Serendipity

Through lack of choice I’m a believer in fate. I’m a planner, rarely doing anything spontaneous (I know, boring) but sometimes the grubby hand of fate grasps hold of my feeble plans and squeezes the life from them even as I stand, a la Romeo, screaming and cursing at its machinations. This was particularly apparent […]

A Visitor

The visitor from Wuhan (as described by a better writer than I’ll ever be) arrived on our doorstep last week. Neil greeted him first, his dismay at a second line appearing on the RAT test he had just done evident in his croaky wail as he saw it. This was two days after he’d first […]

Volcanic

A decade or so ago we’d just signed a binding contract to buy a house in Ohakune when the alert level for the volcano that looms over the town was raised. Last week, for the first time since such levels were introduced, it was raised for the volcano that lies under New Zealand’s largest lake, […]

Final Farewell

I wasn’t going to let the death of Britain’s longest-serving monarch get away with only one mention on this page. We British (and I am still British, even though I no longer live there) haven’t had much to be proud of recently (MPs behaving and squabbling like children in a playground ffs) but organising the […]

Farewell

I was a small child when Mum said one day: ‘I wouldn’t be the Queen for all the money in the world.’ I was stunned into rare silence. Why would you not want to be Queen? To wear crowns and beautiful dresses and to have everyone wait on you hand and foot? Besides, if Mum […]

Weathering: Part 2

(A lame title, I know, but I’m hopeless at naming things and my usually helpful assistant clearly has inspiration issues.) I realise this is my third post in a row about weather, but it’s a fascinating subject and I am English, therefore predisposed to talk about it. I’m also now a Kiwi, and Kiwis like […]

To The Lighthouse

One of the features of living in New Zealand is the weather. Nearly twenty years ago, after a few weeks of living here, we moved into a cute little cottage at the bottom of the owner’s garden on a January day so hot the tarmac melted and I left a pool of sweat with every […]

Weathering

Here in Ohakune we’re on our fourth day of solid rain. We’re not alone – storms have swept across the country and I wonder if we should rename New Zealand the Soggy Isles. There have even been mini-tornadoes in some areas, trees being tossed aside like cocktail sticks and rooves ripped away. We’re paying for […]

I am Woman

Growing up I never really thought about the differences between boys and girls. Of course I knew there were many, especially when it came to puberty – I wasn’t the only teenage girl envious of boys who didn’t have to go through the trauma of starting their periods, the nightmare of communal school showers, the […]