Politics is a funny business. Though the people of Mordor do have politicians, these seem to be just extensions of the common man rather than public school educated tw@ts or lying war criminals. I could be wrong but that is the impression I get from the following few experiences.
The Prime Minister, John Key, represents the National Party. Not “National” in a Nick Griffin/Adolf Hitler kind of way, but more in a Conservative vein and though he is a world leader he seems to be as accessible as the mayor of a small town. You know, which he is…
Evidently Sauron keeps him on a loose leash and one of the radio stations rings him up from time to time to ask his opinions on certain things, mainly the sporting events. To them he is just “John”, and the conversations are always very casual and relaxed with no pandering to him and a fair bit of florid language thrown in as is the Kiwi way. I can’t imagine anyone doing that with a UK politician, unless they were able to beat them with a piece of steel pipe beforehand to work out all of the issues.
He was on again recently in this astonishing broadcast.
A bloke I worked with was at a café in Newmarket one Saturday morning for breakfast. He spotted a family of four at the next table also having brekkie and thought he recognised the guy from somewhere. Only when the guy got up did he realise it was John Key. He then spotted 2 minders at a nearby table, but was amazed that there was the leader of the nation (albeit a nation of sheep and Orc minions) at a café, just hanging out. Crazy stuff.
The wife likes him so much she wants him to be her dad. As her own dad is a lying, thieving scumbag of the highest order anything is preferable I suppose.
I had a run in with one of the members of the new Hobbiton Council recently when he showed up at work. Of all of the politicians I think he is the least respected, looking as he does like the Hood from Thunderbirds. As he entered the control room here I was roped into the party accompanying him (mainly as I just happened to be passing and they needed to make up the numbers as he was so unpopular) and stood by as he started punching buttons for a photo opportunity. I remarked to a colleague in a louder than intended whisper that he looked like an angry midget Voldemort. At this point he stopped what he was doing and looked around at the assembled entourage and I tried to appear as nonchalant as possible, unsure if he heard me or not. He then frowned, which made his eyebrows look like caterpillars doing some weird insectoid samba, swiftly concluded his photo op and left to deal with those International Rescue pricks once and for all.
Hobbiton has a new mayor and his name is Len.
Quite a few people threw their hats into the ring for this coveted role, including the incumbent mayor, several local councillors, a comedian, a former tv star and a local dole scum troublemaker by the name of Penny Bright.
Anyway, after a hard fought campaign Len Brown won the election and became Mayor of the Auckland Supercity (which saw the amalgamation of five Orc tribes into one), and he did all of this in the defiance of my wife.
To say she hates him is understating the matter somewhat (it’s a bit like saying World War 2 was merely a frank exchange of views) and she has often wished for a portal to Hades to open up beneath him and for his gurning frame to be dragged down and torn asunder by the claws of grotesque demons. All the time being anally raped at the hands of insatiable, barbed penised hell hounds and screaming in indescribable torment as the superheated gases of Hell’s unholy furnace blacken and char his hair and skin. Oh, and he’s also forced to watch looped episodes of the Keeping Up Appearances Christmas Specials.
All pretty standard stuff really.
She came to this conclusion being largely put off by his cheesy grin and row of tombstone like teeth but felt that he had essentially sentenced himself to the pit of torment after his famous council speech in June. Len had been under media attention for matters relating to some spending on his council credit card which included items of a personal nature like toys, cave troll prostitutes and a can of Balrog repellant.
At the council meeting where all this was brought up he repeatedly slapped his face and got extremely emotional, leading to intense speculation that his actions were attributable to his use of a Maori act of contrition. True or not, the face thing is a bit odd and freaked the missus out enough for her to feel physically sick when she saw his visage from then on.
Because of this I took every opportunity to seize the remote and turn up the volume when his campaign adverts came on and secrete flyers bearing his crooked grin in her work bag. It’s not that I am a bad husband; it’s simply that I have a strong death wish.
Recently I was having a drink in Aotea Square and he wandered past on his way for a coffee. As luck would have it I had a camera handy and gave chase telling him that my wife was a HUGE fan of both him and his campaign and that she would be really impressed if I shook his hand. I then shoved the camera into the hands of the woman he was with (who it turns out was the Deputy Mayor) and the little fella put his arm around me, imparting a “Good on ya, mate” as he grinned for the camera.
He genuinely seemed like a nice guy so I wished him all the luck for the future, apologised for pestering him when he was trying to get his Whorebucks fix and went back to my alcohol. He even waved at us when he left Whorebucks and went off, credit card in hand, in search of champagne bubbles to polish his antique waka with.
When I got home and showed the picture to the missus she made me take a shower and sleep in the spare room for a week.
The Queenstown New Year celebrations themselves were interesting. The wife was spoken to by a colleague who reported that the town was “mental at New Year”. Evidently said colleague had never been to any large city square at the last stroke of midnight and had probably only ever spent it with 12 other humans.
The harbour area was comparatively busier with two stages (of sorts), a single burger van with a bored looking purveyor and a modest firework display that lit up the harbour and scared the beaks off the local duck population.
The first stage featured a DJ set playing some poorly chosen dance music as some select locals jigged along like the old guy out of Deliverance when the duelling banjo music starts playing.
The second stage was an eye opener and was populated by a series of covers bands, including a delightful group of three ladies who were butchering some 90s tracks while dressed like an unholy cross between some Geordie slappers and the women from the "Sheila’s Wheels" adverts.
As they “performed” their unique renderings of the songs, they wiggled their bodies (one of them was a bit rotund so had little choice in the matter really) and played up to the dumbfounded crowd of slack jawed yokels.
Looking off to my left I spotted an Eastern European gentleman I had seen earlier that day asking for directions. He was filming the entire thing on his camcoder, with a huge smile on his face so it was obviously the best form of entertainment he had seen since they banned dancing bears in his homeland of Kazakhstan.
The only down point was the wine tour we went on earlier that day. Though it was pleasant and the driver was very nice and informative, the wines weren’t that fantastic and the mood was ruined by the know alls behind us.
I don’t mind the Bohemian types who like to drink wine and talk about art and literature, having met many of them in some of the circles I have moved in. Ok, you wouldn’t trust a lot of them to wire a plug or remember to feed your cat, but they generally mean well for a bunch of harmless loafers.
What these seemed to be, however, is arrogant mature students who have graduated from the school of life with a double first in bullshit and f*cktardary and the world could do with a lot less of them.
Everyone else on the trip seemed ok, from the cool looking French pair and the camera happy Americans to the ubiquitous Brits and the weird German couple (he looked like the bastard offspring of Arsene Wenger and Pam St Clement and she couldn’t go more than a few steps without lighting up a cancer stick), but these guys were a pain in the arse. So much so that it prompted the missus to declare quite loudly that she was glad she had left her encyclopaedia behind as it evidently was now redundant. When she gets riled, I know things are bad.
Starting the journey with a sort of one-upmanship foreplay of interesting facts the know alls pointed out that the mountain range known as The Remarkables are so called because they are the only range in the world that run truly North-South. Utter bollocks as The Rockies have the same aspect and the naming is rumoured to be down to the fact that they looked so spectacular to the original settlers. Score one for Wikipedia there.
When we passed a church they pointed out that all Churches must point to the east as it’s some kind of religious law. Though I don’t know much about churches, I think it is mainly the Anglicans that do this and have been in churches that certainly don’t follow this convention. Having visited St Peter’s Magic Castle (for the Vatican City is like a Catholic Disneyland, full of imaginary characters where the devout go to escape from reality and they hire people who like to spend far too much time with children) I am fairly sure that the chancel is on the west rather than the east.
Which reminds me, if churches are built to face east because Jesus is meant to return from there, then east of Queenstown is a place called Cromwell. In which case, Christianity is in serious trouble as the Messiah is going to be either a sheep or an inbred mutant.
As the journey progressed and more tastings were had, they couldn’t seem to hold their drink and the gibberish just got worse, with them sometimes forgetting what fact they were meant to be mis-representing. One of them even reported putting one of the winery people straight as apparently a painting done by her grandmother hung in the winery and the winery people simply were not aware of this fact. Boo f*cking hoo.
Toward the end of the trip we stopped at "The Winehouse" which is near the mentalist magnet AJ Hackett bungy over the Kawarau River. As we did so, the most annoying of the know alls (the one with the little known painter grandmother) spoke up to her comrades…
“Oh, we’re not going to look at the bungy are we? Oh dear.”
Rolling their eyes at the tackiness of it all, the gruesome threesome trudged off the bus looking ashamed to be there.
However, once off they were the last ones getting on as they were still watching the maniacs hurl themselves off the bridge, probably exchanging true facts like “the ancient Greeks invented the ipod first” and “Noah’s Ark almost certainly had room for two of every species of dinosaur”.
Thereby proving that they weren’t just know-all jizzbats after all, they were in fact hypocritical know-all jizzbats.
While back in the safety of Auckland airport, I was standing next to three Americans at the carousel. I don’t know what it is about Americans, but they seem to behave strangely in places of transit. I was in Venice some years back and a fairly young American family were there as we were getting the train to Lake Garda. As the woman and child headed off to conduct some important business, the bloke on his own started to go a bit mental in the middle of the crowded station.
His shortish, portly frame resplendent in his pink polo shirt, yellow shorts, white socks and trainers, he popped one arm of his sunglasses in his mouth and began practising his golf swing with an imaginary club and looking into the distance as his imaginary ball sailed down the fairway. He did this for about five minutes.
As I stared at him incredulously, I caught the eye of one of the many locals who were also jaw agape at the antics and we both shook our heads at each other in a brief moment of European unity.
Anyway, at the carousel there were two blokes in their 30s and a woman in her 50s or 60s. As one left to use the bathroom, the older lady moved in and started giving the other one a back massage remarking that “Gee, your back muscles are really big”.As my brain struggled to take in the relationship I figured either that…
A) It was a gay couple on holiday with the mum of one of them, in which case she shouldn’t be massaging either of them.
B) The bloke who had gone for a slash was her son and this was his mate who she was secretly nailing. In which case, eeeew.
C) It was her son. And they are from Appalachia and had travelled to Auckland instead of Invercargill where this sort of thing is a regular occurrence.
This is just the sort of lapse in judgement that lobs in a frag grenade during a hostage rescue.
Queenstown is the NZ capital for adrenalin junkies.
I know this because on the way in our pilot decided that simply landing at an airstrip that is situated with mountains on three sides while being criss-crossed by helicopters and other light aircraft simply wasn’t enough excitement for his terrified passengers. Instead he decided to come in at way above the normal speed and bring the plane to a screeching halt with metres to spare, probably while wearing shades and waggling his thumb and little finger out of the window shouting “Awesome, bro!”
After sobbing and kissing the tarmac for several minutes we headed into the town itself via the shuttle service. This was also an interesting experience as our driver was apparently so bad that they had to have a back up driver on board telling him where he was going wrong. As the bus lurched and careened to our hotel, the back up guy offered such helpful bon mots as “just start off in second gear”, “don’t bother with the handbrake” and “watch out for that Mumakil”.
Disembarking the vehicle as it thundered down the hill to the town centre mowing down everything in its path we elected to check in and then head off to explore the delights of Queenstown. This would take about 40 minutes, including check in time, the conversation with the receptionist from Kirkstall and the five minute walk into town. Had the place been a Freddie Mercury style themepark (as I had earlier feared) I feel the situation would have been improved.
A small town by anyone’s standards, Queenstown is the home of the bungy, which was invented by a suicidal bloke who wanted to keep his options open when he realised he was living in Queenstown. It is also one of the few places you can stand on a plank on top of a tipped over cylinder and try to balance. This is genuinely one of the attractions on a small funfair that is situated near the cable cars and wouldn’t look out of place at the Craggy Island fair. Idiot pointing is also popular and I indulged in a spot of this while watching the luge track on the nearby mountain.
The first thing I noticed was the scenery. It is simply stunningly beautiful.
Lake Wakatipu (despite drowning a couple of Frenchman last month) is clear, blue and inviting. The mountains surrounding the area look straight out of Lord Of The Rings and the town itself looks clean and well maintained, especially the park where you can play Frisbee golf. No, really, Frisbee golf.
The second thing I noticed were the car pricks. Boy racers took great delight in revving their souped up bangers up and down the hill into town all the time forgetting the golden rule of vehicular style…
It doesn't matter how low your car is, how deep the bass goes, how piercing the headlights are or how shiny your rims may be, if you are a white guy with 50 Cent pumping out of the stereo then you may as well just cut your losses and kill yourself.
Like the commonly stated fact about rats, you are never more than 10ft away from a Brit in New Zealand. They are everywhere, having fled the hellholes of the UK (Preston, Leeds, Penzance, Crewe etc.) for a better life in the fires of Mordor.
Queenstown is full of them, mainly in the bars and cafes, all of which seem to be constantly hiring. In fact, I am almost certain that the entire serving staff resigned and were replaced in the 40 minutes it took us to eat our pizza.
Despite this short relationship, the people of the town seem genuinely friendly and inquisitive about visitors. Much like the people of Birkenhead only without the unpleasant end result of a mugging and subsequent hospital visit.
