Quiet weekend of rain

I needed to escape my home this Saturday, especially as rain was predicted all day. The two boys in my home who don't work Saturday (one never works!) need the house to themselves. So I am in Café Baobab with Tom, reading the Saturday Dom Post with a more critical air than before, and even finding a Guardian newspaper to check out, again, it appears, although it is this week's edition, but there is ever something new to read..

The crowd here is predictable, local intelligentsia and those who want to be part of the Newtown cafe scene. Tom tells me more stories of his Polish family in Nelson, his father in particular who was an amazing intelligent and sympathetic character. Tom is now the last male in his family, with three sisters still alive, ( there were eight in all, but the others are deceased). Tom's education at an English county boarding school was forgettable and not pleasant at all, but he harbours no ill-feeling about it as there was nowhere else to go with his family living in Africa at that time. His father wisely chose a different school from that of his older brother, who had been dux of his, as he knew that Tom needed to be independent of his brother as he was not the academic sort at all. Interestingly, his brother died, a big success in the enormous global firm of British Tobacco, at quite a young age, and Tom, the only male left, gay and self employed, is 'doing very well thank you' as he often says, as a curtain-hanger and owner of three debt-free homes in New Zealand.

New Zealand seemingly in advance in many ways...but

..still has a long way to go in other administrative and certain judicial areas.

The money to spend in infra-structure upkeep in a small, remote country is enormous and you just can't get away from it. This is one reason why commodities are so expensive here.

A first generation Kiwi success story - the Chief Censor, multi-degreed, fit as a fiddle, in a great job with a  great family. What more could you want? Do these Kiwis know just how easy, and good, they've got it? Sometimes I wonder...

Tom Scott criticising the awful Australian attitude to refugees..another reason for me to return this year, as the Indigenous movement towards equality in all ways has taken root and is advancing in great ways for me to join and be vocally a strong part of. For this reason, and to bring down the Conservative government.

This movie I saw yesterday brought a lot of truths home, for the US and for all countries who are not moving intelligently with the times. NZ and Australia are two of them I'm afraid, and we are inordinately spoiled in so many ways.

Where NZ has fallen behind in modern education, where Denmark, Finland and Norway, and probably all the Scandinavian countries are so in advance.

This is my optometrist in Wellington, and the man opposite me in Baobab looks exactly like this model, the handsome, intellectual Kiwi male, always wearing a three-day growth which is today's ultimate fashion, and all over the world it seems. Or are they just lazy? I don't like at all the feeling of a rough face but now it is 'de rigueur'!

Tonight off to the Hannah Playhouse to see a local play, written by an Indian, first generation Kiwi.

It is called The Elephant Thief. Should be good.