It's Time!

More cold weather and my second speech due at Toast Masters today, entitled 'It's Time', the slogan of the winning Labor juggernaut that launched Gough Whitlam into power in 1972. I think the very young audience did not quite grasp the significance of it all but my ally Caroline was very charitable and congratulated me after it was over. At least I kept to the time schedule.

Aussie David Jones arrives soon, at least before I leave at the end of the year. It will be interesting to see how the Kiwis embrace it, I think they will, wholeheartedly.

Eddie having good talks this morning....

Kiwi woman sadly gone but giraffe arrives happily in Wellington..

Tigers are being commercialised horribly and need to be saved....

Another Kiwi war hero, there are many more unsung ones I am sure,,,,,

Mark Reason loves a winner, amd Steve Adams is certainly that!

...next year he will be earning ten million dollars a season for playing basketball!

Oysters at Bluff, doubtless the best in world and I haven't yet tasted them, cheap at two dollars fifty each!

This young Kiwi Kyle Mulinder is a Vlogger aka 'Bare Kiwi'. He has done it all and just loves travelling with the mob and recording his adventures. He will eventually make a lot of money out of his hobby I am sure.

Winter arrives

Down to ten degrees celsius today so the winter weather has set in, for a while anyway.

Memphis is full and the coffee is steaming forth with its welcome aroma.

More bad news about this famous acoustically pefect Town Hall, another four years before it will re-open.

...and this silly Kiwi woman in Australia prey to a roving crocodile, at ten pm with warning signs everywhere...

When will they decide what to do about Wellington traffic, never, it seems from these many letters to the editor...

John Key, blind as ever to the housing crisis in Auckland...

Busy checking phones at Memphis...

More bad news about the Barrier Reef in Oz.

Always worth a picture with these three gods of Rugby...

Sunny Monday

YyWell it's sunny for a minute anyway, and the trio is in Memphis for an early morning coffee. Even Eddie joins us for a while....

Sport on the front pages, always, with another All Black gracing page one. At the same time a racing club banned for serving liquor to minors...not the right stuff!

Another Savea champion....

Cooks are the flavour of the year in New Zealand....

More footy camaraderie...

Tom 'n Anita....

..Gloria looks on.

More sporting mania with Steve Adams a demi-god of basketball.

Back home to prepare ads for room soon to be vacated. Frenchman Tanguy has been here nearly six months, much longer than I had expected, but now with winter and a new girl-friend it's time for a move. It's strange to think the elder in the house now will be young Julian, and I see little of him as he has rejoined forces with his girlfriend as well. Things never stay the same, it is the only true adage...

Sunday weather reprieve...

I am at my not-so-favourite café Zumo, but which is in a good position next to Commonsense Organics where I am buying some healthy stuff later. Their coffee is not always to my taste but the Sunday papers are there to read and there is a (fake) fire glowing to pretend to keep the customers warm.

The day is sunny and gorgeous and afterwards I decide to drive to the top of Mt Victoria where the views are magnificent across the Cook Staits and over the city of Wellington nestling on the bay.

How Kiwi parents prepare their kids for an adventurous future....

The Zumo fake fire....

A sad statistic in this rugged country, of lives lost and sometimes bodies never found....

More sucides happening than recorded ... they say it is getting to be more than serious as the young people take up the 'fashion' of ending their lives when they will.

Here is a weathered writer from South Otago feeling the need to be separate from the north...it is much like Scotland wanting freedom from 'tyrannical' England in the long-distant past (but also, ironically, today).

Below, on Mt Vic the meteorological map...

Next stop, the Antarctic!

Bella looking beautiful atop the mountain....

The view from Mt Vic facing towards the south island...

...and I am joined by some workers who are having a smoko at the top the mountain, music blaring and with several  bottles of Tui lubricating their senses. They are celebrating, like me, the wonderful weather after some awful wet windy days this week. 

 I decide on the spur of the moment to ring T and R in Melbourne as it was here we went on their visit last year. Miraculously Ronald answers the phone and he says they are both in good form, regretting missing me in Melbourne on my last visit 'due to lack of adequate warning' he says. I must say I did give them a short time-frame to work in with and they are always very busy, both of them.

So I leave them in the happy state of their memories of me in my eyrie in Wellington Heights, but from which I will be flying on in the space of six months from now. In the meantime I must make the most of this beautiful city.

Baobab on Saturday

My regular jaunt to Newtown on Saturday to visit the market and have a good coffee in the very popular Café Baobab. Today on the walls is a wonderful painting of a prowling tiger. I am strangely attracted to it and it's for sale. I'd better leave quickly before the temptation becomes a folly.

A lethal tiger and lethal blooms in the forest...

This is an important NZ fight for voluntary euthanasia. The widower has written a book about the ignoble death of his wife last year. 

Looking on to Riddiford Road...

Interesting article about the major problem of child and family abuse in NZ. Lots more money needed for education in why this happens.

This successful Pasifika man died at only 46.....

..whereas Burt lived to a good age of 87....why the differences I wonder? Indigenous and Pasifika life expectancy is very low, but when will the studies show the reasons?

This excellent book about Maori origins and the Tangata Whenua will no doubt become a classic volume.

Peter Gordon, chef extraordinaire in London and the world, was born and bred in Whanganui. He was   trained however in his cooking skills in Melbourne...

He is now living wirh his male partner in London but returns often to NZ.

Friday and yet another Film Festival

I have discovered the Film Festival of Architecture and Design, what more can one ask for ?

It's on at the Embassy and today I caught the first movie about London photographer Norman Parkinson. It was a great synopsis of the scene in London in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, merging even into my era and one of the photographers shown, Terence Donovan, photographed me when I began my career as a model in 1972. So it was a blast from the past and 'Parks' certainly was the glamour photographer of that era.

But reality hit in the local paper with this killing being revisited in an awful way but bringing together a small town to unite in its grief. But how did it let this crazy murder happen? Authorities at fault yet again.

Below another great Kiwi talent living in the UK nearly under the radar, like so much of the exported talent from this small country.

This letter says scrap the famed Basin Reserve, it has outlived its time and the space needs to be used intelligently, not just for the small but powerful clique of emotional cricket fanatics.

Amelia Berry is an emerging star and certainly a name to watch in Opera circles.....

Today was busy at Memphis, Anita and Gloria in fine form.....

...and even Tom turned up.....

This was the film I saw at the Embassy, and 'Altina' may be the next one I see as it looks to be another great New York story

Breakfast at Memphis

A short break in the weather results in blue skies over Memphis and after a rather late sleep-in today, (last night's birthday bash at St John's needed some extra sleep!) I am having a welcome breakfast at Memphis. The news in the Dom Post however is not at all good.

Below another shopping centre in outer Wellington going bust....

These past few days have been stormier than most around the bay.....

My savoury breakfast with versato coffee..

Yet another report of total inadequacy, say incompetence, by the Kiwi police force. It exposes what I see of the nice guy police commissioner who seems to be more a career diplomat that a tough law enforcing officer. You can see what's wrong when the top post is a sinecure and seems to demand little or no accountability.

Good on Desmond Tutu's daughter, we need more high profile gays showing their stuff, especially in countries in Africa where it is still illegal to be gay.

More serious strikes in the petrol industry in France where fossil fuels still reign supreme it appears. Manuel Valls, the PM, is under severe fire, not an easy job...

Weta Workshop, still a place I have to visit, but it is obvious they certainly know how to keep an industry afloat, with these two young creative men at the helm.

Last night at St John's Hall, Basin Reseve, our teacher Katherine cuts the Island Bay birthday cake

Below at the Empire, instead of swimming tonight, I am going to a movie can you believe. It is one I normally don't see, a popular move on the big screen with lots of special effects, à la Sir Peter Jackson. Called 'Apocalypse - the X men' it received a five star rating so I will let you know what I give it after the viewing tonight. 

I had a depressing afternoon battling with Australian bureaucracy only finally to discover they are probably right, not allowing me to vote in the coming elections. Apparently I missed the overseas cut by two days - had I not been sick last week I would have discovered this in time. Oh well, I didn't vote in the Abbott disaster, let's see what eventuates this time. The Australian Electoral Commission told me that after three years absence I am automatically taken down form the electoral roll, and functionally do not exist. It was a telling moment, especially as I have only just fervently decided to re-embrace my country, and am feeling very homesick at the moment, without any country to speak of. It is a lesson in really dotting one's i's and crossing one's t's, but to be honest, I don't think there was anyway around this one as I hadn't made an early enough application to vote. Australia considers me a non-person.

Above the Empire Eatery, as it is lovingly called, in Island Bay. I had a passable banana cake which had it been accompanied by some yoghurt, would have been much better. It is a lonely place tonight and I may be the only one in the cinema, again!

My two lovely neighbours having a very engaging conversation over their coffee and cake. The white tile decor is very 1950's butcher shop style.

 I discover this excellent program for the Italian Film Festival starting next week...more great movies to see and I feel they will outshine the French Festival which I greedily consumed last year. 

This festival is on only at the Cuba Lighthouse and the Empire, so there will be many visits for me I hope. The program looks very tasty indeed, covering a lot of cinematic genres and even showing 'The Conformist', the 1970 classic by Bernardo Bertolucci which I saw while living in Paris and didn't fully comprehend its political implications at the time. This time, hopefully, I will. It was a great vehicle for the star of that decade Jean-Louis Trintingnant.

Btw, my estimation of the 'Apocalypse' was never five stars, but then each to his own. It just was not my cup of tea, although well made but full of visual effects which gagged the mind a little too much.

I have also seen too much of Jennifer Lawrence but Michael Fassbender never disappoints, even in a tame role like this one. He is a great actor, he and Tom Hardy, my other favourite Brit actor..