Last night we had our dinner at Hiakai, the new hottest thing in Wellington. This is a high-end restaurant that uses Maori/ Pasifika ingredients and has created a great deal of buzz including an article in the New York Times and this interesting piece about the challenges of sourcing native produce in NZ. It’s located […]
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Someone else’s rupees at work
This is from Dawn today. ISLAMABAD: The government and the opposition were on Tuesday unable to reach a consensus in the National Assembly over Minister of Water Resources Faisal Vawda describing Prime Minister Imran Khan as the “biggest personality” on earth. The house was adjourned till Wednesday evening without any proceedings having taken place.
New arrival
A new person has arrived, the last of the Gentleman Friend’s relations aside from a few outlying ones. This is someone who is very interested in genealogy (something that, I must admit, interests me not at all) and has been on a decades-long quest to map out relations from Trinidad to New Zealand. Along the […]
Uphill
After a leisurely Sunday morning we accompanied the Doyenne to her weekly shop, helping with the heavy gingerbeer crates she couldn’t manage by herself. (Or, more accurately, the Gentleman Friend helped her). Part of the shop is a wholesaler, which is the sort of thing I enjoy wandering through and seeing the immense buckets of […]
Zealandia
This morning we went for a drive with the Doyenne, who is not able to walk much but does enjoy driving. As soon as we passed over the hill we arrived at a wild coastline, with high waves breaking on a rocky shore. Hard to believe that this was a near suburb of a major […]
Downhill
This morning I went down the hill on the cable car, which is really more of a funicular, hoping to find a walk-in clinic so I could get a prescription refilled before going off to America where it’ll be significantly more difficult. I arrived at 11 and the receptionist said that they’d have drop-in times […]
Storied aunt
Last night we went for dinner to the home of a storied aunt, one who suffered an unspeakable tragedy when she was in her late teens and, according to all her relations, has not been the same since. There was something not quite as usual about her, but after a stilted start to the evening […]
Curly hair
Last night we decided to stroll down to town for dinner. While the net strolling was downhill, a lot of it was very steeply upwards, to the top of the hill where the cable car (funicular, to be more accurate, I think) ends. Then there was a way downwards between tall hedges. At the foot […]
Sabres rattle
The jangling of metal against metal is deafening. It does make one sceptical about any form of government, really, when one has de facto army rule on one side and a least common denominator Hindu nationalist democracy on the other. Yesterday we had a visitor, the GF’s uncle who accompanied us to Thailand about a […]
Change of weather
A cyclone grazed the country and cold southerlies began to blow. The temperature dropped 10 degrees or more, the skies turned steel grey and it poured with rain all day long. We went out with the Doyenne to get some groceries from a magnificient city centre warehousey sort of place and then drove a bit […]