20/01/2011

Spiders From Mars / A Forest

19th January 2010


My hatred of all things spider began at an early age and was confirmed nightmarishly at the age of eleven when, upon waking parched in the middle of the night, I took a hefty gulp of what I thought was water from the glass next to my bed before realising, to my unending horror, that I had unwittingly slurped a giant and very much alive arachnid straight into my gob. The fact that this most devious of spiders (and they do seem to develop ever more devious ways of torturing me) was still alive when I projectile-expunged it from my mouth onto the carpet only added to my belief that these creatures could only be the work of the devil himself. As I watched that spider twitching menacingly in a pool of water-spew, my younger self immediately declared war on its entire species - a war I would be prepared to fight until the bitter end.


For a long time, this was a losing battle. My arachnophobia frequently got the better of my common sense and compelled me to undertake a nightly series of almost certainly needless “spider checks” before I would be prepared to attempt to sleep - checks that sometimes involved the complete dismantling and reassembly of my bedding. That I never again uncovered another such loathsome specimen under my sheets or beneath my pillow was beside the point to my younger self – one had already infiltrated the supposed safety net of my bedspread and I wasn’t prepared to let it happen again. Certainly, the oft-quoted statistic about humans swallowing in their sleep at least one spider per lifetime was enough to convince me that no let up in my quest to be forever rid of the eight-legged bastards could ever be allowed. In any case, while my bed may not have thrown up any further arachnid traumas, spiders were very much present in other parts of the house - lurking hairily in cracks in the walls, spinning sinister webs at the backs of the cupboards and pulsing like black hearts under the bathroom plughole. Quite simply, they had to be stopped.


In the early days of the spider war, my main weapon was my dad, who would frequently be called upon to despatch any sighted enemy agents with a swift stamp of the shoe or slap of a newspaper while the rest of my family (my mum and younger brother Nic having also joined the cause by now) stood shrieking in the next room. Later, I took to the battlefield myself, at first with similar weapons of brute force, but later with the far more sophisticated, not to mention civilised, Spider Hoover. This ingenious device, discovered by my gran in a local mail order catalogue, consisted of a battery-operated suction pump attached to a long transparent cylinder in which the spider, having been hauled inside with a brief powersuck, would reside until you took it outside and deposited it in a bush or tree as far away from the house as possible. Not only did the Spider Hoover provide a quick and easy method of capturing offending arachnids (the old glass ‘n’ postcard method was fraught with potential danger and once ended up with a spider running up the length of my arm like an eight-legged Roger Bannister) but it also allowed one the begrudging satisfaction of knowing that no blood had been shed in the pursuit of a spider-free household.


One evening soon after I first met Holly, she spotted the Spider Hoover (my third model, I believe) on the kitchen shelf in my London flat and immediately thought it was some kind of breast pump. When I calmly explained what it really was, I think she probably wished it had been a breast pump. Kiwis, you see, don’t appear to suffer from arachnophobia. In fact, Holly was so appalled by the very notion of me being scared of spiders that it put serious doubts into her head about my masculine credentials. I tried to explain my fears (“come on, they’re fat black hairy blobs with eight legs and eight eyes – what’s not to be scared of?!”) but to little avail. New Zealanders, it soon became clear, are used to living side by side with spiders in a way that most of us Brits would never allow. They’re also far more inclined to “rough it” in their tents and batches and log cabins, while we swan around in posh hotels and ski resorts. And roughing it in New Zealand inevitably means sleeping in very close proximity to lots and lots of spiders.


I should be grateful really. This is New Zealand, after all, not Australia; the native spiders are not, as a rule, particularly large and only one species - identified by a distinctive white dot on its back - is capable of inflicting a poisonous bite on humans. It just seems to me that there are a heck of a lot of them out here. Part of the reason, no doubt, is that we’ve spent much of our first three months here living out in the countryside, where spiders the world over are far more likely to be found residing than in your average city apartment. And, seeing as I have come here unarmed (the Spider Hoover, on Holly’s strict instructions, is currently gathering dust in a box somewhere in England), I have been forced to approach my new arachnid-rife environment with a more diplomatic approach. Fortunately, the house spiders here are slightly less terrifying than their British counterparts. Rather than being big hairy black things that lie in wait in darkened nooks and crannies, the spiders here tend to be of the more spindly and small-bodied variety and prefer to hang from the ceilings of rooms and thus at least give you a bit of a warning about their intentions. Though I still conduct the occasional de-spidering if I happen to see one in the vicinity of the bed (in the absence of the Hoover, this usually takes the form of an admittedly primitive scrunch-attack with a tissue), I’m more inclined to follow the “if you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you” mantra that my dad tried unsuccessfully to instil in me as a child.


Unfortunately, just as I thought I was getting to grips with the idea of living peacefully with the Kiwi spiders, I came face to face with one that made my childhood spider-swallowing episode seem like a walk in the park. A fist-sized Avondale Spider, a breed I later discovered had been brought over from Australia and is to be found only in and around the Waitakere region of NZ (ie. right on our doorstep), had somehow found its way into the house and was stationed in all its disgusting glory above the threshold of the back door. Upon espying it, I immediately forgot everything I had learnt during the previous two months and screamed like a girl while Holly - lion-hearted heroine that she is - removed the beast with the improvised use of a floor mop. To be honest, I don’t think even my trusty old Hoover would have been big enough to deal with that one.



Traumatising though this incident had been, it wasn’t enough to completely shatter my new-found spider-facing confidence and I was therefore able to approach our recent two day sojourn “roughing it” in Holly’s dad’s forest in the King Country with a far lesser degree of trepidation than I might have done a year ago. Now I don’t want to give the impression here that I am a complete novice when it comes to the great outdoors. I did, after all, spend a year of my school career as an RAF cadet, which entailed several intensive expeditions to the English countryside and nights spent in tents comprising little more than a sheet draped over two paltry wooden sticks. But it is true that such experiences in my life have been few and far between and our two days in the forest opened up to me a whole new world of al fresco adventure.


Firstly, on our way down to the forest, located approximately three and half hours’ drive directly south of Auckland, we paid a visit to the world famous Waitomo Caves, where I had my first ever encounter with the remarkable glow worm. Though I have long been beset by a morbid fear of spiders, I am generally on friendly terms with most other insects. Holding wriggling garden worms in my palm, for example, has never been problematic for me, so I entered the glow worms’ dwelling with excitement rather than trepidation. After an initial walking tour through an impressive cave that resembled the inside of a slowly-melting cathedral, we were loaded into a wooden boat that ferried us along an underground river surrounded by thousands of glow worms. With everyone obediently following our guide’s plea to be silent in order to preserve the cave’s ambience, it was a mesmerising journey, with the worms on the walls and ceiling resembling nothing less than a field of glittering stars in the night sky.



After a brief stop for lunch, we continued on our journey to the forest, a massive 130 hectare block in the middle of the mountains that Holly’s dad Philip has co-owned with some other relatives for the past fifteen years. Forests have always held a strange fascination for me, no doubt inspired by my love of books such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a child, and one of the things I miss most about England is the atmospheric walks I used to take through the knotted old woods near my home town. I had never before, though, been fortunate enough to walk through a privately-owned wood guaranteed to be free of other ramblers and travellers. Indeed, the only animal lifeforms we encountered during our stay there were a couple of wild goats and an unexpectedly quick-footed hedgehog.



Densely populated with over twenty thousand trees, from steely oaks to skinny pines that towered far above our heads, much of the forest felt beautifully untamed, though this did have the downside that our feet and legs were cut to shreds by the low-lying brambles and blackberry bushes that had grown out haphazardly across the walking tracks. Most scenic of all was the fresh water river that runs for over three kilometres right down the forest’s spine, and as I walked up it, often tummy-deep in water, I was ecstatic to be able to tick off another personal first. Though there were no fish or eels to be seen, the waterfalls and highly distinctive rock formations en route were more than enough to keep me mesmerised, even when the water temperature felt sub-zero and my right arm was aching from holding my camera far enough away from the water that there was no risk of it meeting the same fate as its predecessor on the beach at La Rochelle…



After a long afternoon of exploration, both in and alongside the river, we returned to what would be our lodgings for the night – a custom-built log cabin with the most basic of amenities, bunk-beds and an external “long drop” for a toilet. In former times, I may have baulked at such conditions but my time in New Zealand has taught me that the country’s incredible natural scenery is almost always best experienced by getting down and dirty with it, rather than from the cosy confines of a hotel or organised tour. It was this outlook, I think, that allowed me to sleep relatively worry-free, in spite of the fact that I knew I was sharing my bed not only with Holly, but also with several of my former arachnid adversaries. I took this not only as a sign of progress in my long-running war against the spider race, but also a more general realisation that the home comforts of my life in London aren’t necessarily as important to me as I thought they were. In the absence of electricity, we relied on cold food for sustenance, candles for reading light and a battered set of Chequers for entertainment, not to mention a hole in the ground for you know what. And though I can’t suddenly claim to be a born-again Hobbit after just a couple of days in the great outdoors, the experience did at least teach me that a night without the laptop and the television is not only an achievable feat, but actually bloody good fun as well.



Jonny

09/01/2011

New Year


10th January 2010


In my tender 27 years of experience, New Year’s Eve sucks. In fact, I hate it. However and wherever you choose to spend it, it is almost always characterised by a sense of desperate anti-climax, stomach-churning social awkwardness and an overdose of horrible alcoholic concoctions to which you’d give a planet-sized berth at any other time of the year.


This is all society’s fault, of course. We are programmed from an early age to “celebrate” the dawn of a new year, as if “having a good time” at the stroke of midnight on 31st December were some kind of condition for entry into civilised society. When someone asks you what you’re doing for New Year’s and you reply, “not much”, it is tantamount to admitting you’re a witless killjoy with no mates. But really, is there any real incentive for doing anything vaguely out of the ordinary on this apparently most sacrosanct of evenings? For a start, it’s all but impossible to gather a half-decent quota of friends together in one place as they’re either dispersed throughout the country with their respective families or, as is more likely, far more organised than you and have already made far more exciting plans. Then there’s the nightmare of actually trying to find a venue that isn’t a) closed for a private party, b) slapping on exorbitant New Year’s Eve premiums, or c) rubbish. There is always, of course, the budget option of staying in and having a few mates round for a dinner party but that inevitably means spending at least half the night being exposed to the background radiation of TV’s pitiful excuse for a New Year’s shindig. Cheesy to the point of nausea, such shows, which fester with the inane banter of half-pissed celebrity guests interspersed with roving reporters desperately attempting to stave off hypothermia whilst simultaneously trying to sound enthusiastic about the accompanying throng of people standing around doing not very much as they wait for the obligatory midnight fireworks display, are enough to make you wish you'd gone to bed at 7 o'clock when the going was still good.


As if all that weren’t bad enough, one is forced to somehow negotiate the stroke of midnight itself in a way that somehow preserves oneself a small modicum of dignity. In the context of a booze-fuelled evening stood next to a bunch of strangers in a pub or restaurant, this is all but impossible, especially when your fellow revellers start holding hands and drunkenly braying to the tune of that godawful drone Auld Lang Syne with its 85 choruses and 157 verses. If you’re stupid enough to choose the “stand around awkwardly in the middle of a freezing street to sample that ‘special’ new year’s atmosphere” option, you’ll most likely have frozen to death by the time midnight comes around anyway, but even if you haven’t you still have to overcome the inevitable fact that everyone’s watches will be slightly out of sync and thus endure a mind-melting cacophony of different countdowns before being subject to the customary piss poor Catherine wheel. Even if one decides to run with the low-key dinner party option, you are still not saved from the humiliation of having to go round the room wishing each person a happy new year and desperately trying to decide upon the most appropriate accompanying gesture from a menu containing, in no particular order, the one cheek kiss, the double cheek kiss, the triple cheek kiss, the hug, the cuddle, the hand shake, the back slap or some other indecorous bodily interaction.


Bearing all this in mind, it was to my great relief that my first New Year’s Eve in New Zealand offered up a far more enjoyable concluding chapter to 2010 than I thought possible. This was no doubt helped along by the fact that Holly had the great fortune of being born on 31st December and therefore provided a far better excuse for a proper knees-up than your average New Year’s Eve. We also had the bonus of being offered the chance to spend it up in the Coromandel peninsula, where the parents of Holly’s very good friend Julianne own a batch house within a stone’s throw of the beach at the resort town of Whangamata (pronounced, inexplicably, as Fongamatar by the locals). The batch provided an excellent base at which to gather a perfectly-sized group of friends to see in the new year without the need to splash out inordinate amounts of cash at a local bar or club. As with Christmas, the exemplary weather helped no end to facilitate a more dynamic programme of activities than I would have been able to experience back home and we were able to spend our final day of 2010 relaxing on the beach, stuffing our faces with greedy portions of fish ‘n’ chips on the batch’s terrace and playing outdoor drinking games into the wee hours of January 1st without the slightest call for a scarf or hat. And, thanks to Holly's serendipitous birth date, we were all able to gorge ourselves on great guilt-free servings of birthday cake throughout.



The generosity of Julianne’s parents Lyn and John in allowing us to stay with them for the rest of the weekend meant that our first days of the new year were not spent suffering from the customary post-Christmas depression but exploring some of New Zealand’s most beautiful coastal scenery. Though Wanagamata itself is something of a magnet for teenage party-goers desperate to indulge in all possible pleasures (legal or otherwise) while away from their parents, the multitude of beaches nearby offered a variety of opportunities for more civilised seaside fun. The gorgeous bay of Pokehino, for example, reachable only via a thirty minute trek through thick native bushland, provided a secluded tropical haven as yet undiscovered by even the most fastidious tourist guides. Its small white sand beach, flanked by New Zealand’s defining pohutukawa trees, was a perfect spot for a relaxing afternoon of reading and swimming, even if a sudden explosion of tiny jellyfish did their best to scupper our enjoyment of the latter.



Further up the coast, we made a visit to the more widely-known Hot Water Beach, where hundreds of eager bathers had congregated to dig pits and trenches which automatically fill up from the natural warm springs that flow underneath. More spectacular, and certainly more tranquil, was the beach around Cathedral Cove, a yawning hole carved straight through the rock which opens out onto another stunning tree-lined beach.




With reports from back home suggesting that the UK is seemingly on the brink of another ice age, my excitement at spending time in such a beautiful part of the country more than compensated for the sadness I felt at missing out on my own friends’ and family’s celebrations. But after experiencing first hand how much fun Christmas and New Year can be in the middle of the summer under crystal clear skies and brilliant sunshine, I think I’m more likely to be encouraging them to come out here for next year’s festivities rather than rushing to book a flight home myself…


Jonny