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

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