Versive

I booked a week in Auckland, because at the time I didn't know any better. It's not unpleasant, not even unloveable, it's just that I am deeply cheap and, now, genuinely poor, here at the end of my travels. Down to a mere NZ$50 a day after hostel fees - that's £20 English for food, entertainment, refreshment and back-of-sofa mislayings and forgetfullness - for every whole entire complete and unabridged revolution of the Planet. Not so easy when one is trying quite hard to see and do as much as possible before returning ignominiously to Blighty.
New Zealand's `greatest city` as it cheerfully calls itself, much to the chagrin of the capital Wellington, is not cheap but, in a strange twist of fortune, there isn't actually enough to do for whole week here anyway. Not enough for anyone unwilling to leave the city (and I mean leave by a good hundred miles, to the northernmost tip of the country at 90 Mile Beach or venture southeast to the centre of the North Island and Lake Taupo, or similar) so perhaps it is somewhat serendipitous that I am poor at the same time that the city has little to offer the casual tourist.
Of course that isn't true, but I don't fancy walking across the upper span of the Auckland Harbour Bridge (the standard, default activity touted to all backpackers upon entering the city limits, perhaps even by law) because I have seen many spectacular bridges and the Auckland Harbour one isn't, and anyway it costs a scandalous $150 and for that they can bloody well whistle, thank you so very much.
There are many other things to do but few unique to this city; I can see the latest films wherever I happen to be; I can eat in almost all of the same type and standard of restaurants in any major city in the world; I can be mugged and beaten by the criminal element of my choice wherever the wind blows me.

Now Wellington, the actual seat of power, politics and of course the real capital ever since about 1860 (though I bloody forgot it myself and mistakenly named Ol' Aucksville as capital on these very pages, ho ho such an idiot am I!) will, I hope and trust, prove different, more exuberant, much more vibrant and exciting, and to make certain that this is so I have booked myself a shorter stay there, because as we all know there is an equal and opposite force to Serendipity, commonly called shit-normal-fucking-evil-arsed-rotten-luck; a.k.a, as many will agree, Real Life.
In any case, back to the city, and the fact that Auckland derives its power, and at the end of the day the single reason it can lay claim to the title of greatest; pure size; from its geographic location, which is certainly fairly unusual. The city is the largest in Polynesia, as NZ does in fact lie within that region according to whoever makes these things up, and as is often said it contains quite a large number of ethnic populations, almost all from Pacific island nations, that are greater in size than those actually resident upon those isles, in which case one could argue that Tonga, Samoa, and many other independent countries are now de facto New Zealand territories, although not too loud in case of a sudden, localised plague of patriotic stabbing.

Auckland sits astride an isthmus and covers it entirely from coast to coast, and with a major harbour on both sides it is one of the few cities in the world to dominate local shipping on two major bodies of water, the Pacific Ocean to the northeast, and the Tasman Sea to the southwest.
As a city to live in it seems much like any other, like many others in fact; cosmopolitan to the point of madness, as often one finds oneself walking any street other than the main city drag (in Auckland's case one Queen Street) wondering where all the nice, normal European-descended pasty white folk have gone, as everyone on the road, in the cars, frequenting the shops and manning the cash registers within appears to be Japanese, Chinese or Korean, and there are six sushi joints you could happily pitch a stone into accurately. Not to mention the myriad other shops that you cannot even describe because the signs and everything in and around them are written in some kind of altaic, like kanji, or sintic form. And of course, again, this isn't even slightly true, it's simply that these things stick out to the pasty white gaijin mind, but on some streets it is amazing, really.

This mixture of life and cultures is one of the great things about Auckland though, and like London, New York and many others a rich community has built up for just about every nation who walks the Earth, and with a little encouragement and the occasioanl intervention of government they don;t always have to run about sticking sharp things into one another because of what their ancestor said about our ancestor at that big battle half a thousand years ago. In truth there is very little of all that that I have seen, and in about seven months living in New Zealand I have seen and heard of only a handful of racist, bigoted and otherwise fundamentally mornic discriminatory behaviour, much of it sponsored by alcohol, which is of course at the root of all evils within society (along with money, capitalism, communism, religion, greed, creed, colour, being a filthy foreigner, getting yourself born in the first place..)

Another big fact of life in this city, often mentioned in guidebooks and the like, is the Aucklander's love of the motorcar, a passion so deep and abiding it might seemingly even extend to a weird Toad Of Toad Hall-style of obsession that may or may not have historically seen residents scooting maniacally about the countryside painted green and running things over, but which certainly saw to it that urban planning for the better part of the last century pretty much excluded all the poor bastards not in possesion of their own fine motorcar, so that pavements in many areas of the city are a fairly recent addition, only cropping up in some places in the last thirty years or so. Also notable are the perhaps slightly even road markings in places giving rather too much right of way to traffic and rather less (i.e. none at all, at some junctions) to the footfalling ambulatory mortal.
That the Auckland Harbour Bridge, much as it does not impress me much (just call me Shania), which is undeniably one of the major symbols of the city and one of its key talking points, in such circles as might dwell on these things, does not actually provide in any way shape or form the means to traverse it by foot or by bicycle - that there is in fact no way to use the bloody thing without sacrificing fossil fuel deposits in some sort of motive engine - says a lot about historic attitudes in the city towards people, cars and the outright silliness of walking between places.
The bridge is now being extensively remodelled to include that portion of society that is a) concerned for Mother Earth and b) cheap.

Auckland boasts, and I'm sure it actually would, the second highest rate of vehicle ownership per-capita in the world - no shit, it really does. The first is almost certainly Mexico City, or New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul....actually I think it is Paris. Anyway Auckland has all but one of them beat; can you believe that? I couldn't. Then I accepted it and came up with the ludicrously over-claused and convoluted paragraph above. See, that's what happen in the face of shocking statistics. Utter madness. Anyway Auckland, in its madness and general kiwi oddness, now presents its rate of car ownbership as 578 vehicles per 1000 citizens, which is very high indeed, apparently. It's certainly noticeable at street level where drivers are more irate than elsewhere in the country (they only wait 3 seconds for you to cross the road in front of them before shooting ahead, unlike the 10 second standard elsewhere. Gotta love that laid back Kiwi attitude) and traffic lights are even more brief in their graces in granting passage across the tarmac.
All that said, it is still a much easier, more pleasant and far more idiot-friendly (handy I was here to test it, then) than just about any city in the UK, and certainly than any I saw in India, southeast Asia or anywhere else I've been, even Australia. Perhaps especially Australia. They can smell a pommie at three hundred paces, or so it's said.

That bridge, by the way, connects downtown Aucland with the North Shore, apparently a residential outpost and smaller-scale fishing port, although of course almost everything is small scale compared to the major activity that throngs the dual ports of Auckland proper, nevertheless the North Shore is famous around the world for its seafood, and it is only shame for you, dear reader, that I am far too much of a cheapskate to go and experience it myself.
When I come back here, I'm totally there

If you had thought nothing has happened much in the last 5 months you would be well forgiven, at least by me. Given the infrequent and blatantly shite postings seen here since I moved to Nelson around the beginning of October I'd hardly be surprised if I was, now, only typing at myself, instead of the lovely folks who have been warm and generous enough to grace this page over the last year and a half. That's you, you lovely folks. You are wonderful you know.
In a court of law they call this sort of sycophantic behaviour `remorse`, effected for pretty similar reasons

My excuse? I have none. Long-story-short: I settled down here, life was good, I didn't need to emit tirades because I had a regular normal level of human interaction. Work then dried up, politics/bullshit/meh and I decided, last Wednesday, to bugger off from the city and see a little of the North Island while I was here.
Money is so tight I can barely afford super noodles and stale bread. Thank goodness water is free from the tap (but the house I drink it in sure isn't!) and so I find myself, now, at Nelson airport awaiting a flight to Auckland and a couple more weeks of life in Kiwiland.
Long-story-long: Here follows the usual waffle....

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The last few months; gosh, doesn't it seem like a long time now, it went by in mere minutes from where I was standing; have been great for me here, I've had the pleasure to be able to build up a whole new collection of friends and acquaintances, many perfectly set up to be shocked and saddened by some disgraceful drunken behaviour of mine, but in this I at least have the real consolation that many of them have done worse but simply do not recall it, because I have been blessed with a shockingly acute memory, particularly when it comes to personal disgraces and generally regrettable shenanigans.
Not only but also: I have been living in a corner room in a flatshare for the past two months, and this corner overlooks the busiest road intersection slap bang in the middle of the city, right on Trafalgar street, no less, and so I've seen about a half-million retarded-drunk fuckwits stagger beneath my windows running, singing, collapsing, fighting, crying, in hysterics of a thousand flavours, and power-vomiting-while-still-walking-along. I am pretty sure that, no matter how smashed I ever get, I do not cry in public nor power-vomit, especially not through open car windows like some people I could mention.

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I am leaving this fine city this very morning, in around two and a half hours from now although it will likely take me two more days to finish this and post it to the site, as ever. Some things are unlikely to ever change. I have a few scrappy notes from this little live-in session in Nelson, so for the sake of completeness, and to get the things done and written and off my mind, here they all are together, in no particular order and with no apologies for repetition, temporal misalignment, or stupidity.

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Received wisdom has it that moving house is the second most stressful thing people are ever supposed to experience. One must asume that the most stressful thing is dying or getting married or some other similar trauma, and not, as would be more reasonable and likely, being homeless, or getting divorced, bereaved, paralysed, drugged, stunned, stuffed and mounted, or nailed to your perch while John Cleese beats a tabletop with your face. Sorry, I may have drifted off into the dead parrot sketch there for a minute.
Anyway I moved house the other day. I barely noticed. I do hope I never forget to attend a funeral of mine at any point.
To be fair I only moved in two loads, carried mule-fashion on my own two shoulders, and have been living out of backpacks for a while now so I may not be able to pass comment on other folk's habit of accumulating a houseful of stuff and getting shady characters in duster coats to truck it about the countryside, but still. As long as you get all your shit out of A and manage to have the keys to B at least ready by the time you get your weary and delapidated arse into position at maison nouveau then I can't really see the problem. Just wait until I have a houseful of my own junk and try it, it'll be hilarious.

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So there I was at work, drunk, and getting a bit hazy with it so I started being shady with the redbull I was serving, and keeping a little back from every can when I poured them. Yes, you can call me a thief if you like, but I am working hard until 3:30am on Friday and Saturday nights for the same wage as a toilet cleaner gets during the day, and he doesn't have to deal with customers or risk a $5,000 dollar fine if he doesn't check the age of the toilet's bowl to see if it can handle the disinfectant, and so what if people are paying $13.50 for a Jager-Redbull? That's my hourly wage here, and if it just-so-happens I'm a bit drunk because I just-so-happen to have been slipping vodka into all my drinks all night then hey, I'm gonna need another little freebie from the company because, frankly, I'm a little fed up with it here. I'm largely doing the job of a duty manager but am getting no credit and this fabled `promotion` has been dangled over my head for over a month now, and I am becoming deeply fed up of giving more than should be expected for the meagre scraps I receive from the almighty table of employment. Plus I have the morals of a snake, so fuck them anyway. Twice, and with a meathook, too. Yeah.

Anyway last night was quite amusing besides all that, I ended up having so much Redbull that I visibly shook while I was serving, and what with all the Jager going into customer's drinks a goodly amount of it made it into mine as well, and I ended up almost as wasted as everyone in front of me.

But not as wasted as the area manager who plumbed new depths of depravity, and although he hooked up with one of the mangeress' sisters last weekend, in her own bar right in front of her, no less (and he IS married and his wife DOES work for the same company..), he topped it yesterday by stumbling into the back corridor obviously the worse for wear, puked lavishly into his own hands, and subsequently achieved the garden where he promptly took a piss in the corner, in full view of, ooh, at least a dozen customers, many of whom know just who he is, too. Well done.

It seemed to be an especially wasty night as the staff from our sister bar just along the road all came in and, as ever, were riotously trashed. I believe the manageress of said sister establishment fell over face-first on the dancefloor yet did not stumble or flinch at all, simply went vertical to horizontal in a fluid movement, and was still smiling benignly when picked up by the security team. She's an awesome lass, that one.

I learned last night as well that one of our duty managers has been fired, ostensibly for drinking on the job (oh come ooonnnnnnn......) but probably due to some bullshit politics, and also that everyone in this bloody company is a bloody stoner! Mind you, that might just be a generic Kiwi thing, or equally likely given the nature of reality, a human being thing. Still a bit surprised to be offered the magical herb by so many colleagues, though.

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The staff party after which everyone pretty much got fired. Well not quite, but oh my did some shit go down that night. Errm, it's probably best to start at the beginning, yes?

The plan was simple enough: everyone who wanted to get smashed for free (duh) was to go to the Grumpy Mole one Monday sometime in the afternoon, where the whole venue had been turne over to us, rather than them, the plebian masses of customers who plagued our doors and our lives. Between the three bars in Nelson and the Turf Hotel out at Stoke, about 50 people piled through the doors, 30 or so staff and a score of partners, lovers, hangers-on and hastily drafted dates. Needless to say I was not in need of my +1 but at least that wasn;t the point, for once. The point, purpose and drive for us all was to get as much free drink down our faces as quickly as possible and then to cause trouble, both of which everyone managed admirably.
Just to put it into perspective, everty time we got ourselves a drink we were to press a button on the till, which added $4 to the total booze consumed. The last time I remember seeing it it was sitting on about $3400 at about 9pm - we didn't get there until 3, and people only started drifting in in serious numbers by around 4:30, so you can see what kind of debauchery we got up to.

Some bright soul had installed a paddlng pool, large enough for ten or twelve people to sit around easily, in one corner of the gardne, and we had been instructed to bring swimming togs/bikinis/boardies aas appropriate. I think two of the lasses managed to get down to bikinis and pretty much no dude at all got as far as fitting himself in suitable board short style attire before they had been carried, in many cases physically lifted above head height against their will and thrown headlong into the pool fully clothed. Every single person present was dunked unceremoniously into the pool in their full party attire, the area manager, a fairly big fella at about 6'2" and with an ex-rugby player's build, was first thrown in at the hands of at least nine people. He's a fighter, that one, and with good reason because they totalled his phone and everything else in his pockets as he had to be captured by team effort while sat unsuspecting at the bar indoors.
The second time we got him in he was held horizontal - literally fully parallel to the ground - by six or seven peopel with his arms locked in a death-grip around one corner post of the outside bar, and it fell to me to prise his hands off the post myself, and I shall never forget the grimace on his face as I finally pried him free and all seven of them collapsed gracelessly into the pool on top of each other. Happy days.

As night wore on the carnage continued, and we all walked off with injuries of one kind or another that night. Jane, the manager at my bar who had just resigned and had been, generally, fairly straight-laced and utterly cold-cool-professional the whole time, got proper smashed and she and her boyfriend/fiance/fella Matt, a mate of mine from me drinking in his bar across town, well they got raucously pissed and started beating me right on the arse with, I don;t know, a stick or something. Jane would come at me from one side, beat the shit out of my poor buttocks, and as I turned to repel the attack I would be violently assaulted about the cheeks once more by Matt coming in out of the sun from the other side, presumably armed with another, larger stick. The bastards had me cornered, and this went on for some time by all accounts.
I do vaguely recall Jane and I sort-pf playfighting, and me getting a little carried away and landing a real punch to the ribs that winded her proper, only for Matt to swoop in like the avenging angel of darkness and headlock me to the ground ina sort of pro-wrestling flying neck tackle. It was most amusing, according to eyewitnesses. All in good fun and good taste in the end

Not so for some others, such as that area manager again (he does get up to some stuff, doesn't he?) who, at about 2 in the morning after waaaay too much drink, made some disparaging comment about one of the staff from the Turf Hotel, a lass, who promptly turned around and punched him right in the gob, leaving him with a split lip for the next week. Unfortunately for all concerned (except, in the long run, that lass from the Turf) he fought back, the poor silly bugger, and as a result, eventually, he was fired, she was fired, after the party five more people resigned, possibly because the sheer horror of what their colleagues were actually like became too much for them, and I resigned a month later, all `my girls` left the bar - all the staff I had trained, which was all of them - in the subsequent weeks (for the same reason I left soon after; that the new manager is the Poison Dwarf She-Bitch from the seventh circle of Hades) and the manager of one of the three main bars in the city also left to go back home to England in the days following events at Grumpies that fateful day.

Other highlights from the night included: Jane, ex-straight-lacer, physically picked up one of our 16 year old glass collectors (there on honourary status of being an adult, and because she's more mature than most of the rest of us anyway) in a vertical grip, and joined the battle upon the dancefloor using Cynthia, the little 16yr-old glassy, as a moshing tool. She was pretty much using her as a club, in fact. Seriously funny.

I danced like an utter lunatic and lost my shoes, as so often happens, as I believe they were flung to the corners of the room as I thrust my way around the room, as also so often happens, sadly enough.

The area manager (him again) ordered a drink from the Grumpy Mole's manager, the inestimable Jess, asking for the dirtiest, nastiest thing she could think of. She made a nice little drink, something we call the Dr. Pepper; a whisky tumbler filled 1/3rd with coke, 1/3rd with beer and a third empty, and a shot glass of Amaretto to be dropped in a la the famous Jager Bomb; but in the face of this awesome and tasty drink he baulked, insisting that she make something truly despicable with which to assault his liver. Such is the behaviour of drunken bosses, you see.
So she made a pint glass full of a bit of every spirit behind the bar, a full 568ml of full-strength poison which must have worked out at about 30% alcomoheekomohol, and on tasting it he immediately ran for it, straight to the toilet to be copiously sick.
It was about midnight at this point, or so I am told. I too was at the bar, witnessing these events with a cheeky smirk, and, according to everyone else, for I was far too wasted to remember this section of the evening, I swiped the Pint Of Doom and downed it in one without slowing.
This has done wonders for my reputation as a filthy drunken bastard (and I would like to say here that I had, of course, been lavishly sick myself that day at least once, many hours earlier) and which seems to have cemeneted my monicker of `Superman` firmly in place.
Apparently I didn't even try to drunkenly harass any of the girls that night nor make any sleazy advances, something I always deeply fear I may do one day, so it looks it was, once again, Liver 0 : 1 Tim.

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NZ Versus UK:

In New Zealand:

People in adverts swear a lot. This rocks. Not because swearing is big or clever (even though it's pretty obvious to any sane, sober person that it is) but because people just don;t give a shit if the advert for a national chain of hardware stores has the odd bit of light swearing, or whether the local paper carries a half-page ad with the word `shit` in it in the context of dialogue. Foks have better things to do and don't see any need to worry about this - and kids are not running amok with machineguns or happy-slapping grandmothers for YouTube; not any mroe than is normal in any civilised country, anyway; because the fabric of society is not held in place by the pins of puritanical rectitude. You c**nts.
Incidentally both Kiwis and Aussies are kind of in love with that word, and if you find yourself called it a couple of times a week, by total strangers, then, well, that's about normal, really.
Amazingly, it seems this does not lead to the kind of mass disorder and anarchy we have been led to believe....

There is a largely informal approach to all basic, unskilled jobs, as there should be, and the hard-ass overserious attitude is usually reserved for tougher, better paid jobs, again, as it should be. Why the hell people actually take most jobs seriously, as if what they do really mattered, is beyond me. Professionalism and anally-retentive strictness are two very, very different things, and Kiwis have largely recognised this.

New Zealand appears not to be managed by a potato-faced, slack-jawed, dyslexic shitsack of a Scot. I'm sure there is nothing whatever to the notion that Brown is purposefully undermining the English way of life in his own personal Bannockburn. At all.

The smallest coin in NZ is a ten cent piece; there is no messing around with pennies, tuppenies or fivepences. All businesses use Swedish rounding on every purchase (if you've never heard of it, SR rounds the total up or down to the nearest ten cents, anything up to -5c goes in the customer's favour, anything -6c and up goes to the shop) , and it all works out very nicely indeed, thank you very much.
Not Only But Also! -
The excess pennies everyone pays on the Swedish roundings-up almost always become charity donations; every four, three, etc. cents that go in the shop's favour DON'T actually go in the shop's favour, but go to good causes instead. I think that is, in a tiny way, rather wonderful.

People really are friendly, at least in the South Island, and will be sure to smile at strangers, be extremely polite in all their dealings, and be helpful rather than spiteful in the workplace. I am dearly looking forward to going back to England and seeing just how happy/miserable the average Brit is. I'm sure I have quite forgotten how godawfully depressing it can be back home, and I intend to inject a good gigantic dose of cheer back into the bloody country if I at all can.

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And so concludes the antic of myself and other shameful characters in Nelson, city of sunshine (and drunks) and the conclusion of my time on the South Island of New Zealand.

Sharper-eyed readers may have noticed that I have fallen in love with the hyphen this morning, for which I can only apologise. It's just so damn cute and useful, and there do seem to be an awful lot of running-together phrases these days. There I go again.
I also have to take this opportunity to apologise for any offence caused to Scottish people, as I am sure that, as always, comments regarding Gordon Brown can be taken with a pinch of salt as it is hardly the fault of the noble Scottish people that the lying, irresponsible, lardbellied fucktard Brown is one of them. He sure as hell isn't One Of Us.