re having to rely on Auckland’s less than efficient buses and local trains, I know from my own experience that driving oneself home after a sober night out is the preferable option.

Whatever the pros or cons of the New Zealand drinking experience, the one thing I am sure of is that there’s a huge gap in the market here for a suburban, proper pint serving, crisp-stocked pub with fruit machines, a 80s-themed jukebox and a grumpy old man and a dog in the corner. There are enough Brits here to guarantee it regular, free-spending punters and you never know, the locals might just enjoy it too…

Jonny

Holly’s Auckland Winter Top Ten

Hello Hello! It’s been rather a while since my last post, so thought I might share a couple of my favourite things about my home town, Auckland. Here are 1 – 3 of 10.

  

1. The New Zealand International Film Festival 

  (Jul 14 – Aug 03)

A highlight of winter for many a partially hibernating Aucklander, the International Film Festival has something for everyone. I can think of no better way to spend a chilly evening than by cosying up under the stars in the beautiful Civic Theatre with a plastic cup of beer or (top quality) NZ wine in hand and being transported away for an hour or two. Jonny and I have had the good fortune of seeing a couple of excellent films so far.

The Civic Theatre

Tabloid – by Errol Morris (2010)

Fantastic documentary by experienced documentarian Morris (Fog of War, Mr Death etc). Former American beauty queen Joyce McKinney is his subject in this bizarre tale of romantic obsession, Mormon priests, smutty porn, a rented cottage in Devon, and the ensuing tabloid palaver she caused in Britain in the late 70s. Not to mention an even weirder plot twist before the final credits roll. If any of you have seen Crazy Love (2007) the American doco about the entangled lives of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss, then you’ll most certainly like Tabloid.

 Joyce McKinney - Tabloid

Submarine – by Richard Ayoade (2010)

Excellent debut film by IT Crowd favourite Richard Ayoade. Submarine follows the fortunes of young outsider Oliver Tate as he comes of age in Swansea in the early 80s (a challenge at the best of times). Fine performances by the Paddy Considine (always ace) as Graham Purvis and Craig Roberts as Oliver. Alex Turner was responsible for the music and he’s come up with the goods with the Submarine EP. Piledriver Waltz is on high rotation in our house at the moment.

 Submarine

 2. Auckland Museum

Perched atop a smallish hill in the green surrounds of the Domain and Winter Garden, the Museum is arguably the best looking building in Auckland and a perennial favourite for young and old alike. Go on a Saturday morning and you can combine a Parnell Farmers Market stop off, as well as coffee in the cute little Go Coffee cafe. 

Museum Opening Day, 1929

3. Little & Friday Cafe in Martha’s Fabrics

A newish addition to Newmarket, Little & Friday is a sweet little cafe hidden away from the Broadway hoards. The white tiled counter provides a nice backdrop to the beautiful selection of cakes and high tea treats which are just waiting to be served to you on a vintage china plate. Like the big shared tables, and the custard tart was very nice indeed. When you’ve finished, stroll through the rolls of fabric in Martha’s, pick up an interesting print - perhaps an upholstery project or that new dress. Or would it be best to look at the fabric first? You wouldn’t want to paw the imported linens and drill cottons with your jammy lamington hands. 

Little & Friday - swatches and brioche

Cold House

3^rd July 2011

From October, when I first set jandled foot upon this verdant isle, through to the early days of May this year, I felt like I was basking in an endless summer. Though we endured the odd dip in temperature and occasional rainy afternoon (and when it rains in New Zealand, it rains biblically), that whole period was basically one ongoing heatwave. For this wee scrap from England, where the extent of summer is usually a solitary scorching week in the middle of June, it felt like being on permanent vacation in the tropics. I think perhaps more than anything else I have experienced in my adopted country of residence, being able to wear a t-shirt outside for over six straight months has made me realise that I’m a long way from home.

What I didn’t realise at the time, but which is now abundantly clear to me, is that the long warm New Zealand summers are offset by the significantly less attractive conditions it offers up in the winter. Now before you all start rushing to direct your web browsers to wikipedia, I must make it clear that, in terms of actual temperature, the winter here in Auckland is nowhere near as painful as it is back home. We don’t get snowstorms or much in the way of frost and a walk in the park does not necessitate the unedifying purchase of a balaclava and a pair of thermal underpants. However, the UK does have one significant benefit over New Zealand at this time of year, and that is central heating.

It didn’t really occur to me until the temperature starting dropping off a couple of months ago that the interior walls of most Kiwi homes are not adorned with large ungainly radiators like their British counterparts. While this is almost certainly a good thing aesthetically, the unfortunate upshot during the winter months (ie. now) is that the houses over here are absolutely bloody freezing. Indeed, as I sit here typing this out at our kitchen table, my body is wrapped in as many layers as you’d expect to see during a snowball fight on Hampstead Heath, right down to the thick woolly scarf and fingerless gloves. And I’m still shivering like a wet dog emerging from an ill-advised paddle in the North Sea on Christmas Day.

The lack of central heating has nothing to do New Zealand not inventing it yet, or anything like that. It’s simply that, because the climate is generally is so mild here, it’s just not worth the investment for the benefits it would bring for only a couple of months each year. Of course, that doesn’t make it any easier for those of us who are forced to sit in our little homes every night trying to talk through chattering teeth and struggling to keep hold our cutlery with our icicle fingers.

I didn’t notice the problem so much when we were living out in Kumeu, mainly because of the whacking great Rayburn that handily heats up the whole house, but now that we have moved into our own pad in Auckland, the cold is hard to escape from. The high ceilings, single-glazed windows and wooden floors that characterise our new one bedroom apartment in the eastern central suburb of Epsom will, I’m sure, do a great job of keeping the place cool during the summer, but at the moment I think we’d be better insulated in an igloo. Fortunately, we have an open fire to contribute a bit of warmth, and we can huddle round a couple of portable gas heaters in the evenings, but I think it’ll be sometime before we feel truly comfortable here.

The process of flat hunting turned out to be relatively straightforward for us in the end, though it’s still something I’d rather not have to indulge in too often. The main resource for budding buyers and renters in New Zealand is the mighty Trade Me, which is a local auction site built on the successful Ebay model. Properties are handily listed by area and price range by either agents or by landlords direct, so it’s fairly easy to narrow a search down as long as you know your budget and preferred location. Initially, wearied by the months of commuting back and forth from the country, we were keen to move as close to our places of work in Freeman’s Bay as possible. However, we soon realised that floor space would be quite radically compromised if we were to mandate such a prime location and though we viewed some nice enough properties in the Ponsonby and Grey Lynn areas, including a lovely little flat in an old colonial mansion block with a driveway festooned with two large brass elephants, it would have been difficult to perform 360 degree turns in most of them.

Ultimately, we decided that space was more of a prerequisite than proximity to work – and in any case, we weren’t particularly attracted to the idea of doing our weekly shop in the same supermarket where we buy our lunches during office hours. Our search finally led us to Epsom, which sits a similar distance from downtown Auckland as my old Maida Vale flat did from central London, so we at last have a commute that gets us door to door in no more than 25 minutes. Though the area lacks a decent local pub – a common New Zealand failing, I must say - it’s otherwise a fine spot, minutes away from the modern Newmarket shopping district and a only a short walk from the cafes and restaurants of Mount Eden Village. The natural haven that is Cornwall Park is also only a few minutes’ walk from our front door, and the lesser known Mount St John, a breathtakingly steep-sided volcanic hump that offers fantastic views out over the city, is just around the corner.

Summer will surely be perfect here, and the local scenery has already provided us with the same sort of crisp winter day walks we used to enjoy on Hampstead Heath and Regents Park in London.

But until our landlord decides to splash out and install some proper radiators in the flat, I suspect the satisfaction of having our own place is likely to be tempered by the sub-Arctic conditions inside.

Jonny

Heaven or Rotovegas

22^nd May 2011

It’s just as well I don’t put much stall by reputations, for if I did I would almost certainly have missed out on a fabulous weekend in the central North Island city of Rotorua, which the locals warned me away from with the same degree of vehemence you’d expect from the Japanese government over the Fukushima nuclear plant. “What the &^%^ are you going there for?” was one of several adverse reactions I received from bemused work colleagues who demanded to know why, of all the beautiful places to visit in New Zealand, I would wish to spend my Easter break in a city referred to with almost cringeworthy regularity as “Rotovegas”. Even Holly, who is more in tune with my tastes than most, actively tried to prevent us from stopping off there during our epic driving tour from Wellington to Auckland late last year, even though it would have been out of our way to avoid it.

Of course, if someone tells you somewhere is shit, it only makes you even more curious to go there. And when lots of people tell you somewhere is shit, it makes you want to spend a weekend there to determine exactly how shit it can possibly be. Well, I’m sorry New Zealanders, but Rotorua is, quite simply, not shit. Which doesn’t mean that it’s particularly great either, but it’s unequivocally not worthy of the opprobrium that is repeatedly shovelled upon it by Aucklanders.

I have already made the case that New Zealand’s towns and cities do not necessarily represent the best of what the country has to offer, and often play second fiddle to the natural wonders upon and near which they were built. So yes, if one were to judge Rotorua solely on its merits as a city in itself, then it would probably be found lacking compared to equivalently-sized conurbations in Europe. This, though, would surely miss the point of what – for tourists at least – Rotorua is designed for: an accommodation and entertainment hub from which the surrounding landscapes can be explored and to which weary travellers can head for an evening of food, drink and revelry after a day of sightseeing. Judged on this basis, Rotorua delivers everything you could reasonably expect, with cheaply-priced hotels and a main street lined with pubs, bars and restaurants providing us with everything we required for an entertaining night out.

It is true that Rotorua has something of the shabby, concrete-fetishising northern English town about it, but for one night only that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We even managed to find a pub that served not only Stella, but bags of crisps – an inexplicably atypical occurrence over here: I almost felt nostalgic. Perhaps it is the overriding niff of rotten eggs that is responsible for Rotorua’s unfavourable reputation, and it’s true, the smell does hang around like a fart in a briefcase. But for me, that’s a small price worth paying for the access it provides to the dazzling array of geothermal marvels that provide the main incentive for tourists to flock to the area.

We began our central North Island adventure with a couple of hours at Orakei Karako, an off-the-beaten-track geothermal park which was pleasingly devoid of the tourist hordes that can sometimes detract from the impact of other parks in the area. (This is the moment when Holly interjects to point out that our “adventure” actually began en route to Orakei Karako, when I suddenly noticed halfway along a deserted country road in the middle of bloody nowhere that our car’s petrol gauge was pointing to a less-than-empty tank, despite - I swear - it being closer to half full only an hour earlier, and us having to endure a sweaty-palmed, heart-pumping quarter of hour in which we chugged along praying and hoping for a petrol station to magically appear before the car would splutter to a fuel-less halt. Thank god, one did, and we were saved. And Holly was a bit cross. But I digress.) Orakei Karako is, for wont of a better word, a wonderland. Reached via motorboat across a river from a carpark, it rises out of the water in a psychedelic patchwork of glistening yellow and blue rocks, and continues to astound as you weave your way along a wood-deck pathway that sits above a steaming, bubbling carpet of geysers, hot water stream and mud pools.

If there is a better example of an alien-aping landscape anywhere in the world, I’d love to hear about it. Quite apart from the colour scheme, which was like an artist’s approximation of the inside of Syd Barret’s head during one of his mind-melting LSD trips, the sounds and smells on display were like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.

The aforementioned pong d’oeuf was even more obnoxious here, while the soundscapes were like something off 1970s Doctor Who. Best of all, perhaps, was the bizarre rock formation that looked like a slumbering woolly mammoth covered in icing sugar.

As if all that wasn’t exotic enough, we found ourselves the following day in a more well-known but no less jaw-dropping thermal park a few miles east. Vaster in scale and just as smelly, Wai O Tapu offered further volcanic wonders, including a series of blue and green pools that were so striking in colour that they barely seemed real.

A giant steaming geyser also gave us the opportunity to take some suitably fantasty-esque photos as our silhouettes stood engulfed by great misty swathes.

But then, just as I began to feel like I really had been transported to some distant planet, we were brought straight back to earth by the rolling dulcet tones of an elderly Scottish couple who had come all this way from Lockerbie. It’s at such times that the world feels really quite small.

We could have easily spent days exploring the region, as the two parks we visited, and the famous Green and Blue lakes that sit like dreamy oil paintings at the foot of verdant mountains, barely scratched the surface of what the area has to offer. Even Rotorua, with its spectacular adjoining lake and impressively palatial museum, is probably worth another trip, though next time we might forgo the blandly international Hotel Ibis for somewhere a little more characterful.

But after two months of work that left me feeling like my holiday down under was well and truly over, Rotorua and its magnificent geothermal wonders made me remember just how special this country can be - just as long as you remember to pack your nose pegs…

Jonny