I once knew some lads who lived in a house on Randolph Street in Newton, Auckland. It was this house, in fact: Only back then it wasn’t so nicely done up. It was a bit run down, and they paid heaps in electricity due to the house being in a commercial zone. The neighbours were [...]
I had to go to Auckland for work, so I included an adjacent weekend in my plans to revisit old Aucklandtown. Saturday night I was going to go to bed but suddenly my roboawesome detectors sensed that out there Something Was Happening. Using the powers of Twitter, I realised that there was a senior citizen [...]
I went to Auckland for the day for work. It was my first proper return to Auckland since I left. On the flight over, as the plane flew over South Auckland on its decent, the two men sitting next to me (strangers who had been chatting) had this conversation. Man 1 (Looking out the window): [...]
I recently signed up for my Wellington library card and couldn’t help compare it with my Auckland library one. Auckland’s got a scenic photo of the city at night, with the sort of orange sky you’d normally only get if there’d been a volcanic eruption in the Philippines or something. The Sky Tower looks so [...]
In recent days people have been coming out with their stories about their connections or experiences with Sir Edmund Hillary – people who went to school with him or climbed with him or built a school in Nepal with him or saw him at the rugby and got him to autograph a $5 note. Well, [...]
I went to the Grey Lynn Park Festival yesterday. It didn’t rain, which is a remarkable achievement. Nice one, the weather. The park was full of people and entertainment, but in a way there was nothing special. A lot of it is the same sort of stuff that is found at other festivals and market [...]
I finally got around to filling in my ballot for the Auckland City Council elections. With so many different things to vote for and so many different people to vote for, I went through the candidate profile booklet and started eliminating candidates based on their little blurbs. I will not vote for candidates who said [...]
A few weeks ago I noticed some photocopies of a poem had been pasted up on the usual places along Symonds Street and K Road. I don’t know who wrote the poem or why they pasted many copy of it up in public. Having read it a few times, it seems clunkily written, awkward to [...]
I checked out the brand new underground train station. Having recently travelled on the Paris Metro and London Underground, I now consider myself to be a 100% expert on underground train stations and have made the following observations. It’s cold. This could possibly be due to the fact that the Britomart centre thing is still [...]
Ah, yes. Dance for us, dancing monkey girl. Do a trick for us. Sing us a song. Tell us a jolly. Dance for us, dancing monkey girl. Hi. I was driving along a road today and suddenly a car shot out of a side street, attempting to do a right-hand turn. I had to slam [...]