Crosstown Traffic

27^th March 2011

Six weeks into my new job and already the commute is killing me. I mean it. Each moment that I spend sitting with my right foot twitching uneasily between the “break” and “accelerate” pedals of my car as it crawls like a wounded animal through greater Auckland’s twice-daily north western motorway logjam, I swear a little part of me dies.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. The only traffic I expected to encounter in New Zealand was the occasional herd of cows being led off for milking. And the remoter parts of the country do almost conform to this arcadian idyll. Auckland, however, is an entirely different beast. Over a quarter of New Zealand’s total population live in and around it, so I suppose it shouldn’t have been a complete surprise that the roads here are every bit as thick with vehicular sludge as your average European city. Unfortunately, our first few carefree months here gave me something of a false sense of security. While we were still firmly entrenched in lazy holidayer mode, the earliest we’d ever venture into town from our countryside retreat at Kumeu was mid-morning, at which point the motorway was almost always free-flowing and the inner-city roads encouragingly quiet. Sometimes I’d hear ominous mutterings about the rush hour traffic, but would always put them to the back of my head, naively refusing to believe that my journey time to work could be significantly longer than the 35 minutes the drive into town usually took. Ignorance, as it’s transpired, was indeed bliss.

If anything, the commute is even more arduous than the most dire warnings suggested. On an average day, we are talking a minimum of an hour and ten minutes door to door, but on at least two occasions since I started working in the city seven weeks ago, it has approached the two hour mark. For poor Holly, who is currently working over in an eastern Auckland suburb, it’s another half an hour on top of that. As we both have to be at our desks by 8.30am, we are compelled to leave the house no later than the ungodly hour of 7. And with the traffic seemingly unable to abide by any laws of consistency, my sweaty-palmed, lateness-fearing morning commutes already number more than I can bear to remember.

I appreciate this must all sound terribly ungrateful to those readers who have spent their entire working lives having to somehow claw themselves out of bed at 5 in the morning and stagger through their working day like untrained extras from Sean of the Dead, but I guess it’s all a matter of what one is used to. For me, having spent the previous six years of my life in public transport-enabled London, my customary work get-up time has never previously been earlier than 8am, with the Tube usually getting me to my desk no more than an hour later. That all-important extra hour and a half in bed meant that I could happily stay up talking or reading or watching TV until way past midnight, whereas now I find myself unable to prevent my feeble sleepy head from nodding off much beyond 11pm. Suffice to say, it’s a lifestyle change that I’m not entirely comfortable with.

Of course, most of these things have their pros and cons, and I mustn’t forget the downsides to London commuting, which often involved lodging one’s face unceremoniously in a stranger’s cheaply perfumed armpit on an overcrowded Tube train (on the few occasions it wasn’t broken down, that is). Driving to work, though, requires quite a different mentality, and it frustrates me that my formerly precious twice-daily reading time is currently lost to me, while after-work drinks are restricted to units beneath the legal driving limit (yes, we're nice and law-abiding like that). There are, though, many wonderful things about life in the countryside, and I know that when we do finally make the shift back to apartment-living in the city, I’ll probably miss it more than I now realise. The one redeeming factor of our daily dawn commute is that it allows us to witness some of most spectacular sunrises I have ever encountered. As our battered old Daihatsu weaves along the hilly country road that runs past the house (the one part of our journey guaranteed to be traffic-free), we are blessed with unique views of the distant Auckland metropolis, and as the suns climbs up behind and bathes the urban skyline in always-different twists of pinky yellow light, we get an early morning hit as good as any cup of black coffee. And even in the most sluggish stretches of traffic along the north western motorway, we are at least gifted the dream-like views across the calm waters of the Auckland harbour reflecting those glorious pastel skies. For those brief couple of minutes each morning, it’s almost all worth it.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that I have trouble selling in our country life to those fortuitous enough to have pads in the city. Nevertheless, considering Kiwis’ oft-noted relationship with the land, I do find it odd that so few seem willing to embrace life beyond the confines of Auckland’s urban sprawl. Some I’ve spoken to seem to regard Kumeu and the other rural townships to the west of Auckland as another land entirely, and my commute back and forth to the city each day appears to baffle and horrify them in equal measure. Given my previous lamentations on the subject, I can hardly disagree with them entirely, but I’m nevertheless surprised by how few Aucklanders have even paid a visit to this part of the region. One business acquaintance recently confessed to me that he hasn’t seen a friend who lives not even as far as we do out to the west of the city since his first son was born nine years ago! Well, they don’t know what they’re missing.

The fact is that once you get past the psychological commute barrier – which, after all, only affects us five days out of seven – life out here is bloody great, and I’d far rather wake up on a Saturday morning surrounded by Kumeu’s rugged natural beauty, than by some bustling car-tooting thoroughfare in the city. And quite apart from the scenic delights of the area, there are actually some pretty fun things to do round here too. For example, we have recently become semi-regular patrons of the nearby Riverhead Tavern, which of all the drinking establishments I’ve frequented in New Zealand perhaps comes closest to capturing the distinctive charms of your traditional English country pub. With a fine selection of beers (spoilt only by the fact that they’re served in New Zealand’s favourite not-quite-a-pint glasses) and a hearty selection of freshly-made food, it offers everything you’d expect of a cosy rural pub, though its main selling point is its giant wood-decked outdoor terrace that sits several metres above a section of the local river. The views out over the surprisingly wide expanse of water are quite spectacular and evocative of nothing less than France’s Loire Valley.

Another local highlight is the Kumeu Country Show, an annual showcase for the area’s finest farmers and artisans. From a woodblock-cutting competition contested by local men with biceps bigger than my head, to a surreal sheep-shearing challenge in which a succession of doddery old farmers line up to shave their animals’ woollen coats in the quickest time, it was all a far cry from anything I would have encountered on a Saturday afternoon in the city. The dazzling cast of characters we encountered there represented all facets of Kiwi life, though judging by the scarcely credible gamut of mullets sauntering around, I won’t be rushing to associate with all of them. More appealing was the fantastic array of rainbow-feathered chooks (chickens to you and me) and improbably large vegetables on display, not to mention the barn full of alpaca and llamas, two species that god must have designed with a knowing smirk on his face.

In future times, when we’re back residing in the concrete jungle, I’m sure I’ll look back with a wistful nostalgia on this mad old country life and wonder why we ever gave it up. But if I hadn’t experienced it now, it might never have entered my head to aspire to it in the future, whereas I now believe with near-certainty that we’ll one day have our own rural dream home either here or back in England, preferably with at least one alpaca roaming around on the back lawn. Perhaps by then someone might have bothered to lay on a half-decent train service to the city. Or, more likely, have invented a jetpack to strap on the back of my alpaca and fly me to work in a matter of minutes. Anyone know a good patent attorney?

Jonny

Other Voices

6^th March 2011

Certain regular readers of this blog have remarked that my updates have slowed to a virtual drip-feed of late (yes, I do actually have regular readers, much to even my own surprise, and according to the handy stats function the host site provides, I’ve had pageviews from countries as diverse as China and Belize, where, as far as I’m aware, I don’t know a single soul). The reason, ladies and gentlemen, is twofold. Firstly, I have over the course of the last six weeks landed myself A Job, and am therefore far shorter on leisure time than I was in those halcyon days when I was a wide-eyed New Zealand virgin. I’m not convinced this is necessarily an appropriate forum to be discussing the ins and outs of said job, but some of the people and experiences to which it is daily introducing me will no doubt end up getting their fair share of coverage in future entries. More importantly, it has for obvious reasons been a incredibly difficult time for New Zealand since the devastating second Christchurch earthquake struck a couple of weeks ago and I felt it would have been unseemly of me to be blabbering on about my own trivial affairs when the terrible losses suffered by so many people here were still so raw. It will be a long time before the wounds can properly start to heal, especially when the whole Canterbury region is so geologically unstable at the moment, but there is at least a determination among the people of Christchurch, and New Zealand as a whole, that the city will one day re-emerge as a stronger, and perhaps even better, place than it was. In the meantime, I would urge you all to donate as much as you can to the various earthquake appeals to at least give those who have lost so much a helping hand in their path to recovery.

My primary topic today is language. One of the many appealing things about emigrating to New Zealand rather than, say, Slovenia, was that I wouldn’t be required to learn a new lingua franca. Foreign tongues, I have to admit, have never been my strongest suit. My best languages at school were Latin and Ancient Greek, which, fun though they were, are about as much use in modern day life as a Betamax video recorder. French I am average at, while my Italian and Spanish have barely moved beyond the confines of the “useful phrases” section of my Rough Guide to Europe. And as valiantly as I’ve tried to improve mon francais during my numerous forays across the Channel, my brain’s apparent inability to retain new vocabulary and verb forms without perennial drilling from my French teacher means that I never seem to get much further than the most mundane of conversational patter. I’m certain that this would be at least partially remedied were I to spend a significant chunk of time living and working alongside Les Grenouilles, but given the inevitable stresses of moving to a foreign country, I was rather glad that language was one of the few things I wouldn’t have to worry about before relocating to the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Or, at least, this is what I thought before I found myself surrounded by New Zealanders 24/7. It turns out, you see, that my Kiwi girlfriend’s (to these ears) distinctly English-sounding tones are not necessarily indicative of your average New Zealand accent. I’m still not entirely sure whether Holly has always sounded like this, or whether she absorbed more of the local tongue than your average worldly traveller during her two years in London, but either way, it meant that I didn’t really start to pay attention to the idiosyncrasies of New Zealand’s distinct brand of English until I actually moved over here.

One of the first things that struck me when I started listening properly to the way Kiwis speak was that curious rising intonation at the end of every sentence, which has the disorienting side-effect of making them sound like they’re asking a continuous stream of questions. It’s a quirk that becomes quite easy to mimic after a while, though obviously I try to suppress the temptation till I’m standing alone in front of a mirror. I’ve never studied linguistics or accents academically so have been left to ponder in my own mind how such a distinctive trait has manifested itself over what can be no more than a hundred and fifty years. The first European immigrants to New Zealand were, after all, mainly from the UK, yet I’ve never heard an accent from my own sceptred isle, from Cockney to Scouse, that sounds anything like Kiwi. Clearly, the influence of the Maori and the significant number of immigrants from non-English speaking countries like the Netherlands can’t be ignored, but its deviation from the accents of the homeland is nevertheless rather surprising.

While the dominant New Zealand accent – and by that, I mean the one heard in and around Auckland, whose population accounts for almost half of the whole country’s – has clearly followed its own evolutionary trajectory, free from the influence of the motherland, there are traces of some British regional accents in other parts of New Zealand. I was somewhat startled, for example, by the unmistakable West Country burr that greeted me when we first visited the South Island’s Central Otago region. Thankfully, there was no call for any of the people we met down there to say “combine harvesturr”, otherwise I might have struggled to suppress a smirk.

The accent is inevitably only one of several facets that distinguish the way New Zealanders speak from the way we Brits do. The vocabulary used for certain commonplace items can sometimes be wildly different, particularly when it comes to food, where Kiwis seem to follow American custom rather than British. Peppers are universally known as capsicums here, while courgettes are commonly referred to by the more exotic-sounding zucchini. And even when we appear to use the same word on paper, there can be an unexpected twist of pronunciation. For example, the “yog” of “yoghurt” is pronounced to rhyme with the “bog” of “bogey” rather than that of “boggle”, while “chilli con carne” is spoken as if the final word ended with the “n”.

These variations are minor, though, when compared to some of the slang terms you commonly hear bandied around in everyday conversation. I noticed early on that the affectionate address of “mate”, with which many of my British male contemporaries end a sentence, comes a distant third behind the more customary salutations “cuz” and “bro”. New Zealanders love the qualifier “heaps”, as in, “I love you heaps” or “I’ve eaten heaps of crumpets”, which gets a bit irritating after a while, though I suppose it’s at least less coarse than the more common urban British variant “shitloads”. I have already touched upon the slightly sordid feeling I get when I find myself having to use the term “jandal” (see, see, it’s underlining it in my spellchecker!) rather than flip-flop, just to make myself understood. Likewise, I have been compelled to adopt such unnatural vocabulary as gumboots (wellies), grunds (underpants) and togs (swimming trunks), just to avoid a sea of blank faces when conversing with the locals. Less common, but certainly more intriguing, are those words and phrases that, if you didn’t know better, you’d assume were some kind of gag from Flight of the Concords. The expression we chose for the title of this very blog, “rattle your dags”, was one example I picked up when browsing through a dictionary of Kiwi slang when we were still in England (for those of you who haven’t worked it out by now, it means “hurry the **** up!”)

Though there have been odd occasions when I’ve been sat in a room full of bantering Kiwis and wondered what the hell they’re babbling on about whilst simultaneously feeling horribly self-conscious about my own accent, which in that sort of context sounds like my mouth has been surgically replaced by Boris Johnson’s, I’ve been here so long now that I only tend to notice an accent when I hear a fellow foreigner speaking. Plus, as most New Zealanders are self-confessed anglophiles, not only because many of them have British ancestors, but because prime time television over here is largely dominated by UK imports, they positively lap up my accent. If anything, they’re disappointed that I don’t sound more like Vera Duckworth from the much-loved Coronation Street. What’s worrying, though, is that last time I spoke to my parents back home, my dad made the shattering accusation that I’ve started to speak a bit like them. As if such a thing were possible! I might say “jandal” and even drop the odd “yoeghurt”, but I swear my accent is resolutely English. Oh.

Jonny

Food, Glorious Food

2^nd February 2010

Insatiable foodie that I am, one of my earliest concerns upon arriving in New Zealand was establishing what sort of relationship the Kiwis have with their grub. In my previous forays abroad, I have always tried to throw myself tonguefirst into the local cuisine; whether it be bratwurst in Germany or cuisses de grenouille (aka frogs' legs) in France, I love to indulge my taste buds with new flavours and textures, no matter how strange or forbidding they might initially appear (and, believe me, German sausages are pretty intimidating when you first encounter one).

Wherever possible I would try to avoid food that was readily available back home and only as a last resort would I allow myself to be caught stuffing my face in an international chain or fast food joint (see earlier blog entry on Tangier for one such regrettable episode). Of course, it was significantly easier to be gung-ho about sampling new dishes knowing that I would be able to return to my staple British comforts as soon as I returned home from holiday. Now that I’m ensconced in a foreign country for a significantly longer period, however, I have no such consoling thought and I knew, when I first came to New Zealand, that it might be some time before I would be able to salivate over another Marks & Spencer Cherry Bakewell or Brick Lane Tikka Masala.

I needn’t have worried, of course. As several sagacious individuals remarked before I came here, New Zealand isn’t really all that different from the UK, and that is no less true of its food. The supermarkets here might have different names and logos – for Tesco, Sainsburys and Asda, read Pak ‘n’ Save, Countdown and New World – but inside they’re very much the same as those back home (except, oddly, for the lighting – NZ supermarkets are a lot darker than ours, which at least means that sunglasses aren’t required in the dairy section). At a rough guess, I would say that around 90% of the items in NZ food stores are the same as their English counterparts. They even have a brand called Watties that is, in every respect but its name, a carbon copy of Heinz, selling the same baked beans, tomato ketchup and tinned soups that you would expect to find in your local Tesco. Curiously, they have the Heinz brand too, for certain products – the company’s “Seriously Good Mayo”, for instance, is marketed under the Heinz banner rather than Watties. Perhaps they want to hold the UK name back for their premium ranges over here…

Look a little closer though and it becomes apparent there are numerous subtle and not-so-subtle differences between NZ and British supermarket shelves. Take tomato sauce, for example, an essential item in any self-respecting Brit’s kitchen cupboard (or fridge, if you’re one of those strange people that likes their t-sauce chilled). In the UK, tomato sauce and tomato ketchup are interchangeable terms and we like ours to drip from either a glass (if you’re an old school Heinz traditionalist) or squeezy plastic bottle. Watties in NZ, though, not only market sauce and ketchup as two entirely separate products, but also offer “tomato sauce lite” and “tomato sauce homestyle” to those not satisfied with your bog standard version. To this uncultured palate, these four “twists” on ketchup are barely distinguishable from one another and would, I suspect, flummox most Brits if they were asked to identify them in a blind taste test. It might be that the “sauce” is thicker and more tomato-y, while the “ketchup” lighter and more sugary but really, they’re much of a muchness. (God only knows what this “homestyle” stuff is but according to the pretty picture on the label, it goes very nicely with a fry up). More bizarre than any of this, though, is that Kiwis buy tomato sauce in tins. Yes, tins. Like the tins you get baked beans or cat food in. Apparently the idea is to use these tins as refills for your glass (or plastic) bottles when they run out but to me, it all seems like a big fuss over nothing. Tomato sauce is tomato sauce at the end of the day – unless, of course, it’s ketchup.

After four months here, I have come to the admittedly rather woolly conclusion that Kiwis do some foodstuffs better than us, and some not as well. Take bread, for instance. They have some truly excellent pre-packaged brands over here, and none tastier than Vogels, which, I have recently discovered, is now being sold at certain branches of Waitrose back home. This is almost certainly a masterstroke on the part of Waitrose’s owners as I feel confident that once the secret’s out of the bag the British public will quickly come to realise that Vogels pisses from an almighty height on the bread brands they’ve been unfairly saddled with their whole lives. Whatever type of Vogels you choose – whether it be original grain (in both “sandwich” or “toast” versions – the latter being more thickly sliced than the former), spelt & flaxseed or soy & linseed – it has a flavour and crunch that surpasses all other pre-sliced breads I have ever known. Honestly, it is so much nicer than anything Hovis or Kingsmill have ever put out that it wouldn’t surprise me if it eventually drives those two out of business. The only downsides to Vogels are cost - it can set you back up to the equivalent of £3 a loaf - and the fact that each slice is about two thirds of the size of your average British bread tranche. But, I suppose, breaders can’t be choosers. Ahem.

One area where us Brits have a definite edge over the Kiwis is in cheese – a concept I found odd to grasp given how renowned New Zealand is for its milk and dairy products. I suppose this is where the European influence helps us Brits, as it’s very easy for our supermarkets to import all manner of weird and wonderful cheeses from the continent. Being so far away from, well, just about everywhere, New Zealanders, by contrast, mostly have to make do with their own fromage creations. As such, the choice of cheeses in supermarkets here is generally limited, and the majority of the market revolves around three staple types – “Tasty” cheddar, Edam and Colby, all of which are sold in either 1kg or 500g blocks and are, going by all my accumulated evidence so far, resident in the inner door of every fridge in the country. Personally, I find the latter two cheeses bland and rubbery, but while the cheddar is certainly at the milder end of the spectrum, I can confirm that it lives up to its “Tasty” sobriquet. And I eat a lot of it.

The pendulum swings back in favour of the Kiwis when it comes to fresh produce, particularly fruit and vegetables, which are generally so much fresher than their UK counterparts. There are a lot of what we would term green-grocers here, and significantly more specialist food stores than there are back home. One Auckland shop we visited boasted the most spectacular array of nuts, dried fruit and pulses, all displayed in a gigantic wall of transparent plastic dispensers. Meat and fish are generally of a higher quality here too, though they perhaps lack the range of British supermarkets. And they don’t do bangers half as well. The main difference in food culture generally is that Kiwis like to cook from scratch and haven’t bought into the whole ready/convenience meal thing to anywhere near the same extent as we have. I don’t even think there is a ready meal section in the local supermarket we frequent, though that’s not to say New Zealanders don’t enjoy the odd pre-made can of something. Creamed sweetcorn in a tin – something that either doesn’t exist in the UK, or I’ve been unobservant enough never to have noticed – is massive here.

Overall my impression of Kiwi food has been a good one and I’ve really enjoyed trying those products that don’t even have a British equivalent, such as tamarillos, feijoas (both types of fruit; both excellent in chutneys), ginger crunch, lamingtons and lolly cake (all form of highly indulgent and very bad for you baked sweet things). But equally, I do find myself hankering for the occasional tin of mushy peas or toasted crumpet, items that are notable by their absence in Kiwi supermarkets. If I’m really desperate it’s good to know that I do have options for sourcing such items, not least in Bramptins, a dedicated “pommie” food shop in the beachside suburb of Devonport that sells all manner of classic British goodies, from Marks & Spencer’s jams to Paxo’s sage and onion stuffing. If it wasn’t for the rather embarrassing similarity between me and the cartoon Brit bloke who appears on their signage, I’d be in there all the time.

Jonny

Spiders From Mars / A Forest

19^th 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

New Year

10^th 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 31^st 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

The Holly And The Ivy

28th December 2010

In recent weeks my friends and family in the UK have expressed a natural curiosity about my experiences of a summer Christmas “down under”. With most Brits – myself included, until now - knowing only dark, cold Decembers and the annual bombardment of festive merchandise promoting idyllic Christmas scenes of snow-dusted cottages and sledging Santas, it is difficult for us to imagine celebrating such an instinctively wintery time of year in shorts and a t-shirt on the beach. Given the arctic weather conditions to which Europe has been subject in recent weeks, the notion must seem all the odder (not to mention galling) for everyone back home, though at least the residents of my home town Loughborough have finally been able to tick off the ever dreamed-of white Christmas, something that has typically transpired the one year I’m not there to witness it.

I found adapting to a hot Christmas quite jarring at first and in the weeks building up to the big day I didn’t feel quite as festive as I usually do at this time of year. Part of the reason, I think, is that New Zealanders don’t throw themselves into the party season spirit with quite the same vigour as we do back home, perhaps because they want to save themselves for the extended summer holidays many of them take in the weeks immediately after Christmas. Also, many of the traditions that we commonly associate with Christmas back home, from the drinking of mulled wine to singing carols by a roaring log fire, are clearly inappropriate when temperatures reach the upper end of the twenties and the only fire you want to be stoking is the one heating up the barbecue. Strangely, though, Kiwis continue to partake in many of these customs despite their incongruity in this climate, presumably as a result of New Zealand’s origins as a British colony. They even produce Christmas cards depicting the same snowy scenes you’d expect to see on the British versions, even though it’s probably been several millennia since snow last fell in Auckland during the summer.

Though New Zealand has its own indigenous “Christmas tree” - the red-flowered Pohutukawa - most households here still opt for the traditional European pines and firs to adorn with gaudy baubles and tinsel. Conveniently, the house in Kumeu has a multitude of such trees growing on the surrounding land and with the help of Holly’s sister-in-law Liz and a long-armed saw we spent a fun/exhausting afternoon in the first week of December lopping down a ten-foot branch from one of them and dragging it indoors for decoration. We later came to regret our early advent enthusiasm as the formerly verdant bough had turned brown and wilted by the time Christmas week came around and we were forced to go through the whole branch-hacking process all over again to ensure we had a vaguely respectable tree for Christmas Day. Perhaps we’d be better off sticking with a plastic one next year.

Christmas Day itself is, of course, a family occasion and every household will have its own special way of doing things, often with idiosyncrasies that would seem utterly bizarre to an outsider. I grew up, for example, strictly forbidden from opening any presents until after the Queen’s Speech had been broadcast at 3pm – this despite the fact that the address is pre-recorded and has already been played out on the radio earlier on Christmas morning. The wait for my five-year-old self was, as I’m sure you can imagine, interminable. Thankfully, this family tradition has slackened somewhat in recent years (helped along, in part, by the insistence of myself and my younger brother) and we have tended to enjoy a more relaxed afternoon gorging ourselves on the obligatory roast turkey lunch and catching up with the relatives we hadn’t seen since the previous Christmas.

The most frustrating thing about Christmas Day back home is that the weather usually confines everyone to the house after lunch. There are, after all, only so many hours one can bear sitting around in multi-coloured hats playing charades without a significant intake of sherry. The Antipodean summer Christmas, on the other hand, allows for a far more dynamic programme of activities and I was particularly pleased to be able to burn off some turkey calories with a game of cricket with some of Holly’s relatives after we’d finished eating lunch at her dad’s house in Auckland.

Though I missed my customary binge on “the trimmings” of a Christmas roast (bread sauce, pigs in blankets, chestnut stuffing – you know the routine), I enjoyed the diversity of food on offer at a more buffet-style lunch, with the turkey accompanied by a range of cold meats and imaginative salads. Traditional Christmas pudding and brandy sauce was conspicuous by its absence but I was more than compensated by an array of other delicious desserts, including the famed New Zealand pavlova and a particularly decadent tiramisu.

Otherwise, Christmas Day was much the same as back home, complete with crackers containing rubbish jokes and useless plastic gifts, operatic renditions of carols blaring out of the stereo and the horrible realisation, around 4pm, that you’ve eaten far too much and pray that the toilet is far out of the earshot of your fellow revellers. Oh, and they even watch the Queen’s Speech over here, a full seventeen hours before the UK gets to. My dear old granny would be mortified.

Christmas Day was made for indulgence and I was pleased to discover that the evening festivities here were no less extravagant than the afternoon’s. Retiring back to Kumeu, we were treated to a delicious spread of barbecued food courtesy of Holly’s mum and were still sitting outside eating and drinking close to midnight. Skype - that wonderful tool of modern communication - then allowed me to wish my family back home a merry Christmas on their Christmas morning whilst feeling slightly queasy at the thought of the gargantuan food binge still awaiting them. Though I was sad to be unable to spend this most family-oriented of days with my own relatives, I felt very fortunate to experience another culture’s take on festivities, but still with so many reassuringly familiar elements and with Holly’s welcoming family making me feel very much at home. Our Boxing Day excursion to the Eden Park stadium, where we watched New Zealand comfortably outscore Pakistan in an entertaining Twenty-Twenty cricket match, even helped to stop me missing my usual trip up to Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane for the traditional post-Christmas football match, though my subsequent discovery of a 3-2 loss to Hull perhaps went further towards softening that particular blow…

Jonny

Capital City

Tuesday 14th December

During our recent European travels I was particularly struck by how rarely a traveller’s arrival into a big city anticipates the charms that lie ahead. For logistical reasons, airports and train stations are hardly ever centrally located, resulting in often arduous journeys though suburbs and districts that no sane travel agent would ever put on a tourist map. It’s a pity, for example, that visitors coming into London via the Heathrow Express train service are first greeted by the rather bland – and sometimes downright ugly – scenery of the city’s south western council estates, rather than, say, the looming marvels of St Pauls or the Houses of Parliament. One city that spectacularly breaks that mould is Manhattan, and I vividly recall being awestruck by its distant metropolis of skyscrapers as I approached it by taxi from JFK Airport on my very first visit to New York.

Another is New Zealand’s capital Wellington, which dangles the bait of a sparkling modern port backed by splendid suburban hills as one docks at its harbour on the Interislander Ferry.

Actually, the most dramatic spectacle on our journey from Picton on the northern coast of the South Island to Wellington on the southern tip of the North was the serene hour-long passage through the Marlborough Sounds, a succession of tree-festooned peninsulas opening out into the Cook Strait at the South Island’s north eastern edge. On the map, the Sounds resemble a leaf that’s been nibbled away at by a hungry slug. From the ferry, they look like a series of half-submerged alligators crowned with the occasional millionaire’s mansion.

The unspoilt early morning skies contributed to an idyllic panorama and had we been better prepared with more wind-proof clothing we would have stayed up on deck to admire it for the entire journey, a regret reinforced once we’d ventured down to sample the swampy slop that passed for coffee in the ferry’s café. As we emerged from the Sounds into open sea the North Island was already visible in the misty distance, though I remain impressed by how culturally and politically unified New Zealand’s two principle land masses seem to be, despite the still-significant stretch of water that separates them. The north and south of England, for example, have no such physical divide yet if you didn’t know otherwise you might assume that Londonders and Mancunians come from entirely different planets…

After rounding the underbelly of the North Island, we eventually came within sight of Wellington, recently voted the “coolest little capital in the world” by Lonely Planet. I was keen to see for myself whether it lived up to the hype, particularly in light of my previously-stated reservations about Auckland, which is by some distance the larger of the two cities. Initial impressions were certainly favourable as we strolled along the sea front, taking in the sights of a bustling quayside and wondering whether the notorious Wellington winds were a myth, so calm was the air and still the water.

Like Christchurch, though, we found the central shopping district to be mildly disappointing. Though we welcomed a condensed city centre that was, unlike its big brother up north, easily navigable on foot, the streets themselves were rather characterless and, apart from the vaguely alternative Cuba Street, it seemed to lack the hip cafes and unique shops that make Auckland’s finest areas so distinctive. I was forewarned that Cuba Mall’s Bucket Fountain, allegedly a “sculpture” comprising a series of brightly coloured containers passing water to one another, was a “love it or hate it” affair, but the fact that our encounter with it coincided with two teenage girls leaping into it and throwing soap suds at each other ensured that it fell into the latter category for me.

Again, we found that Wellington’s most enticing attractions were not in the centre but around its outskirts. The Botanical Gardens, for example, proved to be an unexpected highlight with the cable car ride to the top of the hill that houses them providing fantastic views back down over the city.

We also got waylaid for several hours in the seafront’s Te Papa, a superb national museum hosting comprehensive collections of natural, geological, political and cultural Kiwi history. Ironically, though, the most crowd-pleasing spectacle there was not Kiwi at all, but the world’s largest preserved Giant Squid, which even in its cadaverous state prompted fear and disgust with its tentacles’ rotating hooks and melon-sized eyeballs. Our visit fortuitously coincided with two excellent temporary exhibitions: a borrowed collection of European Masters from Frankfurt’s Stadel Museum and a career-spanning retrospective of Kiwi photojournalist Brian Brake. I’d never heard of Brake before but after seeing his mesmerising photo sequences on, among others, an Indian Monsoon and 1970s Sydney, I’ll definitely be checking out more of his work in the future.

Though Te Papa, the Gardens, and Parliament Buildings (which include the architectural wonder the Beehive) proved to us that Wellington had more than enough to keep the casual tourist happy, the city’s reputation as a model place to live only really made sense once we ventured further afield to the suburbs. While the majority of Auckland’s outlying hills have been left as rugged parkland, Wellington’s have been landscaped to allow its wealthier residents to build homes on them with glorious views out over the city. Far from ruining the natural landscape, for once the buildings actually enhance the views from below, with the houses all afforded appropriate space and extensive tree and plant growth encouraged between each plot of land. Thanks to the generosity of Holly’s relatives Margaret and Tim Fairhall, we were fortunate enough to experience these lofty suburbs for ourselves when they invited us to stay at their former B&B in Kandallah, around 15 minutes’ drive from the city centre. As well as offering luxurious accommodation, their place unexpectedly granted us the opportunity to see Wellington’s best kept secret, a beautifully detailed miniature recreation of Germany’s Black Forest railway network that Tim has been building in his garage for the past twenty years. Given that the Fairhall’s imminent move to a newly-built townhouse on the waterfront is going to force Tim to dismantle his grand project at the start of next year, we felt incredibly privileged to see it at all, though we were heartened to hear that he plans to start a whole new railway scene in the basement of their new property, this time based on 1950s Saxony.

On a final Wellington note, one of my most heart-cockle-tickling experiences there was watching streams of football fans pour into the concrete monstrosity that is the Westpac Stadium for a game between the local Phoenix FC and Australia’s Adelaide United. For a moment, I had to do a double take, so reminiscent was the scene of a typical Saturday afternoon in the streets around an English football ground. It was gratifying to know that even in a country in which the beautiful game is far from the top of the sporting pecking order, football fervour is at least alive and well in the capital. If only Auckland would get its act together and submit its own professional league team, I might actually be able to watch a live game over here for myself…

Jonny