The day is half over

It's sleepy in Hamilton. This is where I grew up and it's funny how time stands still here. The cicadas are so loud, they drown out the easy listening radio hits blaring from the neighbour's window. Almost anyway.

There are a lot of cats skulking round the house, murdering birds, lazing in the sun.

I spent yesterday cruising around in the car, superheated by the midday sun. Driving over the languid deep green Waikato river. Memories of swimming off it's banks when I was a teenager. Riverweed in my hair. Hungover.

Hamilton is affectionately nicknamed "Hamiltron, City of the Future", because of a funny old petition by a student radio station to change the name of the city. It feels like the city of my past now. But it is where my family live so it will always be the place I return to. To visit. To holiday. To be lazy.

Hamilton is like your favourite old PJ's. Really comfy but you don't want anyone to see you in them.

Ooo Baby Baby

So we’ve been in Wellington for the last week with Guy and Lucy and my new nephew Kingsley, and staying in Vogeltown with my good friend Kylie and her awesome three year old son Ike. Its been exciting, inspiring and a little exhausting being around the little fellas – they’re both so cute but both require so much energy and attention – and it seems to make a weird kind of sense this time that coming home to Wellington, usually a nostalgic backwards looking exercise, is this time all about new futures. A mangled copy of a ‘This is your life’ video from the future is skipping around out of control, back and forward – bits of the past and the future playing side by side. We’ll live in Wellington again.

All the love I have is in my mind.

J

Comeback special

At some stage while we were away someone decided exactly what ‘kiwi summer’ means and forgot to tell us. It’s plastered on every ad and every bottle of ‘kiwi summer’ beer or soft drink – an idyllic tan and brown, moustached, stubby shorted version of 1970’s New Zealand. It’s not that I don’t like it, it just that it seems a little bit early in the piece to stop and decide exactly what we’re all about, and I wasn’t even alive in the 70s.

Sonya and I parked outside a Samoan church in Auckland last Sunday and as we pulled up the whole congregation of big mums in giant hats and even bigger 14 year old boys in crisp white shirts and tapa cloth around their waists flooded out like they were waiting all this time to personally greet us. I love how much NZ feels like a pacific island.

Then we drove up the Coromandel peninsula. Australian birds and trees are like drunk sunburnt Shane Warnes who come and trip over your picnic blanket, spill beer in your salad and try to tell a dirty joke to make it all better but forget the punchline. New Zealand bush is dark and strange but somehow on its best behaviour, and kiwi birds are practical and polite little gentlemen quietly going about their sensible business.

Actually – if the world was a party Australia would be that same sunburnt man but this time hes standing on the coffee table telling the joke properly, drawing the whole room in to every lewd detail. New Zealand is the pretty girl in the hall - not outrageous or particularly glamorous but somehow sensibly stylish - deep in an earnest conversation about something that probably doesn’t really matter.