It’s 9pm and you’re heading for town. You look good, you’re keen for a biggie, and you’re a prionoplus reticularis or huhu beetle like this handsome brown fella here. Coco’s, you think – I’ll go to Coco’s for a drink and some kai – so you point your nose in the right direction, set out, […]
The fun thing about having naturalist friends – naturalist, not naturist; though Dave you do have a good all over tan – is being able to tap their actual proper expertise around animals from time to time. A while back I got sent one of those rather silly internet rumours / stories / bits of […]
Apologies to anyone who saw this on my Facebook already, but I thought it was worth sharing here: it’s the shark that my friends and I found washed up on Ninety Mile beach these summer holidays. He (let’s call it a he, though I have no idea how to determine the sex of a shark, […]
Strolling home from breakfast along Ponsonby Road the other day I had the pleasure of bumping into my friend Bonnie Sumner – and her future Oscar-winning mother; Barbara Sumner Burstyn and her husband Thomas made a documentary called This Way of Life which has been short-listed for an Academy Award. We find out if they […]
Auckland has been disgustingly hot and humid this week – which equals bad sleep and mosquitos. The damp means they’ve been breeding like crazy, but you HAVE to leave the windows open at night because it’s so roasting – which means the little buggers waft in at all hours and bite you. But lying awake […]
Ah – nothing says “I’m running a meth lab” like a big ‘laboratory’ sign made from white gaffer tape. Seeing this had me musing on the audacity of hiding in plain sight – and on the Banksy documentary movie Exit Through the Gift Shop. For those who haven’t seen it and don’t mind a spoiler, […]
Sometimes I despise the rest of this country for its knee-jerk hatred of Auckland. For the way the word ‘latte’, spoken by an Aucklander anywhere out of their city, is cue for an eye-rolling jazz-handing “oooh, fancy!” The way doing anything more sophisticated than chopping carrots julienne style is a sign of the most condescending […]
Dave has the coolest job of anyone I know. A conservation biologist, he’s spent years at a time deep in the jungles of Cambodia and Vietnam counting and studying animals that are – by definition, being endangered – hard to find. He’s like a friendly Colonel Kurtz, and the only person I know who can […]
I go for a run and – is it just me – or is there a lot of sex in the streets here? It’s super-humid, so I just do a short one – down Cockburn, up Regina, round through Cox’s Bay and… well, see what I mean? Maybe I’m just childish. Jeez, I can’t even […]
Some good news on the fiction front! Not for me, but my friend Melissa Harrison. I think of Mel as one of my closer pals – she’s the person I’ve spoken to most about writing fiction – and she found out today that her fiction project has been accepted by a publisher. I’ve never met […]
