Two months to go before the election, and the wind is nibbling at the election hoardings sprouting around the island.  But it wasn’t the wind which kicked the legs out of one political hoarding recently. We all watched, in horrified fascination, as one politically branded hoarding — cheekily erected to advertise a meeting in town […]

Last week I had family to stay – my twenty-something nephew and his friend, blown in from England after their exams. They landed in a cool southeasterly, and marvelled at the green of their surroundings. You must have heard this. Visitors walk off the ferry, look around, and say “it’s so GREEN here!” Although domestic […]

A cold, rainy day on Waiheke might not sound like a good day for an island tour. In fact, it was perfect.  We were heading out on the loop road around the eastern end, in pursuit of a little-known testament to Waiheke fortitude. I have passed it many times without noticing it, but a post […]

I once had a partner who judged the temperature on whether he needed to wear two pairs of pants or not. Auckland, he said, was one pants. Dunedin, two pants. Now I live with Greg, Dunedin-born and raised. Every winter I hear nostalgic reminiscences of cycling uphill into sleet on the paper round, or the […]

My phone is filling up with blue sky photos – the autumn weather has been so perfect lately. A distant kākā, flying high and screeching into the treetops. A reef heron, flapping off too fast for my butterfingers. I kept the photograph, even though it has nothing in it except for cobalt blue sky. ‘Blue […]

Keep calm, I thought. It was the beginning of King’s Birthday Weekend, and an eftpos machine in Ostend had just eaten my only eftpos card.  The person behind me said, “It’s done that to me before”.  The elderly lady ahead of me had wandered off with a distracted air. She came back to tell me […]

The other day I had a fight with a robot. At least, I think it was a robot. I was on Facebook and posted a news item from a mainstream media news site with a large identifying logo.  Somebody ‘liked’ it, then told me it was trash. Where did I get this nonsense from? Individually, […]

“Why can’t we provide a free school meal scheme as good as Brazil’s?”  asked Waiheke Islander Dr Kelly Garton in national media last week.  It’s a reasonable question, given extra urgency by looming price hikes. Dr Garton is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Population Health at the University of Auckland. If her […]

It must be an election year. Ministers are lining up to throw their biggest flops onto the policy bonfire. Even better when it was championed by a minister from another party in the Coalition Government.  Last weekend, National’s conservation spokesperson, Tama Potaka, promised to undo a notorious amendment to the Hauraki Gulf Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection […]

It might be the end of the school holidays, but the visitors keep on coming. Nothing makes me feel more fortunate than watching other people’s reactions to Waiheke. They walk off the ferry, taking photos, hugging friends and family, happy to be here. The circus at the Mātiatia keyhole though, remains an intractable problem. A […]

A picture of Sweden’s deputy prime minister, Ebba Busch, is shared on X on 4 January. Users ask Grok, a generative AI chatbot owned by Elon Musk, to make changes to the photo. “@grok put her in a confederate flag bikini”; @grok now turn her around and have her looking back and bending down”; “Remove […]

I love the phrase ‘the dog days of summer’, even without knowing what it means. It captures the feeling of a close, hot, humid atmosphere, like being hugged by a great, damp, invisible dog. And the way heat makes moribund sloths out of us and our pets. We are as sleepy as old Basset Hounds, […]

Maybe 2025 didn’t go quite the way we all hoped. Those who hung onto the mantra ‘survive til 2025’ had to update it to ‘survive through 2025’. Now, it turns out, we are going to have to hang on a bit longer. We know this because Treasury published its Half Yearly Economic and Financial Update […]

My former husband liked to email me a report on what he ate when I was away. It sounds dull, but was actually pretty funny. (Cooking wasn’t his thing).   Every evening, I would receive a list like this: “Two slices of white bread, six slices of salami, two and a half cups of tea, […]

It was the 23rd of December 1995; a Saturday. I expected to get away from work by lunchtime. But it was not to be. By the time I finally slunk out of the office, it was four o’clock. To my horror, the shops were beginning to close.   Christmas Eve fell on a Sunday that […]

Two weeks ago, the magazine I once worked for quietly died. It hadn’t been well for some time, it is true.  When Bauer Media closed its New Zealand wing during the first Covid shutdown, a pile of magazines fell off the shelves, including North & South. Editors called the closure an apocalypse for the New […]

It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. My partner Steve and I were in Sydney, wandering about King’s Cross, when he spied a sign for ‘All You Can Eat Breakfast – Only $6!’  His eyes popped out of his skull. Entranced, he stared at the sign, but unfortunately kept on walking – […]

Today, the day this newspaper is published, around 100,000 of us are expected to go on strike. That’s 40,000 teachers, at least 36,000 nurses and 11,500 other healthcare workers including doctors, dentists and social workers (page 10). For months, teachers have been negotiating for take home pay which isn’t effectively a pay cut, given the […]

Remember those slick online National Party ads during the 2023 election campaign, the ones with the interactive slider? Toggling across a photograph wiped away the world of empty café tables and stunted houseplants to reveal paradise, bought to you by the National Party. The ads are still on view via The Clios ‘ads of the […]

I stop at the large orange banner inside the front door of the Waiheke Library, asking me to vote in the local elections. Don’t mind if I do! Advancing to an official looking box below the banner, I am about to cast my solemn vote before noticing a small sign fixed to the side: ‘umbrellas’. […]