Queenstown: Bohemian Raspberry

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: A Kind Of Tragic

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.

Rod Serling Presents...

I've seen some weird random stuff recently. For instance...

A Korean Christian Rock band singing to an enthralled crowd of their 12 friends from the church. Their cultural legacy will live on to the end of this sentence.

A bloke in a full and uncomfortable looking snowman costume dancing to Eminem in an empty car lot on a very humid day. This was while the sun beat down on a Monday afternoon.

Two blind, elderly Chinese ladies doing some Tai Chi in front of a huge sign that was raising awareness of the persecution of blind people in China. This was news to be as the only blind Chinese people I have ever seen or heard of were all hardcore Kung Fu masters who were revered and respected. Ok, this is probably a western conceit but despite being blind these two ladies were in perfect synch so I reckon they could go all Pai Mei on someone when they need to.

A bloke at the beach who I assumed to be dressed as a superhero, clad as he was in an all in one bodysuit with a pair of trunks over it. As he got closer I realised this wasn’t the case and I can honestly say he was hairy enough to carry C3PO on his back and hang around a Mos Eisley cantina looking for work.

A sign in the Bay of Islands advertising “Home Kill Butchery”.
Much like “Epileptic Blunt Vasectomy” or “German Peace Initiative” these are three words that surely don’t belong together in any sane society.

The (NZ) famous TV ad personality Levi Vaoga. Levi, is the poster Uruk Hai for Mitre 10 (a sort of B&Q with the “&” removed and replaced by another “B”) and is what I can only describe as a f*cking brick shithouse. We bumped into him at the opening of a new Mitre 10 Mega when we were shopping for gardening crap. Levi and his posse were showcasing the new store and holding a strongman competition (for he is NZ’s strongest man) involving the lifting of housebricks and the smashing of Hobbit skulls.

A sign for a local church saying “Google doesn’t have all the answers! GOD!”
At first glance you think this is saying that it is the Almighty and only the Almighty who knows everything (except apparently how to create a planet that doesn’t try to kill the inhabitants on a regular basis) but the sentence is constructed like the church is just having a go at Google for not knowing what they asked it and then shouting “GOD!” at the end of it like some sort of spoiled teenager.
Still, when you follow a religion free from the shackles of logic, common sense and scientific evidence, you can’t expect to get the grammar right. Except if it’s about putting people to death for working on the Sabbath, of course.

Four mimes of varying ethnic backgrounds doing their artistic best as the rain pounded down outside Britomart station. They were accompanied in their misery by Dvorak’s New World Symphony. For the record, I f*cking hate mimes, and come the Apocalypse I mean to kill as many of them as Xenu sees fit to deliver before my rifle.

Mr Ed translated into Maori. Seriously messed up shit.

The (Oceania) famous singing sensation Altiyan Childs. It’s hard to quantify Altiyan.
One minute he seems to be a sensitive rocker with a history of disappointment behind him belting out cheesy Bon Jovi covers like there is no tomorrow (which very well may be the case for him) and the next he comes across as a crazy eyed mental defective blubbing his way through an interview and throwing homo-erotic glances at a worried looking Ronan Keating.
As the missus is a huge fan (and Facebook friend of his) we queued up for 2 hours at the Warehouse (a superstore- real classy move there, chief) so she could press the flesh with the great man. When the steady procession of slavish yokels went up to get something signed he seemed genuinely touched and excited that so many people had come to see him. My guess is he is either far too nice to last in the music business or it is all a highly impressive act and sooner or later he will flip out and take a bus load of nuns hostage.
I declined the invitation to shake his hand as my mouth can’t be trusted in situations like that and I’d have doubtless caused “an incident”. Instead I opted for taking a snapshot of him hugging the misses, a photo she will treasure right up until the day they find his car abandoned near a popular suicide spot.

The number plate TRFC, bringing back terrible memories of my youth.

A bloke playing a small guitar outside a run down row of shops in Glen Innes while dressed as Optimus Prime.
Bruckheimer! *shakes fist*

NZ’s ugliest child. As I stood waiting for the missus outside of the local Belgian Beer bar, the beautiful people of Mission Bay went about their business on a hot and sunny evening. In the café next door a young couple played with their toddler, which was pestering a dog belonging to the woman on the adjacent table. The parents of the toddler were both attractive, blonde haired, tanned and athletic looking. The child, on the other hand, was some sort of half human/half warthog abomination that wouldn’t look out of place in Clash Of The Titans. I suppose the important thing is that it seemed physically and mentally healthy but all of this leads me to conclude that either good genes cancel each other out or a Jeremy Kyle-esque paternity special is on the cards.

Lots of families smiling, pointing and waving at me as I ascended two escalators. Only when I got to the top of the second one did I realise that the geezer right behind me was dressed in a full Santa suit.

Off The Buses

I’ve been getting the “Loser Cruiser” to work on a regular basis. The buses in Mordor are a lot like those in the UK except for five very important differences…

1- The buses run late. Now, I know that buses in the UK run late too. It’s just that here it is kind of expected here and the timetables are taken as a rough and wildly optimistic guideline. Because of this, people don’t get that narked by it and start smashing the bus shelters or complaining loudly to their fellow stranded passengers. They know the bus will turn up when it turns up (or maybe it won’t) so just accept it. It has taken me months to get used to that attitude, and I’m still not there. Much like the 770 that never arrived last week.

2- Some of the buses are a health and safety nightmare. Devoid of cameras, dimly lit at night and driven by madmen, you need your wits about you to get up, pull the bell cord and make it to one of the doors without serious injury or death. I got on a bus recently that (I shit you not) had a mural on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel’s famous neck strainer. I don’t know why it was there but the sceptical part of me suggests it has something to do with taking your eyes and mind of the lousy driving.

3- I’ve yet to see a bus with an empty Lucozade bottle rolling about the floor.

4- People are friendly. At the bus stop one morning, I got into a conversation about bus timetables and then music with a huge Pacific Islander lad who worked at the Vector Arena. Disturbingly though he was a teenager and dressed like a member of Slipknot he said the best gig he had been to recently was Robin Gibb. His final reminiscence being underlined with the statement…
“That Robin Gibb put on an awesome show, bro.”
As the bus journey ended at the Newmarket terminus, the driver got up out of his seat and as it was a Friday wished everyone a cracking weekend, waving to us as we alighted.
If that had been the UK, the incident at the bus stop would have been a punch up over which Gibb had the best voice and the only waving the bus driver would have conducted was the two fingered variety.
The only exception to this is the Filipino bus driver who said to me in excellent English as I boarded his bus…
“Hello. I remember you from yesterday as you look like a member of the 1990s UK pop sensations Right Said Fred”.
I almost killed him.

5- Bus mentalists seem to be few and far between. The ones back in Leeds were especially plentiful, including the colourful character who liked to quiz people about their favourite films before revealing his was popular 80s scapegoat “I Spit On Your Grave”. Possibly for the artistic direction, but more likely for the graphic sexual violence.
I have only had one run in with such an individual here in Mordor and this delightful episode only occurred as I boarded the bus one morning and failed to disengage my nutter magnet in time.
As we stopped at the bottom of Symonds Street, a bloke got on. With his shaved head, shorts and army boots, my howling moonpig detector went straight into the red and I shifted along on the seat to take up as much room as possible while he explained to the driver exactly what stop he was after, what the distinguishing features of that bus stop were, his ultimate destination for the day’s business (a hostel) and his God given purpose for doing so.
He lumbered down the bus clutching his ticket and dropped into the seat opposite the aisle from me.
By this point I had plugged in my earphones (which were switched off in case I needed to hear a steady build up of mentalism prior to him going postal) and carried on reading my book so he wouldn’t talk to me. My subtle plan failed spectacularly as he looked over and started his jabbering…

Mental: Are you Major General Fitzroy?
Me (pulling out earphone): What, mate?
Mental (looks right and left): Major General Fitzroy. You’re him, aren’t you?
Me (jokingly): Ha ha. No, I just look like him. He’s my twin brother.
Mental: I need to talk to him about that business today. 160,000 British soldiers dead in Kabul.
Me: Oh…
Mental: 1000 Centurion tanks destroyed. Don White will be a long time paying that off.
Me: Don White being?
Mental: The Prime Minister. I’m just off to see him in Western Springs.
Me: Isn’t the Prime Minister called John Key? And why would he need to…
Mental (stares with his head cocked to one side like a dog): …
Me: Okaaaaay….
Mental: I was a Colonel in the Falklands War and won 4 VCs, including the one that belonged to Freaky Frank.
Me: Right. Yes. Hmmmn. Good one.
Mental: I’ll tell Don you said. 160,000 dead. He needs to be told.
Me: Yeah, let me know how that goes…

He got off further up Symonds Street, walked in the direction of the hostel and then turned on his heel and started walking back towards town. I wonder what Don White made of it all.

Though not in the mental category, I do regularly get the bus home with a couple of Chinese ladies, one of whom sings on the journey like a demented Mogwai having its nuts pushed through a garlic press. I’m not sure what it is all about, but if it’s a love song it makes me wonder how the Chinese aren’t extinct as a race.

One final note…as I leapt to safety from the bus the other morning I spotted a huge container ship peeking through the early morning fog as it made its way up the busy harbour to the sound of foghorns and Uruk Hai war cries. By my return to Britomart Transport Centre the ship had docked and was being unloaded. Registered in Singapore the ship was called MV Madame Butterfly and it got me wondering about the crew of that fine vessel. Would you really want to serve on a ship named after a famous (albeit it literary) suicide? I’ll bet there are loads of jobs going on the MV Kurt Cobain. I might sign that bus mentalist up for it.

Call Of Nature:Toilet Assault

After the Christmas Cruise of Calamity, the seven of us who had survived the night knelt near the harbour kissing the ground as the wife laid out her grand plan for the rest of the night.
When the missus has had a few drinks she often makes command decisions worthy of General Custer and, as so often happens when she has had a skinful, she hit upon the idea of finding a place she could dance. She knows that I can’t dance to save my life, having all of the natural grace and rhythm of a gout-addled epileptic walrus so I am fairly she does this on a subconscious level to make me more uncomfortable.
Fortunately, with the closure of the living hell that was Boogie Wonderland, the number of clubs in Auckland that play cheesy pop music (rather than the puzzlingly popular RnB) you can now count on the fingers of one head. So, after leaving two of the party behind simply because they were Australian, we headed to Karangahape Road (or K Road as the local vernacular has it).
This road is probably the crime capital of Auckland and virtually every time Police Ten 7 shows somewhere unruly in the city, it is K Road. It is also the location of the miniscule Gay, Lesbian and Transvestite scene in this fair town.
It’s a very odd place. One end of the road features the Langham, one of Auckland’s most upmarket hotels, and the other features a pile of rotting garbage known as the 24Seven Bar. Somewhere in the middle there is a sliding scale of crime, debauchery and really bad kebabs. If you want something, you can find it on K Road, especially if that something is to be brutally assaulted by a mentalist in a dress.

In the daytime it is full of music shops, tattoo parlours, eclectic cafes and lots of retro and hippy stores. At night it appears to be dodgy takeaways (where the Korean meatballs probably are the dog’s bollocks), rough bars and pools of rapidly congealing blood. It’s like one of those comedy speakeasys where the roulette table and drinks cabinets flip over to reveal a dinner table with lit candelabras and a radio playing the Waldo Chester Juggling Hour just as the Feds smash through the door and proceed to scratch their heads in puzzlement. Every day at 6am the entire street flips back over to reveal a respectable row of shops, while an army of slaves work on the seedy side mopping up blood and vomit before the night shift begins again.

As we travelled up Queen Street towards our target, as sure as eggs is eggs and any film where Jason Statham is the lead being a steaming pile of shit, the area became steadily rougher and rougher. Gangs littered the pavements, drunken revellers staggered their way between the window down-stereo on hoodmobiles and the “Back off, Bro” quotient went off the charts. By the time we got to K Road, there were already two police cars in evidence as officers attempted to get some sense out of drunken teenagers on the steps of a bar playing some god-awful Kanye West track. I think the cops should have shot them and anyone else in the bar merely for listening to Kanye, but I’m probably alone in my views.

After several minutes we stood in a loose circle outside The Family Bar, perhaps K Road’s most famous gay haunt while attempting to listen to the music that was playing inside and trying not to stare at the transvestite sitting on the bench behind us. Well, I say “transvestite” but that was stretching it somewhat. Effort wise he was getting a sympathetic F, mainly as he seemed to be undecided whether to dress as Danny LaRue or Gabby Johnson from Blazing Saddles.
I once saw a documentary about sea birds where, during mating season, the males would gather on a clifftop and basically show off in order to attract a mate. The elderly ones, past their prime and unable to preen themselves and squawk their little hearts out, would turn up anyway out of instinct but look on miserably from the edges as everyone else got paired up. Was this guy one of the old guard who had assembled here to look on as the youngsters conducted their colourful courtship rituals? After a while I came to the conclusion that;
A) I can’t apply the lifecycles of puffins to transvestites, and
B) I didn’t care.
Then someone pointed out that he was just some homeless guy who had stumbled upon a rainbow coloured feather boa. F*ck you very much, David Attenborough!

Somewhat predictably the music pumping out from the bar was Lady Gaga, though the video showing on the screens was Van Halen’s not so gay classic Jump. For a moment I thought this was some weird flashback dream sequence I was having after eating that space cake in Amsterdam, but it turned out that the video screens were just showing random stuff on mute while the DJ played the gay anthems of the moment. After several moments of deliberation we ventured inside, passing several burly men with shaved heads and very tight t-shirts. I’d left my tight t-shirt at home so didn’t really blend in.

I’ll have an aside here and explain why the wife often sees me as mildly homophobic. I grew up in a family with absolutely no known gay people in it and basically my early experiences with gay friends involved sidestepping several uncomfortable attempts to seduce me. In the gay bars I have visited in my crash course of gay culture my shaved head and gorilla like appearance was apparently a big draw, presumably among the blind and/or drunk members of the pink fraternity. Then there is the fact that it has taken me some 20 years to get used to seeing two men kissing to the point where it is no longer an issue for me. However, I will point out in my defence that to see a couple of any gender or persuasion going at it hammer and tongs in public is not exactly my cup of tea. Unless it’s Charlize Theron and Megan Fox, but that’s pretty much a given.
I acknowledge that due to my upbringing I am a dinosaur and hopefully one of the last of a dying breed. The next generation won’t have my restrictions to overcome and I think the world will be a much happier place as a result.

Meanwhile, back in The Family Bar…no sooner had we settled down when two transvestites made a grand and noisy entrance. The second of these was wearing something I can only describe as Widow Twankey meets Rainbow Brite. Had a colour blind version of Aladdin been playing in town I would have assumed that she had come to the wrong stage door, but regardless, it was an A for effort in my book, if only for the astonishing hat.
However, she was way behind the lovely, awe inspiring sight of Miss Ribena.
Miss Ribena is what I can only describe as the bastard offspring of Jonah Lomu and Carmen Miranda. Standing well over six feet tall in her heels and with biceps like cannonballs, she strode through the bar in her purple ensemble drawing gasps and adoration from all who viewed her.
About 12 months ago I was becoming infuriated with Call Of Duty: World At War when trying to storm the Reichstag for the umpteenth time on Veteran setting. It was insanely hard as the hated Nazis were all crack shots and had a billion grenades each that they would throw with surgical precision next to my cowering form.
Had Miss Ribena been beside me striking terror into the hearts of the krauts with her purple eyeliner and arms that could snap a panzershreck in two, I feel sure I would have completed that game in 93 seconds, my Red Army soldiers hoisting a rainbow flag above the ruined squarehead stronghold.

Anyway, after a round of drinks and a trip to the loo it was time to move on as the wife’s attempts to embarrass me had failed and I seemed to be losing my homo-erotic appeal as I didn’t get chatted up once. I did have to manhandle a bloke into the toilets as he was drunkenly trying to negotiate the complex method of door opening while punters stared at him incredulously. One shove in the back later and the door magically opened as his head struck it. It was brutality and education all in one, provided free of charge by your friendly neighbourhood maniac.
Call Of Nature:Toilet Assault is out now on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Striking terror into the hearts of Nazis by being fabulous...

The Boat That Sucked

Right, where was I? Oh yes...

Last weekend we went on a Christmas meal harbour cruise and as we waited for the rest of our party to arrive we were passed by two midgets dressed as pirates. This was a bad omen for the evening to come and left me wondering two things.
Firstly, where does a midget go to get a pirate costume that fits a small adult frame with little legs and secondly, are midgets really cut out for piracy? There’s probably lots of rape and pillaging that needs to be done above waist level and it must be devilishly hard to steer the Black Pearl through the treacherous waters around the Isla De Muerta when you have to stand on a box.
Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t have anything against midgets (not even my lower body) but I have a brother who is absolutely terrified of them. He wouldn’t even watch Time Bandits when we used to put it on. Ok, that film seemed to be shown a lot in our house but I’m sure this was purely out of therapy rather than out of familial cruelty. It was hard to tell with my family, but because of this I always associated midgets with bowel loosening terror. To see them dressed as pirates or ninjas or other purveyors of human misery (Nazis, Priests, Bon Jovi, etc) only serves to ramp up this image in the dark recesses of my brain.

The three hour cruise got under way and all seemed to be going ok. This was until the DJ arrived. I don’t like DJs as they tend to be pricks or buffoons and it was the one reason I didn’t want to go on this cruise, recommending instead that we go on the Waipa Delta paddle steamer which is meant to be a cut above.
Anyway, this guy not only fell into the “buffoon” category, he crashed through the floor of it and tumbled headlong into the fenced off area marked “incompetent fuckwit”. He started off his set with an excuse that the booked DJ had been struck down with something that prevented him performing his duties for the night. Presumably the booked DJ had a premonition that midgets were going to make him walk the plank if he played the Oompa Lumpa song from Willy Wonka and thought the better of turning up. As he stood there in his black shirt with white musical note braces and tie (looking like a 1920s Chicago hitman who specialised in not only killing music, but also torturing it and then cutting off its body parts to send a message) DJ Excuse went on to explain how he hasn’t DJ’ed in three years and that he was used to working with vinyl. We took this diatribe to be a joke at first, but how very wrong we were.

After enduring the first few tunes we left to go outside and snagged a table near the midgets in case it all kicked off, albeit it at knee level. The alcohol was reasonably priced so that flowed quite freely as we tucked into the BBQ grub, and the world didn’t seem so bad.

Suddenly the boat swung around and quickly made for port. Mystified by this (we were around only an hour and a half in) I looked up and was surprised to discover that the midgets had disappeared. Had they taken over the boat? Were we going back to the harbour to commit below the belt mayhem and murder? Was the DJ hanging from the yardarm for one too many cracks about being there on “very short notice”? I ran down to the cabin and discovered it was none of the above. There was the DJ, mic in hand telling the circle of ladies that the Beyonce cd is now scratched beyond all hope of recovery and there were the midgets drunkenly dancing along to the Time Warp. I could hear Edward Teach spinning in his grave.
It turns out we had simply run out of plastic forks and were making for the harbour to pick up more. One hasty re-supply later and with the crew refusing to let anyone escape the boat, we set sail once more on our voyage of terror.

After several more jumping cds, unexplained silences and frankly dreadful attempts to explain it all (“my speciality is vinyl”, “the boat is rocking too much”, “I have Parkinson’s…shabba!”, etc) I couldn’t take any more and left, shaking my head at the circle of women who were gyrating on the dance floor to Boney M’s seminal classic “Mary’s Boy Child” and heading for the top deck to throw myself into the unforgiving black waters of Auckland Harbour.

As I stood there contemplating taking the easy way off the boat I was steered away from self termination by a majestic sight in the darkness. With the glittering Auckland skyline behind it, the paddle steamer Wapia Delta (streamed with blue lights from her bow to her stern) chugged her way past our boat and lit up the black waves as she passed.
With the universe holding it’s breath for this fleeting moment of beauty, one of the three expatriate middle aged ladies standing to my left piped up...”Eeee. It’s just like Blackpool, with the trams all lit up.”
Only when the moment was broken could I hear Beyonce’s Single Ladies being played in the Delta’s main cabin as it occurred to me that the DJ who had called in sick had obviously got a better gig. As I squinted into the cabin I could see the beautiful people of Auckland enjoying themselves with not a midget or a pirate in sight.
My faith in humanity forever tarnished I headed back to the cabin to find my wife harassing the DJ and pulling at his braces before she was whacked on her arse by a midget with a plastic cutlass.

Never trust this man with your Ipod...

The Non-Return Of The King

The wife has had her back surgery, hence the delay. This was all made more bearable by the fact that her beloved Bono has recently gone through the same procedure.

That voodoo doll has paid for itself. Twice.

Bono may be a strange, hypocritical little gobshite with a grossly oversized head, but his pain and misery has had a calming effect on the wife. The piece of spine that was removed now sits on the bookshelf preserved in vodka til we decide what to do with it. I was thinking of getting it made into a paperweight and making a present of it to the wife’s mum.

I travel to delightful suburb of Three Kings every day and was fascinated to learn that it was named after a collection of volcanic cones (actually four in number) sitting inside a much larger and shallower explosion crater.
Which really just goes to show that despite having a literacy rate of 109%, the understanding of maths here in Mordor is only 12%.
The area around Three Kings was drastically quarried over the years and now only one cone remains, mainly as it has a large water tank that was built on its summit at the beginning of the 20th century and is somewhat difficult to dismantle using tools for breaking into cars. Now known as Big King, it has been designated as a public reserve and will not be quarried. No matter how much it begs to leave the area.
Up until I read all of this I just assumed that the rest of the cones were stolen as the area is known for its high crime rate and scant regard for personally property. In the first week I started working there a work colleague went to the bank and was about to go inside when a guy in a wheelchair outside rolled up and advised her not to as it was being robbed by two armed men at the time. She fled the scene like a greased rodent but the guy in the wheelchair remained. It was probably the first entertainment he has had since his television was stolen.

Though I am some 7 months in to my time here and getting more accustomed to the Kiwi way of life, every day in Mordor I see or hear something that causes me to do a double take. Sometimes this is one of the collection of phenomenal mullets out in Three Kings, but more usually it is something on the quite bonkers media that catches my eye or ear. The other morning there was a caller dropping the F-bomb on a radio discussion and this language wasn't checked or apologised for by the hosts.

The caller then said “Shit….I just said “f*ck” there, didn’t I. Shit, sorry about that…”

Earlier this year we went to a fair at Mission Bay and one of the stalls was called “Finger Puppet Heaven”. I’m reminded of Demetri Martin’s wise words that the phrase “Finger Puppet” is only ok as a noun, but even given this, should children really be subjected to a stall where dead finger puppets abide? That just cannot be right.

Just as London has its Pearly Kings, Mordor has its Hubcap King. Whilst passing through one of the homelier (and by which I mean the kind of home that has a burnt out car on the lawn and police tape as a fence) areas of the city we passed a house that has the entire fence and some of the walls decorated in silver hubcaps of all styles. Not knowing if these were either stolen items displayed like a Predator’s trophies, salvaged from the road by the rest of the Maori womble clan or actually purchased for this very purpose, we stared in wonder before accelerating off into the night.

We then got out and checked the hubcaps were still on the car.