Blackout To The Future

Before I came to Auckland, those in the know informed me that the New Zealand of today was like Britain in the 1960s. Bracing myself for arrival on the set of Heartbeat, I stepped off the plane expecting to see antique motors, posters announcing the imminent arrival of the Monkees and possibly even Nick Berry administering some brutal back alley justice to Bill Maynard over the theft of some motor oil from Scripps garage.
Thankfully, Auckland is a very modern city with seemingly few antique vehicles outside of a horse drawn cart, a 1971 Buick Riviera and a rebuilt Uruk-hai siege tower with twin cam, bucket seats and spoilers.
What I have noticed however is that there is an old style feel to the place with regard to health and safety. Some of the pavements resemble elaborate death traps that both Indiana Jones and Lara Croft would fall victim to within seconds, and yet if someone trips over they just learn not to do it again.
I haven't seen a single advert for those "where there's blame, there's a claim" ads that have steadily infiltrated the UK way of life.
Yesterday I saw a junction box in someone's garden that had some yellow warning tape wrapped around it and a small fern growing from its shattered casing. My guess is that it has been like that for months if not years. And yet, despite the lack of perimeter fencing around it, nobody has set it alight or jammed a metal spike into it and been incinerated. In the UK, such a thing would be a source of public consternation because a child/inbred estate rat had licked the thing after confusing it with a cornetto.

In other news, the Haiti situation has understandably been getting a lot of headlines, but I was also recently alerted to the Samoan Tsunami of Sept 2009. I don't know whether it was because we were preparing to get our arses out here or if it wasn't newsworthy enough for the BBC due to a conflicting report about X Factor or something, but I knew nothing about it until I saw an end of year round up showing the devastation.
As a lot of Pacific Islanders are resident in NZ, it was a big thing over here and the Kiwis were quick to send aid and offer lots of support to the Samoan Govt. However, since hearing about it I am stuck with an image of the grateful Samoan officials gathered around (or rather clinging to) a boardroom table that is floating 30 miles offshore and wondering what to do about the sharks crashing the meeting.

Finally, we have had a power cut in Auckland today and the company at the centre of the blame game is called Transpower. No word of a lie, but the head of the company is called Dr Strange.
My guess as to the cause of the outage is that he's testing out some home made Tesla weapons in his Volcano Fortress. Actually, come to think of it he could be responsible for that dodgy junction box up the road...