Moving to New Zealand!

There was a time when I thought I could get a pretty good coffee at Starbucks. There was a time, also, when I had never been to New Zealand. By no coincidence whatsoever, those two things ceased to be true of me at about the same time.

I should have realized, almost as soon as I arrived in New Zealand for the first time, that coffee would figure reasonably prominently in the trip. Air NZ’s overnight flight from Los Angeles arrives in Auckland at an hour I generally speaking prefer to pretend doesn’t even exist — certainly, in my younger days, I would typically see 5am as the end of the evening, not the beginning of the morning. But when you step off a Boeing into a country you’re planning to explore with a view to emigrating, then the day is most definitely beginning, not ending.

And so, ink dry on entry permit in passport, you make your way down from the immigration gate to the baggage claim area. And you wait. New Zealand’s border guards are no more efficient than any other country’s that I can think of (they’re certainly less officious than the American gatekeepers at Niagara Falls, who make their disdain for anyone who’s actually left the country to go to that frozen socialist wasteland to the north quite apparent); rather, fetching five hundred people’s suitcases off a 747 takes a while. The wait, of course, is tiresome. You stand, along with all the people you’ve spent the last thirteen hours breathing recycled air with, waiting for a sign that your luggage is about to emerge. And you wait. And wait a little longer. The conveyor belt starts to move, and people stand up just a little straighter. The knot of impatient travelers clumped round the chute onto which the baggage handlers will dump bags gets a little thicker. Then out comes the small, tartan holdall.

This is an unfailing truth of airports. I’ve traveled through airports on four different continents, in a dozen countries, and it’s always, always the same — a small, tartan holdall, first down the chute, loops round and round the luggage carousel, round and round, never claimed, never picked up. It’s always there. I don’t know if it’s the same small, tartan holdall following me, or if the airports of Hong Kong, and Manila, and Pittsburgh, and Moscow, all of them, have their own small, tartan holdalls, but it’s there regardless, always there, always the first out, never claimed.

Then the wait continues, another five minutes of noises, of grunts and bangs and shouting, and occasionally a flashing yellow light. And finally actual luggage starts to appear. Mine is never first. I’ve never been entirely sure why not, but it never, ever is. There is no good reason why it shouldn’t be, is there? Everyone’s luggage gets loaded onto the plane — everyone’s luggage has to be unloaded, and somebody’s has to be first. I’ve flown first class, third class, every damned class in between, but my bags are never first.

Because my bags are never first, I invariably have a long wait to collect my bags. And, given that I rarely sleep well on planes — something, I suspect, to do with being 6’3″ tall in a seat better suited to someone 3’6″ for half a day — I’m not always in the most attractive, or even recognizably human, of moods. The immigration experience at Auckland airport, to be entirely fair, doesn’t always offer the most uplifting experience a weary passenger could hope for after a trans-Pacific; the border guards, despite being, as we’ve established, less obnoxious than many of their American counterparts, are often every last bit as grumpy as they are entirely and reasonably entitled to be for having to be at work at such an unfeasible hour.

And so, in a nutshell, albeit a rather long and unfocussed nutshell, is the frame of mind in which I downed the stairs and into the baggage hall. The room itself is a bit dark, a bit dull, more than a bit utilitarian, but, on the left just as you enter, is a small kiosk that makes things, well, all right. It gives out coffee.

It doesn’t sell coffee. It doesn’t give out great coffee. I believe it offers tea, but this is unimportant. What matters is that it gives out coffee. This, a shagged-out traveller’s enduring first impression of New Zealand, is one of life’s most joyfully unexpected, small but appreciated, wonders. It shows that New Zealand is a country that understands the most basic, the most fundamental, of human needs, and is willing to meet them when they are most crucial.

And, more importantly, it lets a new arrival know that, alongside the great food and astonishing wines, New Zealand offers some of the finest coffee a coffee-drinker could hope for.

On that first visit, my eyes were opened. I grew up in, largely, a tea-drinking household. Coffee was always available, but in the form of granules — not beans, not ground, but little bits that (I made the mistake of tasting one, once) were little more than concentrated little balls of brown and bitter. I eventually graduated to freeze-dried, kidding myself that this was a little bit more like it. And it was — a little bit. But not much — it still, in hindsight, wasn’t real coffee. It was still reconstituted, still imitation. At the age of 19, I went to Rome, where I tried real coffee for the very first time, but I wasn’t ready for it. My palate was simply immature. Two years later, when I found myself in Jerusalem, drinking coffee so thick it was treacly, so strong it could jump-start a Sherman tank, I started to realise that this was more properly what I should be seeking out.

And so I moved to Japan — a great career move, no doubt, and a wonderful adventure that was to last ten years, but in terms of coffee, not the best move possible. As with anything else, the Japanese value form over content, and so while coffee becomes a lavish ritual of hand-grinding the beans, and slowly pouring boiling water over the ground coffee in a filter atop the cup, what I was drinking, I realised, was the appearance of coffee.

When Starbucks finally appeared in Shinjuku in, I believe, about 1997, I thought that I might finally start drinking coffee, real coffee. I had no idea what to order when I first visited the branch on the concourse opposite the south exit of Shinjuku Station, over the tracks from Takashimaya and Kinokuniya and Tokyu Hands, and so I asked the young lady what might be good. I found myself drinking a mocha, and, still an immature coffee drinker, rather enjoying it.

This, then, became my Starbucks order of choice, and I drank it until Debbie convinced me to try a latte — all the coffee flavour, none of the chocolatey syrupiness. After a couple of attempts, I was convinced. As Starbucks branches spread across Tokyo, and then up to Omiya, the commuter-belt suburb I then called home, I became a regular latte drinker. Starbucks, I realised, was the McDonald’s of coffee — while it was never brilliant, it was also never dreadful. And it was always, always the same, consistently and reliably safe — I tried lattes on trips to Oregon, to Beijing, to Manchester, and not only was the coffee identical, but even the layout and the decor of the stores were carbon copies. Consistency became predictability.

A move to Florida in 2001 did little to improve matters. While Deb and I were given a French press and a burr grinder as a wedding present, and so my home-made coffee was unimpeachable, coffee bought out was still likely to be from Starbucks, there being precious little in the way of alternatives in Pinellas County. The Tech Café, in Safety Harbor, did make a very pleasant latte, and this would be my escape of choice when Daughter was doing her ballet practice at the dance school a couple of blocks up the road. But when Starbucks opened up in the bizarrely named Shoppes [sic] at Harbour [sic] Pointe [sic] development at the end of Main Street, the Tech Café changed hands, then closed up shop, and the espresso juggernaut crushed another that had been foolish enough to stand in its path.

But the Tech Café, and Dan, its highly eccentric but utterly charming, owner, had taught me that there was so much more to coffee than Starbucks. While the free coffee at Auckland airport really wasn’t, in pure coffee terms, that spectacular, it did point up to me the importance of coffee in New Zealand.

And so, on my very first visit to the country, I found myself, at breakfast time, walking along Parnell Road in Auckland and looking for a cup of coffee. I had heard that New Zealand was capable of good coffee, and I was keen to carry out a little field research. Lonely Planet wasn’t a massive amount of help as I tried to pick out a coffee shop to sit and relax — certainly the Lonely Planet map of Auckland gave no idea how understated the word “Rise” was in the street name “Parnell Rise;” “Parnell Sheer Bloody Cliff” might well have been a touch more appropriate — with a cup. The clincher, in the end, was a “Free Wifi” sticker on the window of Esquire’s Coffee.

I sat, outside, in the warm early-summer sun, looking at the silver fern drawn into the fawn-and-white-coloured foam on top of my flat white. Please, please don’t ask me the difference between a flat white and a latte — other than the fact that “flat white” sounds so much more down-to-earth than “latte,” they’re essentially the same drink. Starbucks in New Zealand and Australia (yes, I’ve been in both — their city mugs do make decent souvenirs) sell both flat whites and lattes, but I have a strong suspicion that they’re exactly the same thing.

I took a sip, and immediately knew that I liked New Zealand very, very much. I also knew that I would never really enjoy Starbucks’ coffee ever again. This flat white was a revaluation — smooth where Starbucks’ was harsh, rich where the latte was bitter. It was the first of several flat whites I had that day. I used jet lag as an excuse; I told myself that I’d need the caffeine to help me get up Queen Street (that one’s not as unreasonable as it might sound — the top end, as you approach Karangahape Road, is damn near vertical). But all I was doing was justifying my fix. I wanted flat whites. Lots of them.

I was back in the US for nearly six months, and I didn’t get a good latte once. I tried Starbucks, but it wasn’t the same any more. The milk wasn’t velvety and soft, but viciously scalding. The espresso wasn’t rich and creamy, but burnt and bitter and harsh. It was coffee, but barely.

And so , in 2009, I moved to New Zealand to live, and, shortly after arriving, I found myself in the Duck’s Crossing café in Warkworth, drinking an impossibly perfect flat white — smooth, rich, right. The sign outside the café said “Gravity Coffee;” when I saw bags of the beans — whole beans, no less — on sale. 200g would cost me about seven dollars — I was sold.

The coffee I plunged in my press pot was every bit as rich and delicious as the espresso I’d tasted at the café. I was happy.

But could it last? The Duck’s Crossing, for all its wonders, was but one café, one source. On the one hand, it was entirely possible that this was the standard, the benchmark, for coffee across New Zealand. On the other, it could just as easily be the only place in the country that knew what it was doing behind a Gaggia.

Research was in order, and, one by one, I tried each and every café in town. They were all, each one of them, good. They were very good. I tried further afield, in Matakana, in Orewa. Coffee was consistently, reliably, wonderful.

It seems to make no difference here whether you try a smart-looking restaurant like the Cornwall Park Restaurant, at the foot of One Tree Hill, where I enjoyed a creamily excellent flat white a week or so ago, or a coffee shop attached to a tourist trap — in fact, ask Debbie or Daughter where the very best coffee of all is to be found, and they’ll both tell you that the café of the Bird Gardens in Katikati, between Waihi and Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, made the finest flat white any of us has ever tasted. And who am I to argue? The coffee I have found in every café I have visited, North Island and South, has been outstanding, consistently and reliably. This, it would appear, is a country that just gets coffee.

There has been speculation about why this might be. New Zealand — and, giving credit where it is due, Australia — has been producing excellent coffee for much longer than the “Third Wave of Coffee” has been spreading south and east from Seattle; an oft-cited reason is that waves of post-war Italian immigrants brought their espresso mojo with them. Whatever the reason, coffee is one of New Zealand’s few sensibly-priced pleasures. I’ve whined about the high cost of living in New Zealand elsepost, so I won’t rewarm those coals; instead, I’ll point out that while, compared to, American prices, beer, or beef, tends to be surprisingly expensive, a good — an excellent, an outstanding — flat white will cost you as much in Kiwi dollars as a Starbucks over-roast in scalded milk will in American dollars. And I know where the better bargain is to be found.

I went back to Esquire’s in Parnell a couple of months after I arrived; I wanted to use their free Wifi to Skype-call Debbie, who was still back in Florida packing up our old life. It might have been better than Starbucks; I know realise that this is not an achievement. But, compared to, well, pretty much any high-street café, and certainly compared to La Red Berry, my favourite coffee in Pukokohe, well, it is sorely lacking.

I find Wellington to be the most confounding city in New Zealand. Last month I made my fourth visit to the capital, and almost wished, by the end of the day, that I hadn’t.

My very first visit to New Zealand, in 2008, ended with a trip to Wellington, to an interview for a job I didn’t get in Naenae, in Lower Hutt, north of the city. I flew in the day before the interview, and spent a highly enjoyable afternoon exploring Wellington. On this trip I first stayed at the Carillon Motor Inn, the eccentric joys of which I wrote about elsepost, and I found myself most enamoured of the city, if not of the Carillon.

Wellington on a good day

This had much to do with the city. On my first visit, the sunshine bathed Wellington. From the Botanical Gardens, at the top of the climb of the cable car, the view of the city, and of the port it hugs, was splendid. Walking Lambton Quay was a joy. The wonderful old buildings of the parliamentary quarter were magnificent. It was a good day.

But then I went back with The Girls, a year or so later, in early spring, and had to wonder if I were in the same city. Where once I had seen beauty framed by blue skies, instead I saw drear and dullness weighed down by the granite and slate of grey, heavy clouds that blanketed the sky and watered us steadily. The view from the hill, well, wasn’t — there might, for all we knew, have been a city in front of us, but we had now way of knowing. Nowhere, I’ll grant you, no city will look its best under such circumstances, but Wellington wears its winters heavy.

A third trip, again alone, again, by coincidence, for a job interview in Naenae (didn’t get that job either), that December again reminded me of the charms of the city. And so, when I heard that drinks were being laid on for the Nine To Noon team at Radio New Zealand’s headquarters on The Terrace, I booked my flight. And, as the day grew nearer, the clouds grew heavier.

I had, between my broadcast bit in the morning and the drink-up in the evening, about five hours to kill, and the weather was truly grim — drizzle if I was lucky, full-on rain if I wasn’t. After wrapping up my on-air bit, I walked back down The Terrace as far as Parliament; I was just in time for the next guided tour. I had taken the tour on my first visit, so I knew it was worth an hour of my time, and, after all, it was under cover — one major plus-point before the guide even said “hello.”

The Beehive, Wellington, in the sunshine

The tour was, of course, excellent. It started in the Beehive (of which more anon), and led through the Parliamentary library and into the House itself; Parliament not being session (this was just a few days after a rather dispiriting general election, and no new government had been officially formed), we were allowed to visit the floor of the House, which surprised, but also rather pleased, me. Photographs weren’t allowed; I did point out that even the Australians allow photos in the the two chambers of their Parliament during tours — telling a Kiwi that the Aussies do it better is almost guaranteed, usually, to get a result — but we had all had to surrender cameras and cellphones before the tour began.

An hour killed, I found myself outside Parliament in the steadily-building rain. I crossed the road to a cafe, and bought a cup of coffee, thinking that if I drank it slowly I could make another hour go away. As I sat at a table waiting for my flat white, I noticed a familiar-looking man walk through the door. After a couple of seconds, I recognized him as Winston Peters, leader of New Zealand First, one of the largest of the minority parties in New Zealand’s parliament. Not being overly impressed with the man, I didn’t bother to go and say hello. But I was surprised at how relaxed senior politicians are about going out in public in New Zealand. This has to be a good thing. Unlike New Zealand First.

But the coffee only lasted so long, and so, the rain having eased off considerably, I started to walk down toward Cuba Street, the funky, edgy end of town. I don’t think I’ve seen any town, any city — this includes, by the way, New York, London, Melbourne, San Francisco, Tokyo, even Auckland — anywhere that has the cafe density of Cuba Street. Every third business, it seems, has an espresso machine hissing away, and if it’s not a cafe, it’s a restaurant, or a grocer’s. Food heaven, indeed. So I stopped for lunch at a Turkish cafe that made the best doner kebab I’ve tasted in as long as I can remember — hot, spicy, oily, lamby, delicious — and then carried on toward Te Papa.

Te Papa Tongarewa calls itself “The Museum of New Zealand,” but that doesn’t quite do the place justice. It’s a huge, expansive collection of everything it means to be Kiwi — whether that means Maori, or Pakeha, or Pasifika, or any other flavor of New Zealander. Everything is represented here, from kaupapa Maori to contemporary Pakeha pop culture. The geology of New Zealand is depicted in charts, diagrammes and a model house that replicates the massive earthquake that shook Edgecombe in 1987. I spent maybe three hours wandering around the place, fascinated. I could easily have spent longer.

Possibly the most amazing thing about Te Papa is the fact that it’s free. It’s a publicly-owned museum, and so the public have free access. This is how it should be. A museum of this calibre could, should it choose, charge a large sum for admission and still hope to see plenty of visitors, but Te Papa, belonging to the people, does not charge the people admission. This is a wonderful place.

The Beehive, Wellington, in the rain

Less wonderful is the Beehive. Designed in the 1960s, and built in the 1970s, before the world realized precisely how ugly concrete really can be, the Beehive squats like a stumpy dalek, all harsh angles and freaky fins and vast sharp edges of ugly, next to the classical buildings of New Zealand’s Parliament. While it is, undeniably, an iconic symbol of Wellington, it is also testimony to the fact that construction, by and large, really should have been put on hold for much of the period between about 1960 and 1980. It’s not simply that the Beehive is ugly. It almost, but not quite, transcends ugliness, but, sadly, instead of crossing over from “ugly” to “so ugly it’s actually interesting,” it simply remains firmly in “ugly” territory. Not only is it ugly; it’s also horribly out of place. Next to the 1922 Parliament House, a lovely neoclassical construction, and the gothic-revival Library, the grey and dull brown Beehive is simply wrong.

And so the score in Wellington remains a tie — 2-2 between me and the weather. I still have a fondness for the place, and I still want to spend a little more time exploring the city, and the area around it, but more and more I find myself thinking it’s definitely a great place to visit, and a wonderful place to come home from.

I was in Wellington last week for Christmas drinks at Radio New Zealand with the Nine To Noon contributors, and I found myself drawn into a conversation with Kathryn Ryan and a couple of business pundits who were knocking around ideas about why businesses in New Zealand never seem to grow particularly huge. It’s a question I’ve heard asked before — why is it that the entrepreneurial spirit, or at least serious entrepreneurial success at very high levels, seems somewhat lacking round these parts?

I offered a little bit of insight, that the typical Kiwi is, generally speaking, not terribly driven to keep flogging himself once he’s made enough to buy the bach and keep him in Speight’s for life, an attitude I do rather find myself respecting.But it’s not, I’ll admit, the most profound insight ever offered in that context (nor the most original — I wrote about it, briefly, myself a few months ago), and I quietly reminded myself that, to be utterly fair, I was slightly out of my depth in that particular conversation.

(Not that I feel badly about it, though. My fortnightly bit on the show is commentary on new technology, not business; had the conversation wandered off in that direction, I’m fairly confident I would have held my own quite admirably. But the chances of the evening getting sufficiently geeky were fairly slim, and so we stuck to the business of business.)

Had that conversation taken place this week, however, I would have had a rather more penetrating insight to offer. I bought a new iPhone 4S last month, and, for the most part, it’s become a rather invaluable addition to my modern lifestyle. But the battery life, as has been well documented elsewhere, has been quite disappointing, and so on Monday I took my shiny new toy to to Vodafone shop in Pukekohe to get it replaced.

The lass behind the counter dismissed me with some hand-waving about iPhones always having poor battery life — nonsense, of course, as I explained to her. But she was having none of it, so I asked to speak to the manager, a young woman who was quite splendidly arrogant and more than a little condescending. Much was wrong about the conversation I had with her, starting with but by no means limited to her snotty, snarky tone, but what chafed more than anything was the requirement, if they were to lend me a replacement phone while my iPhone went off to be looked at (“Hmmm…looks like the battery’s buggered!”), to pay a $200 bond.

Shocked, stunned, speechless, I left the shop and went home to contact the company. Of course, if you’re going to contact the company, then you go straight to the top, as I’ve done many times in the past, and, to their eternal credit, Vodafone make this reasonably easy. A little bit of poking around on their website leads to a page with photos of all their top executives, including their CEO, Russell Stanners. But the photos aren’t what’s impressive. What makes the company remarkable is the fact that each of the photos has an email link below it, and so I found Stanners’ email address more easily than I find addresses of heads of most companies.

I emailed him, explaining that I was most dischuffed with the treatment I’d received, and that I would like a new phone. That evening, I received a reply from Russell Stanners himself (or, at the very least, from someone who writes his emails for him) assuring me that this would be dealt with forthwith, if not sooner, by Vodafone’s retail manager. And, today, I picked up a new iPhone – from, I’m delighted to say, the snotty manageress who refused to replace my phone on Monday.

So what’s the moral of the story? It’s simple, really. Kiwis work best when they’re working together as individuals. The young lass I spoke to first at the Vodafone shop had no connection to the business; she just worked there. She didn’t care about me, or about the company, and that’s the danger of a big, corporate structure in a country like New Zealand that is built, very strongly, and much more so than other societies, on connections between individuals. In the US, by contrast, small businesses are such an endangered breed that the idea of simply being a small cog in a huge corporate engine is a fundamental expectation of most workers. The Japanese zaibatsu model even more solidly entrenches this expectation, with workers all but owned by their corporate families.

In New Zealand, however, small businesses remain sufficiently widespread that the descent in corporate anonymity has yet to happen. A stroll down Pukekohe’s high street shows both that this remains true and that it might not much longer — despite the majority of businesses being local, single-location concerns, the national chains increasingly are gaining inroads. The local cafés, for example, still well outnumber the chain coffee shops — as well they should; the food, and especially the coffee, and, for Debbie, the tea, at La Red Berry, for example, will ever outshine anything on offer at, say, Columbus Coffee or McDonald’s — and I still get my haircuts at Lynette’s, and will do as long as the chain hairdressers stay away and allow her to stay in business. The new cinema in Pukekohe is an independent, but the newly-opened branches of Cotton On and Pagani, and the vast and likely overwhelming Farmer’s currently under construction and due to open next year, will likely ensure that local clothing shops will forever be excluded from King Street.

And so the small-business model remains the one that matters most in New Zealand. As long as I was dealing with a drone, a minimum-wage placeholder who simply handles cash for a company she has no stake in and no relationship with, my experience was deeply unsatisfactory. But as soon as I started talking to someone who actually cares — the shopkeeper, if you want to pursue the analogy (and why not? It works.), the business owner, the bloke whose name is on the website, if not on the shop window any longer — problems were resolved, the right thing was done, and I walked away a happy customer.

This is why businesses in New Zealand don’t take over the world. Kiwis don’t want corporate — Kiwis want personal. New Zealand might look like a country, but it’s not. It’s a town, and a bloody small one at that. It’s not the country to come to if you plan to get rich — bugger off to Australia if that’s your goal — but if you want people, and connections with people, it’s without equal.

With being a serial immigrant comes a little bit of perspective regarding various countries’ immigration policies, and of the people whose job it is to handle immigrants, foreigners and aliens.

New Zealand visitor's permi

After moving to Japan in 1991, it didn’t take long for me to realise that one of the best places to see institutional racism on display was at the local nyukoku-kanrikyoku, the immigration office, where officious little men with even more than the typical Japanese distrust of foreigners would abuse elderly Asian immigrants who spoke little Japanese but could understand from tone of voice that they were being insulted even before their children could translate for them. I went for my annual visa renewals, and for my re-entry permits, armed with a good book and a thick skin, knowing that I’d usually have to wait up to a couple of hours before my couple of minutes of condescension.

I assumed, fool that, clearly, I was, that when I moved to the United States in 2001, things would be more palatable. An hour-long wait in the August sun outside Tampa’s immigration office soon disabused me of that notion; once my turn had come for an X-raying and a search of my belongings, I was allowed inside to sit and wait for nearly three hours before a guard came round checking that everyone had the correct forms of payment. I showed him my cheque; he told me that only money orders were acceptable. I showed him the bit on the INS paperwork that said how cheques should be made payable to the INS; he told me that “we don’t take cheques at this office.” So off I went to get a money order, and came back the next day for another hour’s queuing up outside before I could show that I was safe enough to be granted admission, and for another few hours’ sitting on a hard, low-backed plastic chair. I was told it would take 18 months to process my green-card application; I finally became a legal, but deeply unimpressed, permanent resident in 2005.

So when I started working on my application to bring myself and The Girls to New Zealand, I was fully braced for another draining of my will to live, another process of humiliation and insult. And I was, wonder of wonders, quite wonderfully wrong. Instead of the Japanese attitude of “Fine, you can stay, but don’t think we actually like having you here,” or the American “What makes you think you deserve to live here?” it was quite incredibly refreshing to have a very clear, very real sense that New Zealand actually wanted us to come, actually wanted us to move to NZ and become part of the country, the community.

New Zealand residence visa

Our application for residency was handled by a real person, Maxine, who was quite willing to work with me, quite prepared to answer questions when I had them, actually to speak to me and treat me decently — not too much, one wouldn’t have thought, to expect from a fellow human being, but apparently nobody every thought to mention this idea to Maxine’s counterparts in Takasaki or Tampa. My application for American residence — and this, mark you, while I was already living in the US, and married to an American — took nearly five years. My application for New Zealand residence took less than five months. In fact, it took less than three. There was, from the beginning, a very real sense that this country actually wanted us, and was delighted that we wanted to come.

So when Maxine wrote to me in June of 2009 to tell me that we had been approved, we were, not entirely unreasonably, quite thrilled. We had full, permanent residence privileges in our new country, and we were pleased. From the first, we have had all the privileges that come with residence, including access to health care and the right to vote, on the same basis as native Kiwis. There was, however, one very small but important detail that we had to bear in mind. Our residence visas were single-entry visas; in order to leave New Zealand, and then return without our resident status lapsing, we needed returning resident visas. The good people at Immigration New Zealand kindly supplied two-year RRVs for all three of us with our residence visas, but they were good only for two years, at the end of which we would be renewing them.

It wasn’t going to be a problem, of course. We met the criteria for indefinite RRVs — I had a job, we owned a house — and it was just a question of filling in paperwork and paying an application fee. But which forms to complete? I tried rooting around the Immigration New Zealand website, but to little avail — I was looking for information about returning resident visas, but found details of permanent resident visas. In the end, steeling myself, I took The Girls to the immigration office on Queen Street in Auckland.

Expecting the worst, we entered the office; the experience was quite disorienting. There was carpet on the floor, there were flags and decorations marking the Rugby World Cup (this was back in September) hanging from every available surface, there was light and bright colours. Oddly, there was no queue at the counter. We approached, and the lady behind the counter actually smiled. Very confusing. I explained what we wanted, why were there, and why I hadn’t simply printed off forms from their website. Very kindly, very clearly and without even a glimmer of sarcasm or patronising, she explained that the system had recently been overhauled, with the old distinction between visas, issued outside the country, and permits, issued onshore, done away with. She handed me the correct forms, told us where to go to get photos taken, and sent us on our way.

Forms completed and photos snapped, we went back. The same lady (I was surprised; I was sure that, if her boss had overheard her being nice to a customer, she’d have been summarily fired) checked our papers and told us that we were in the queue to speak to an officer. Here we go, I thought, in the queue — should have brought a sleeping bag and pillow. But we sat — in, it should be said, decently comfortable chairs — for barely fifteen minutes before our names showed up on the computer screen on the wall.

We handed our papers to a young lady, herself, it appeared, an immigrant, who looked them over, asked a couple of cursory questions, took payment from us and then printed out our new permanent resident visas.

That was it. That was all it took. No screaming (by her or by us), no racism, no nasty, snarky comments, no sense that we had a hell of a nerve asking to be admitted to God’s Own Earth. We spent more time talking to her about who she’d drawn in the office sweepstakes for the Rugby than we did dealing with the business of the day.

New Zealand permanent resident vis

So now we’re permanent. We can stay here, and come and go, as we see fit. And in a couple more years we can apply for New Zealand citizenship, a path I fully expect us to go down. We do feel like we belong here. When we were watching the All Blacks dismantling the Japanese defence in the early stages of the Rugby World Cup, having seen England barely manage to pull off a little-deserved win against Argentina, Debbie remarked to our neighbour, David, that she was thinking that she should switch her allegiance to the All Blacks. “Can I be an honorary Kiwi?” she asked. “You live here, don’t you?” replied David. “This is your home, isn’t it? Then you’re as much a Kiwi as I am.”

Moving to New Zealand from any country will involve just a little bit of culture shock; even for poms (remarks I’ve made elsewhere notwithstanding), New Zealand is a new country, with its own ways of doing things. But I didn’t come here directly from the UK; eight years living in the US, a surprisingly buttoned-down country, for all its “land of the free” propaganda, left me finding New Zealand a quite refreshingly relaxed place to be, and nothing sums up that relaxed nature better than three words you’ll often hear here.

“She’ll be right.” Most any potential hurdle or hazard you encounter in NZ life will be met with a smile, a shrug and a “she’ll be right.” Instead of endless rules, regulations, restrictions and prohibitions, here in New Zealand people do seem to be willing — quite happy, even — to let events unfold, comfortable and safe in the knowledge that she’ll be right.

Last summer we built a barbecue in the back garden. We went to the local engineering workshop to order some iron bars. They took our measurements, took our order, but didn’t want our money. “Pay us when you pick it up. She’ll be right.” Debbie, ever the American, was at once amazed and delighted that a business would commit time, materials and effort to a job, even a fifty-dollar job, without payment upfront. But no worries, mate, she’ll be right.

As regular readers will be aware, we’ve recently installed solar panels on the roof of our house. We also, as I shall blog about soon (not today; I have talked at far too great length lately about such matters) installed central heating. The total cost for these two systems was comfortably in the five-figure range, not a sum we had lying around, so we spoke to the National Bank about an increase on our mortgage. We supplied the revised property valuation, the contractors’ estimates, and the application form. Next thing we knew, we had a large sum of money deposited in our account. We’ve had the work done, of course, and we’re very happy with it, but nobody from the bank has ever bothered to check that the home improvements that were meant to provide extra value to the property securing the extra loan were actually done. She’ll be right.

I’ve been branching out a little of late; while physics teaching is still highly enjoyable, I’ve been making now-regular appearances on Radio New Zealand‘s Nine To Noon programme as their technology correspondent. I was having dinner with my predecessor, Nat, who let slip that he would be taking some time off from the show. Encouraged, possibly, by the glass of wine in front of me (and, to be fair, its predecessors that evening), I suggested to Nat that I might make a good replacement. “Send me an email in the morning,” he said, “with links to your blogs. I’ll pass it on.” I duly followed his advice, and a week later the show’s producer called me, asking when I could start. No interview, no audition. Nat had recommended me; that was good enough for them. She’ll be right. I’ve done four slots so far, and they keep asking me back for more, so she clearly will be right.

Many more examples spring to mind. There’s the waterfall in Whangarei, tall enough that falling over would spoil, at the very least, your day, and, more likely, your life, but which has no railings, no barriers, nothing to stop visitors from walking out into the stepping stones in the middle of the Hatea river and peering over the edge. There’s Melvin, the B&B owner in Taumaranui who let us leave without paying (we only had a credit card; he didn’t accept them), knowing we’d be back in a day or two and who trusted that we’d bring cash with us then. And so on, and so on.

It would be easy to dismiss this attitude as a little bit slack, or lazy, or even naive. I have no doubt that there are some who exploit it, either to excuse their own idleness and carelessness or to take advantage of others. But if they exist, I have yet to encounter them. It’s good to remember that, living as we do on these small, remote, isolated and lonely islands, a million miles from anywhere in the middle of the South Pacific, the good people of New Zealand look after each other. They trust each other, and they trust that things will work out right.

So far they have. She’ll be right.

The cost of living is one of the greatest of the surprises that greet newcomers to New Zealand. Food, housing, petrol, books — many are the regular purchases that are almost shockingly expensive compared to back home, especially when “back home” is the United States (and I would like to make abundantly clear at this point that, while I did live in Florida for more years than I’m altogether comfortable discussing, and while both Wife and Daughter call America home, I’m British by birth, northern by the grace of God), and the latest expense we’re attempting to address at our new home in Pukekohe is electricity.
I’ve moaned, whinged and complained about heat

and, more specifically, the lack of it at great enough length that I think I can safely skip the subject for this post. I’ll just point out that when we moved into our old, cold, uninsulated house, we simply assumed that all we’d need to do in order to keep warm would be to fire up the oil heaters. This worked, of course, but was also terrifyingly expensive. Coming, as we had, from the almost obscene abundance of the United States, we reckoned without the crazy price of New Zealand energy.

It’s a good thing, I’ll allow, that New Zealand is a remarkably green energy producer. Around half of NZ’s electricity supply comes from hydroelectric plants —not, I’ll allow, a perfect environmental solution, but a better one than, say, a nuclear power plant — and a decent chunk more comes from geothermal generation around places like Taupo and Rotorua, where the steam clouds by the roads signal the presence of underground energy exploitation, or from the wind farms north of Wellington. But I’m still not happy with the price of the Green Watt.

The typical electrical unit, or kilowatt-hour (KWh) costs about 8¢ in Florida. A kiwi kilowatt-hour will set you back around three times that price. When we realized that, we decided that it was time to start generating our own. And the solution we settled on was solar power.

On Wednesday (after about four weeks of off-again-on-again installation from an electrician who made it quite clear that we were very, very low down his list of priorities, and repeated deadline-slippage from the company managing the install; we’re pleased with the system, but I’m really not sure I’d use that company again, but they weren’t quite bad enough for me to feel the need to name them here), we finally commissioned the system, and today, a typical very-early-spring day in the southern reaches of Auckland, we generated nearly 12 units in the day’s ten and a half hours of usable sunshine, of which we exported five. We fully expect to see this number increase by a decent proportion as the days grow longer and the sun climbs higher in the sky.

The system, of course, wasn’t cheap. But we didn’t pay for it ourselves upfront; instead, we spoke to the nice people at National Bank, who were quite willing to roll the cost, over $20,000, into our mortgage, which makes our new power station quite affordable — in fact, we expect that, over the course of a typical year, we’ll end up saving as much on electricity bills as we’re losing in increased mortgage payments. And that’s without even considering the very real probability that power prices will rise, which will see us saving even more.

As part of the installation process, we found ourselves switching power companies. We had been buying our electricity from Genesis Energy; I’d signed up with them when I started renting a house in Warkworth two years ago on the recommendation of the previous tenant, and inertia kept us with them when we moved to Pukekohe. We had no problems with their service in general; what turned us off them was the fact that they weren’t willing to offer us net metering.

When we generate electricity, we’ll use some or all of it. If we use all of it, all well and good; if we only use some of it, then we have to do something with the surplus. Some people decide to go completely off the grid, and feed their surplus into batteries, but we’re not ready to go that far, and so we sell back what’s left over after we’ve taken what we need to the grid. Genesis Energy weren’t willing to offer us a net-metering agreement, whereby what we sell them is credited to us at the same price they charge us for the power we buy from them. Only one company in New Zealand will, and so we’ve switched to Meridian Energy.

As I speak, the sun is climbing higher in the sky on a lovely, sunny August morning. We’re currently generating a little shy of 2KW, plenty less than we’re using right now with the central heating, the dishwashers, the washing machine and the other heavy-duty appliances quiet. As a result, our system is, in fact, exporting power back to Meridian, and we’re net producers, so far this morning, of electricity.

The setup isn’t perfect, though. Meridian pay us the same price that they charge us, hence “net metering.” What we’d really like to see is a feed-in tariff system along the lines of the arrangements in place in countries from Australia to Germany, whereby exported units are bought at a substantially higher price than retail units are sold by the grid. While I’m not advocating actually moving to Australia — let’s not get carried away, now — I do believe that this is one thing the Australians have got right. If our house were in, say, Melbourne instead of Auckland, we’d likely get about the same amount of sunlight over the year, but while we’d be paying about the same for our imported power, but receiving up to 60¢ for each unit we export, a rate that has been locked in by legislation, I understand, for at least another ten years.

While our current situation could be improved, we’re very happy with what we have right now, and we are hopeful that the New Zealand government will catch up with the rest of the world and start to offer incentives to early-adopter localised power generators. What we do generates no emissions, is safe and clean, and generates electricity a matter of a few feet away from where it’s consumed, massively reducing transmission overheads such as infrastructure development costs, maintenance, inefficiency and the inherent danger of long-distance high-voltage AC transmission. Little by little, we’re replacing our appliances with more efficient ones — our new washer-dryer combo replaces an old dryer that was so antiquated its one-energy-star rating was simply a result of the fact that they don’t give no-star ratings — and monitoring our daily consumption quite aggressively. As soon as this post is finished I’ll be checking the fridge’s overnight usage — Ben Elton would be proud of me — and looking for other ways of paring back our consumption

For anyone who’s interested in learning more about our system from a technical angle, visit Steve’s Tech Blog, where I’ve posted a little about tech specs; you can visit our inverter’s stats page online, too, and see exactly how much energy we’ve generated recently.

More frequent visitors to this site may have noticed that keeping warm has become something of a recurring theme. There would be a quite simple reason for this fact, of course; as has been discussed at quite obsessive length here, for example, or here, winters in New Zealand tend to be long and wet. They’re also fairly, but not absurdly, cold; paradoxically, however, you’ll feel colder inside your house than outside.

Again, the analysis about this can be followed elsepost; what I’d like to talk about today is one of the things we’ve been doing about it. Before I sat down in my living room, newly insulated since we pulled the drywall down over the summer holidays and insulated all the exterior surfaces before replacing the sheetrock with GIB-board, I noted from the thermostat rigged up to our somewhat under-performing heat transfer system that the temperature in here, mid-morning, was 12˚C. Now, don’t get me wrong. If you’re outside, in the direct sunshine (and today is as gloriously sunny a day as has been enjoyed in New Zealand in some time), if you’re moving around, if you’re rugged up in a dozen layers of coats, jackets, sweaters, hoodies and Lord knows what, then 12˚ is an entirely reasonable and perfectly pleasant temperature. But on the sofa I’m not really moving around that much, the room’s southern aspect captures less sun than might be utterly optimal, and I’m only wearing the four layers. So I’m cold.

That’s why i’m in the lounge. Debbie has a tendency to huddle up in the office, but I find that to be too cramped and dungeonly. I prefer the lounge, for the simple reason that it has a fireplace. And that’s what is keeping me warm right now, and it is glorious. The flames are dancing, orange and golden and wonderful, around logs of ti-tree and pine, and the glow is inching the mercury up, slowly but noticeably. With strategic arrangement of newspaper, kindling and logs, I can usually whip up a fire to warm the room to the upper reaches of comfortable without too much trouble, but it hasn’t always been so.

Our pot-bellied stove, getting ready to feed my belly.

When we bought our cottage last year, there was, as I have documented (read: “whinged about”), only one source of heating in the entire house. It was, to be fair, quite interesting — a pot-bellied stove in the dining room. It wasn’t something we would ever have thought to install ourselves, but since it was there, we embraced it, almost literally. It’s a splendidly efficient piece of kit; the iron belly retains heat inside itself so well that combustion can’t help but happen. Yesterday’s Herald, scrunched up, is enough to get a fire started. But, obviously, we needed something to keep the fire going, and I found a convenient source of wood on my way home from work. An odd place to buy firewood, I’ll allow, but a mechanic’s in Drury was selling big sacks of pine offcuts for a tenner or so a time, and I would pick up a batch once or twice a week.

Pine, as we’ve come to learn — it’s amazing what you become an expert on when you live in New Zealand — burns hot, and burns fast. No kindling was needed; just get the sports section flaming, and toss in a few blocks of pine, and you’re in business. Hot, fast heat, but twenty minutes later the stove was emptying and ready to be fueled up again. This, then, while effective, wasn’t a sustainable way to heat the house. We found a supplier of casuarina in Paerata, and ordered a truckload, which was delivered during last winter’s school holidays. Suddenly the newspaper wasn’t enough to catch it alight; it burned well, hot and long, but needed something hotter than paper to start the fire, and so kindling went on the shopping list for every trip to the Pak-n-Save.

Casuarina is a hot-burning wood, we discovered. Coal is also a very, very hot-burning fuel, so hot in fact that we saw the base of our stove glow orange once (just the once, now) when we pushed it a little. But coal is dirty, messy and not that easy to find good sources for, which was a priority, of which more to follow. It did, however, have one major advantage — it was easy to fit in the stove. The pot-belly has a rather small mouth to take fuel, and so I was finding that, every time I went out to the garage to bring in firewood, I had to rifle through the woodpile to find pieces small enough to fit in the stove.

What to do with the rest? Well, we eventually had an open wood burner installed in the lounge, and so larger logs were set aside for the fireplace. But they didn’t want to burn in the fireplace. Well, that’s not entirely true. They burned, but with coaxing. Plenty of kindling was needed, and while the occasional box wasn’t going to break us, we were suddenly chomping through it at an alarming, and increasingly expensive, rate. But then, in October, I lit my last fire of the year, and promptly put the matter out of my mind.

During the summer, I spent a couple of days at a friend’s property with The Girls, felling and chopping up old, dead trees that were ready to be put to good use in my fireplace. I’m not sure what kind of trees they were, but some of the branches were old and dead and quite light, making them very useful as fire-starters. With a few of these flaky, crumbly bits of wood, no kindling was necessary, and the fireplace pumped out warmth like the very depths of Hell. Heaven indeed.

And then the wood ran out. We bought a batch of ti-tree (that’s what’s on the fire as we speak, raising the room to, already, over nineteen degrees) from a friend’s son who wanted to make a little more pocket money. Again, it burns like a demon, but it takes a fair old bit of encouragement to get started. The pot-belly loves it; the fireplace is a little less sure.

We also invested (and remember, folks — the value of investments can go down as well as up) in a batch of hotmix from TradeMe. Hotmix, it would appear, is a mixture of pine, for starting purposes, and assorted hardwood; I have no idea what the wood we got might be. The big problem wasn’t what kind of wood it was, though. Firewood, we’ve come to learn, needs seasoning after being cut; put simply, it needs to dry out, because green, sap-filled wood won’t burn as well. It’s a simple enough process — just leave your chopped wood to stand for six months to a year. But don’t forget that, if you leave anything outside in New Zealand, then, with a certainty that makes even death or taxes look like a bit of a gamble, it’s going to get wet.

And wet it got. Wet wood, if it burns at all, burns most grudgingly. If I bring a batch into the living room and stack it by the fire, then, maybe, after a week it might have dried out enough from the warmth that it will catch fire instead of sucking the heat out of the flames from the actually flammable logs. But it’s no sure thing.

And so we keep on carrying baskets of firewood in from the garage, building fires and tending them. The temperature is now a toasty 21˚C, and life is, as it tends to be in New Zealand, good.

Auckland: the SkyTower and the waterfront

Life in New Zealand remains, for us, quite splendid. The weather notwithstanding — it’s winter; winter in New Zealand, even in the North Island, is a dire and dismal experience sometimes, with damp, cold days and endless rain leaving one wondering if Northland’s “winterless north” claims really could be true, and breaking out in cold, naturally, sweats at the thought of living in the South Island, where even the summers drizzle endlessly — life is good.

For us. Life is good for us. But lately life, for a significant chunk of the Kiwi population, life has started to be rather desperate. Before we moved to New Zealand, when the dream was something we dreamt, not lived, we idly thought that Christchurch might be the place for us. The name, to Debbie, sounded quite wonderfully, romatically, English and Victorian; the pictures we looked at, to me, seemed, well, English and Victorian. But I applied for jobs across the land, and we found ourselves in Warkworth, not Christchurch, and came to realise that Auckland, not Canterbury,was the place we wanted to be.

We, we’ve since discovered, aren’t the only ones to think this way. Many of the Americans we’ve come to know on email discussion groups for expats in New Zealand write that they don’t want to live in the big city (that pretty much makes anywhere in New Zealand a good choice; much as I love Auckland, I don’t really know it can truly be considered a “big city,” certainly not by anyone who’s seen New York or Los Angeles or Miami or Chicago), and they tend to gravitate toward Christchurch.

I cannot begin to imagine what life must be like for Mainlanders these days. The earthquake that hit Christchurch in September of last year, damaging though it undoubtedly was, only served to set the scene for the massive destruction that accompanied this February’s quake, and the waves of aftershocks that seemed never to end; June’s earthquake was simply salt in the open wounds that criss-crossed the city.

The government and insurance companies are doing a little — I’m not sure that, even if they wished to, they even could do enough — to try to rebuild the city, and, in the areas where destruction has been too great, to assist Cantabrians in rebuilding their lives elsewhere. But regardless of where blame could, or should, be placed, it’s clear that for many people life in Christchurch is simply no longer feasible. Many have moved north, to Wellington and to Auckland, and many more have moved west, across the Tasman Sea, to Australia.

The obligatory Opera House shot, Sydney

Australia, despite a tighter-than-a-Scotsman’s-wallet immigration policy of late, has wide-open doors for Kiwis. The Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement allows Aussies and Kiwis freedom of movement back and forth, and grants right of abode and work in either country. The Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition Agreement, similarly, requires, for example, the Victorian College of Teachers to recognise teaching credentials issued not only by other states’ teaching governing bodies, but also by New Zealand’s Teachers’ College. In many ways, it’s as easy for a Kiwi to move to Sydney or Brisbane or Melbourne as it is for, say, a Western Australian.

So why would you want to? Would you want to? Plenty of New Zealanders do; as Robert Muldoon observed, in an unrivalled moment of Prime Ministerial snark, every Kiwi who does so raises the average IQ of both countries in the process. And they continue to go; a recent report in the New Zealand Herald suggests that Christchurch’s recent problems have sent vastly increased numbers of New Zealanders to the West Island. But what’s the draw?

Flinders Street Station, Melbourne

A large part of the attraction of Australia is money. New Zealand is not, it must be said, a rich country. It’s not poor; we’re definitely not living in the third world here. But NZ is, let’s face it, not as rich as, say, the US, or Australia, its southern-hemispheric counterpart. Australian families have as much as NZ$18,000 per year more in disposable income than their New Zealand counterparts, according to some estimates. There is a perception in New Zealand that Australia is the place to go to make a quick dollar.

And, to be honest, that’s really about all. Australia has a lot more gloss than New Zealand; it’s slicker, more American in many ways, than NZ. I’ll admit that I’m not speaking from too much authority here; I’ve spent time in Sydney, Melbourne and even Canberra, but that’s been the extent of my exploration of Oz. I did like the place, to be sure. The cities have character — Sydney has one of the most wondrous natural harbours in the world, and has done a magnificent job of exploiting it with developments that are world-renowned, while Melbourne has at its heart an exceptional city centre. But what matters is the people, and while I do, as a whole, like and enjoy the company of the Aussies I’ve known over the years, I do get the impression that Australia is just a tiny bit too pleased with itself. There is no denying that Australia is a wonderful, fascinating country full of natural beauty and human achievement, but, in the end, I find New Zealand to be so much more like home. I’m British, with all that that entails — we tend to be much more self-deprecating, more understated, than, say, our American cousins, and I sense a similar difference between New Zealanders and Australians.

Parliament House, Canberra

After two years — it’s been slightly more than that, in fact — of living in New Zealand, I increasingly find that this country is my home. I still hear people talk about “the lifestyle,” and I still agree with remarks that it’s “the lifestyle” that makes New Zealand such an attractive place to live. But I still find it difficult to identify what, exactly, “the lifestyle” is. But increasingly I come to realise that “the lifestyle” is the very simple fact that life here is about people, not money. I’ve heard it said that one of the reasons why New Zealand isn’t as rich as Australia is that, here, the entrepreneurial spirit tends not to be as strong. A Kiwi sets up a business, makes money, saves enough for a bach and regular surfing, and, well, that’s it. What more does he need? An Aussie, let’s say, might see the first million as just that — the first of many. A Kiwi, on the other hand, is more likely to say “I’m set — see you at the beach.” But then he’ll fire up the barbecue, invite his mates over, and spend time with people. The focus here, really, simply, honestly, seems to be on people. And I like this.

People in New Zealand just, plain and simple, have time for each other. Neighbours stop by to visit more here than ever we experienced in our years in America. People in shops, in businesses, have time for customers — it’s not just about getting a sale. Conversation flows easily, readily. Kiwis genuinely seem to care about each other, in a more real and honest way than I’ve seen in other countries.

Three years from now I’ll be applying for my New Zealand passport. For some, New Zealand citizenship represents little more than a back door into Australia. But not me. I’m staying put. I know where the lucky country really is.

There’s no good, sound theological reason why Christmas is celebrated on 25th December. There’s a very good reason, but it’s not one you’ll find in the Bible; it is, however, one that will make perfect sense if you live in northern Europe.
Up in the cold, bleak, wintry expanses of Europe, and especially in the north of England, that corner of the world I am privileged to call my homeland, winter is a miserable time of year. The days are depressingly short, and even when the Sun makes the effort to poke a ray or two above the horizon, its warmth and light are barely felt through the slate-grey clouds that blanket a barely-lit sky. It’s small wonder, then, that the peoples of these lands would want a celebration in mid-winter, and the beginning of the end of winter is as good a time as any for a good knees-up. Merry solstice to you.
Then along came Christianity, and with it a new holiday. Except that nobody was quite sure when to celebrate Christmas, and so the winter solstice, with its ready-made celebrations, seemed like as good a time as any. The new ex-pagans got to keep their mid-winter parties, because, by Jove, they needed them. The Church put a new spin on them, and everyone was happy.

What, I hear you ask, as one voice, could this possibly have to do with Steve & Family’s adventures in New Zealand? The answer, constant reader, is simple. Christmas in New Zealand — as, I suspect, it is in much of the southern outposts of Empire — is, well, redundant. It feels odd to be writing about this today, sitting as we are around a fire built from the ti-tree logs my mate Mark delivered this morning, but Christmas in New Zealand is, somehow, unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mean in a religious sense. That’s not where I’m going with this. What I mean is that, in December, there’s nowhere in the world quite as splendid as New Zealand. The sun shines, the sky is blue, the air is clear and fresh and warm and crisp and life is truly good. Friends visit, we drink wine outside, and all is good. Christmas rolls around, and it’s celebrated, but the lily is very slightly gilded. There simply isn’t the same need for a holiday in mid-December; New Zealand’s summer is one of the greatest joys known to man, and the need for a holiday to raise the spirits isn’t as essential when there isn’t the same gloom crushing the spirit.

Winter is a different matter. From May to around early September, winter can be rather miserable here. Rain is a daily visitor, and temperatures drop low enough for us to be mightily pleased in our investments in heating, and insulation, and all the other developments I won’t bore you with here, having written about them extensively elsepost. But there’s no Christmas, no midwinter holiday to buoy us up. Well, not among the pakeha, anyway. The Maori, smart people that they are, have been celebrating Matariki for centuries. Matariki is sometimes referred to as the Maori new year; it refers to the constellation of the Pleiades, and the festival is celebrated at their first sighting, usually at the end of May or early June. It’s not a national holiday here, although there have been proposals to make it so; it’s unlikely to become one as long as the Queen’s Birthday is celebrated as a bank holiday at the start of June.

But just because there’s no national holiday, that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate it ourselves. Next weekend will see the three of us spending most of Saturday in the kitchen, cooking up a turkey (because it’s kind of, like, but not quite, Christmas) and a leg of lamb (because, well, it’s New Zealand). A couple of dozen bottles of my secret-recipe honey-wheat beer is aging next to a dozen gallons of feijoa wine in the kitchen, and the dandelion wine we made in the summer will be ready to crack open. I’ve distilled a couple of litres of hooch to form the base for some cocktails. All is ready, and we’ll be having over friends from Wales, from America, from Holland and even from New Zealand. It might not be Christmas, but there will be good will to all men.

Winter has arrived. No, don’t try to contradict me, don’t argue, don’t point to the calendar and tell me that it’s not yet June, that winter can’t start until May’s ended. This is New Zealand, where the weather has little to do with the date. Winter has arrived, and with it has a reminder that there’s nothing but ocean between us and Antarctica.

Autumn this year was deceptively benign, following as it did a summer that started weak but ended strong. February saw patio doors still wide open, barbecues still lit, sweaters buried deep. But, little by chilly little, the mercury has dropped. We lit our first fire of the year in April, and we’ve not looked back. We’re going to be warm this winter.

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